Over my 35+ years as a librarian, I tried to avoid genealogical reference work whenever possible. But since I've been retired, I've been drawn deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. Now I run a genealogy club for people in the area. It's basically a support group of very nice people, all doing our own thing. Some like to keep expanding their family trees, while others are sorting through family memorabilia to discover clues to ancestry. We even organized a genealogy "fair" for the community last fall to share what we've learned.
It's been an interesting journey so far for me. I've learned that 1/4 of my roots are firmly southeast Asian stemming from many Indonesian foremothers on both sides. These ladies had no written documents beyond basic data. Some didn't have family names; others adopted Christian names after marrying Dutch men, schooling or other life events (unknown to me). It's very typical for people living in colonized parts of the world. I have become accustomed to almost every branch of my tree dead-ending somewhere on the maternal side.
As a librarian and an amateur writer, finding more branches of the tree isn't as important as finding and writing stories of relatives anyway. I started with a story about my great-grandmother who went around the world with her second husband, a journalist, back in the 1930s.
That was a lot of fun to research and write about, and my Mom especially loved that there were even newspaper accounts and interviews to include. I then wrote a story about the summer my brother and I spent with my grandmother and great-grandmother in the Netherlands in 1960. My brother added some memories from his six year old point of view, which made the writing especially fun. Next, I tackled a brief biography of my grandfather, an entrepreneur and journalist who spent World War II in Suriname as a political prisoner of the Dutch. My Mom added some valuable insight on that story, and I need to continue to capture more while I can. She's 98, has a great memory, and wrote a detailed memoir of her early days.
Talking with my brother about various aspects of family history, I decided to write a biography of my stepfather next. He was a generous spirit with very strong opinions about politics, right/wrong, cars, sports, and more. Luckily for me, he had written some memoirs in a class and also given a long speech for his 85th birthday a few years before passing away. I had also written his obituary before he passed away, making sure to check with him about basic facts. More research has turned up facts about his life that could be included in what is now a ten page story. Sorting through and scanning photos to include is the next step in the process before I share the draft with my Mom and siblings.
Who's next? That remains to be seen.
1 comment:
an interesting project! We tried to trace some of my family at one time but several of the branches were dead ends and couldn't find the sources in Canada - Both sides of my family were French Canadian and immigrated to the US around 1890-1900
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