The lost are found

In an effort to use up some annual leave (I'll lose it in January if I don't use it up), I took last week off. Instead of driving all over the place with the camera, I hit the doctor for flu shot and the computer for some much-neglected research. I spent an average of 3-4 hours a day trying to track down some long-lost ancestors.

I started tracing my ancestry in 1999, when I visited my family in Pennsylvania for a couple of weeks.

My parents were able to give me some background on their families - parents and one grandfather's name for my mother; parents, grandparents and one side of great-grandparents from my dad. Fortunately, my mother's cousin was happy to provide some insight into one branch for me.

That trip and the thrill of finding information online when I returned to Fairbanks kept me going. I joined a genealogy group that met monthly here and solidified my interest. Each time I found another ancestor the excitement increased.

Several of us from the genealogy group made trips to Salt Lake City to visit the genealogy library there. We would go down for one week, spending hours at the books and microfilms. I became expert at loading and unloading the film spools and zipping through them to the page I needed. My bookshelf at home is now loaded with research books, papers and magazines.

Subsequent trips to PA to visit my family had me visiting the local historical society and the county courthouse archives. We took drives to local cemeteries to photograph tombstones. My dad took us by the old family homestead, where both my grandfather and his father were born. It's still owned by the (second) wife of one of my ancestors.

I backed off the genealogy for a couple of years when a serious illness and astronomical medical bills not covered by my insurance made it tough to justify paying a lot for the subscription to the best websites for the research.

However, I decided to get back into the work. I'm pretty much an indoor person during the winters here, as the cold really bothers my arthritis, and I didn't want to become just a lounger. So I reactivated my subscription. The website has improved tremendously since my last visit, and I found a quaking leaf on nearly every name in the tree I had started 10 years ago. When I clicked on the leaf, I was led to hints on the specific ancestor. WOW! Much of the information was not new to me, but other bits had me looking for sources to confirm. Once confirmed by a census, newspaper, Social Security death index, WWI and WWII draft card or other official document, I could then say with certainty this belongs in my tree.

In my maternal grandmother's line, I had her parents and her father's father. However, that line stopped there. I was relatively certain that George (my grandmother's grandfather) was the son of Jacob. But I couldn't prove it. All I had was a hunch, however strong it was. I had managed to get Jacob's family traced to France in 1520 - but still needed to link him to George.This week I FINALLY managed to get that confirmation thanks to a quaking leaf that led me to church records. So I have my mother's maternal side back to France (to America via Scotland and Ireland) in 1520 and her paternal side to Switzerland in 1634.

My dad's families are primarily of German heritage, as are many of my mother's other lines. I've hit a couple of brick walls with two of Dad's lines, but again this week, thanks to those little leaves and a much larger library available online, I got the Hoffman (my maiden name) line back to Germany in the 1600s.

As I'm working this project, I'm astounded at what these people who are all part of me must have faced - poverty, hard work, persistence, long ocean voyages - and HUGE families. Many of them had 12 or more children. Many of them lost a number of those children before they reached adulthood. Most of them were poorly or uneducated. They were simple folk - farmers, laborers, boatmen. They had no modern conveniences to help with cooking, baking, laundry or cleaning. But their obituaries describe them as "well respected citizens." The church was important to them. Thus far, all but one family line has arrived in the US through Philadelphia, and that one line came in through Baltimore. They all moved a bit northwest to what are now Perry and Juniata counties - and many of them are still there today.

As a teenager, I thought our family was rather uninteresting because they didn't come from somewhere else. As I started tracing these people, I became very grateful they were grounded in one spot. I heard my friend mutter, "He's in New York in 1850 and he's in Idaho in 1870. Where was he for the 20 years in the middle? How did he get there? Why doesn't he show up anywhere in the 1860 census?"

This past week hooked me again. I've felt once again that thrill of success. I know that the farther back I go, the sparser the records and the more difficult to find information that is verifiable. But I will press on. My greatest regret is that I didn't start this before my grandparents died. My greatest joy in it is that my granddaughter is interested in the project. Hopefully I will be able to continue finding "lost" ancestors to share with her and generations still to come.

My paternal grandmother's grandparents

My dad's parents

My dad's paternal grandparents

the Hoffman homestead

My mother's parents and me