The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Genealogy begins in the end
This story was published Sept. 17, 2000
I wouldn't exactly say genealogists are backward people, but they work backward. Put another way, genealogists begin in the end.
So, if you want to take up genealogy, just start with now and work your way back toward the beginning of time. Here's how to get the project under way:
Start by writing down all the vital data you know about yourself - birth and marriage dates are a good start, unless you're single, of course.
Then start working your way back. Record your parents' names and any vital data you know about them - birth, marriage, death dates are the most important.
Include where each of these events happened. City, county and state are the accepted form - Kennewick, Benton, Washington.
Then add your siblings. Put down dates and places for vital events.
Never guess. If you don't know your sister's birthday (in which case you would have to be a male reader), you probably know how old she is.
Let's say she's 53. Write down "born about 1947."
Don't assume that you know where she was born. Even if your parents lived in a certain city at the time, your sister may have been born somewhere else.
I was.
Well, let me explain. When I was born, my parents lived in Kennewick, but Kennewick was just a sleepy farm town in 1938, and it didn't have a hospital, so I was born in Pasco, Franklin, Washington.
Now that you have your parents and your siblings written down, write down your parents' siblings - your uncles and aunts.
Then go back another generation. And another.
Few nongenealogists know the names of their great-grandparents, and this is about as far as anyone in the United States can go without benefit of some sort of family history.
Some narrow-minded genealogists only want to know "the main line." They don't want to clutter up their minds or papers with the names and vital information on siblings.
These people are not only narrow-minded, they don't know who their cousins are, and likely never will know!
I'm a very inclusive kind of guy. I like to know who my cousins are. I don't have many in my own generation. Of my dad's generation, only Dad and his brother survived to adulthood, and his brother, Russel Day, had only two children. So, I have only two paternal cousins, Bill and Bob.
On the maternal side, Mom had two sisters, Mildred and Lucille. They gave me five cousins who I know of, but 600 miles separated us as we were growing up, and I rarely saw them. I don't have a clue where they might be today.
In the beginning, don't get bogged down with details. If you know a detail, write it down. If not, leave it blank and go on. Later, you can come back and compile a list of unknowns to research.
Now, having exhausted your own knowledge, get out the family papers, wherever they're kept, and start going through them. Look for birth, marriage and death certificates or licenses in particular. Also deeds, wills and any other legal documents.
From these, you will cull information to fill in some of those blanks.
Finally, you are ready to really start digging. You are going to either write letters, send e-mail or actually pick up the telephone and call Uncle Mortimer or Great-grandmother Gladys and pepper them with questions.
You are going to ask very specific questions: What's your birth date? Where were you born? Where were you married? Do you have any brothers or sisters? What are their names? What was your mother's name? What was her maiden name? Where was she born? Where did she get married? How about your father? What was his name?
And you're going to write down the answers.
See how easy it is to become a genealogist?