Bringing the family tree to life

Happy 2010! It's taken me a while to acknowledge the transition, but I guess I'll go along with it.

One reason I've been out of touch is because I spent so much time over the holiday in my alternate universe, tracing my family's history.

I am a proud participant in this old person's hobby, as one of my neighbors once called it. Maybe it used to be a geriatric pursuit because you needed a lot of time to research the documents involved. Now, though, online access makes it so easy that I end up spending a lot of doing it because I just can't quit.

My pursuit of my ancestors began in 2007 when my kids asked me a question and I didn't know the answer. We were on a Cub Scout outing, placing flags on graves at Stone River Battlefield in Murfreesboro in 2007. After reading name after name on the headstones, my boys asked if we had any relatives who had fought in the Civil War.

I didn't know, and that bothered me. My parents weren't sure, and I only have one living grandmother whose memory tends to be selective. So I did what I always do when I have a question: I turned to the Internet.

In just a little while, I found my great-grandfather's name on an original image of a 1910 census form, and I cried. Hey, I was surprised, too, but I felt overwhelmed when I saw evidence of a man I knew only from family stories. Here he was listed as a newly married 22-year-old with only one of his five children, my great aunt Allie.

I was addicted.

Since then, I've answered my kids' questions plus a whole lot more. We did, in fact, have several ancestors who fought in the Civil War, both in the infantry and the militia from Virginia through Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. I found out from a long-lost cousin that one of my mom's great-grandfathers fought with Virginia at the Battle of Chickamauga, then walked to West Tennessee where he started farming.

I even found the above photo online of my great-great-great grandfather born in 1822.

Though my dad's side has been fairly simple to trace, my mom's side of the family, in fact, has been quite troublesome. I've traced my dad's side all the way to medieval Scotland. One of his ancestors came over on the Mayflower and holds the dubious honor of being the first person to be arrested in the new world. He apparently went all redneck and got into a fight with a man named Edward Lister. They were bound together by their hands and feet for two days with no food or water, then finally released.

My parents and I have laughed about this and bonded over our checkered past, though they may not laugh when they read it here.

It's funny what you'll remember, though, even when the past seems too cloudy to peer through. One reason my mom's side was so hard to trace is because her relatives all have the most common names in North America. Even with the Internet, it's maddening to sort through decades of documents to determine which James Mills is yours. How many James Johnsons do you think there were in antebellum Mississippi? Plenty. The same holds for William Baker and Charles Mason.

The breakthrough on my mom's side came as I was on the phone with her, discussing a Census form I'd found. As I started reading the names of the many children in one family, she suddenly remembered why old "Uncle Shack" had been called that. His mom's maiden name had been Shackleford. I found someone else's online family tree with another great-grandmother's missing maiden name: Lindsey. That opened a long line leading back to French Huguenots who settled in Abbeville, South Carolina. Fancy!

Fortunately the ladies on Mom's side had charming, memorable names like Almarinda and Arrietta. It's just unfortunate that most record keepers didn't care much about tracking maiden names back then.

So when Census time rolls around this year, don't turn your back on that person collecting your family info. You'll be helping your great-grandchildren connect to their past.

Or you could do it the easy way and keep your Facebook page up to date.