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.
Benjamin Franklin understood joy of collecting ancestral anecdotes
This story was published Feb. 6, 2000
During Benjamin Franklin's two trips to England, he found time to search parish registers for his ancestors and to visit many of their graves.
Later he would write, "I have ever had pleasure in obtaining any little anecdotes of my ancestors."
Printer, writer, editor, publisher, assembly clerk, postmaster, politician, scientist, inventor, diplomat, horticulturist - Franklin was all of these and more. He also was a genealogist.
Today, millions of Americans follow in Franklin's genealogical footsteps, in pursuit of their family history. Genealogy usually is listed as the nation's second most popular hobby.
For many, genealogy is a means of pursuing the eternal question: Who am I?
For others, such as the Mormons, it is inextricably interwoven with religion.
Still others pursue genealogy strictly out of a sense of mystery, for the thrill of discovery, much as a gardener finds joy in making things grow.
Genealogy is much more than names and dates, births, marriages, deaths and burials.
It also is history. Family history. Like all history, it's replete with triumphs and sorrows, with drama and humor, with wisdom and foolishness.
It's the story of an uncle who lost his balance and threw a can of white paint over his shoulder, saturating bedding and shoes the day before a barracks inspection.
Genealogy is the hungry little girl sent to the grocery store for bread, who ate the center out of the loaf and told her mother it came that way.
Genealogy is the farm boy hopping home on one foot from a distant hay field, with a pitch fork jammed through his other foot.
Genealogy is an aunt giving her nephew his first haircut, without his mother's permission.
It is a widowed mother of five children working as a waitress in a desperate struggle for survival.
Genealogy is the grandfather who rode with a lynch mob because his wife said if he didn't go, she would. The vigilantes broke a man out of jail and hanged him for the rape and murder of a girl on her way to Sunday school.
Genealogy is a stubborn Civil War soldier refusing to let surgeons amputate his leg, then defying their orders not to bend the knee through which a Confederate Minié ball had passed and restoring his leg to usefulness.
Genealogy is the drama of ordinary people doing ordinary and extraordinary things.
It's the story of our ancestors and living relatives.
Just like history at school, dates are important. Vital statistics delineate our lives. Birth dates, marriage dates, death dates, all are important, but they merely identify. They are the skeletons of our heritage.
Genealogists avidly pursue these dates, but vital statistics are but a bare beginning.
Stories about lives lived are the flesh on bone that transform our ancestors from mere skeletons into people with whom we can identify, and who can influence our lives.
Often in the pursuit of the foundation facts - those innumerable, pesky and sometimes mind-numbing dates - I get bogged down in the lives of my ancestors, like that obstinate Civil War soldier who walked around for 54 years on the leg that surgeons wanted to cut off.
When that happens, I'm always glad.
Like Franklin, I've always taken pleasure in obtaining any little anecdotes of my ancestors.
They're what keep me interested in genealogy after 43 years.