Meeting Persephone

I began doing some research on my family tree a few years ago. I'm fortunate that most of the work has been done for me by my paternal grandmother. She went whole-hog into the work and stuck with it for decades and has managed to trace my grandfather's family back to the late 1700s Russia which I managed to take one step farther on my own - locating the first one to go from Germany to Russia. She also believes that she has traced her own line back to William the Conqueror which means, yes, that there would be some royalty in there. I remain unconvinced - primarily because that seems to be everyone's goal in researching their genealogy - find royalty - and a multitude of "flubbed" facts are incorporated to make that happen for most. I really have no interest in the royalty or nobility aspect of my own genealogy - in fact I prefer the regular folks I find in my family tree. Their information is more difficult to locate and I feel far more rewarded when I stumble upon something really juicy that nobody else was able to find prior to my work. The royals have always been well documented and there is little mystery left there *yawn*.

Between my own work and the new show on NBC - 'Who Do You Think You Are?' - my husband has also got the ancestry bug. He began shaking his family tree this past weekend just to see what kind of nuts might fall out. He started out with some excellent information in the form of a "family bible" from his great-grandmother. This is not your typical family bible. There are no formal looking pages of family trees where information was tidily placed in proper spaces making it all very clear to anyone just who and what was which. Instead this bible is just a regular old bible that is sadly falling apart at a rapid pace but contains a treasure of information in the back two pages. My husband's "[great] Gramma Bunny" wrote down the names and dates of deaths, marriages, and occasionally births of family members along with some very entertaining notes about some of them - "______ was a real 'casanova'" or "______ was one arrogant dentist!" and "a grand lady. Never out of line". Some of the details are a bit confusing because there is no rhyme or reason as to how and where people are listed but the information has been invaluable in putting together some of his information. It's allowed him to further explore a side of the family that nobody he knows has bothered to learn about (because it's on the side without the penis) though it's my goal to get him to write everything down from the bible in a notebook and then charts so he can salvage the already fragile bible for future generations. In very short order he was able to bounce from the information he had all the way to Germany. Finding these records would have been really difficult through traditional methods as his great-great-great grandfather came to the US via New Orleans and worked his way up the Mississippi River until he finally settled in Iowa. Within about 45 minutes of starting, my husband found one of his connections to Germany! Thanks to those who've worked on those old small town gossip-y type newspapers! Without them we'd have gotten nowhere.

Feeling quite "high" from his success the day before, he decided to try digging into his mother's side of the family as well. Fortunately that side is [mostly] Italian (on his maternal grandfather's side) which means they've all talked so much for years that a great deal of information and details are burned into their brains. His mother was able to blurt out loads of family history, dates, names, and locations without a lot of effort and he jotted down the notes as she was talking and talking and talking and talking. It's a good thing too as we've turned up absolutely nothing else since talking to her.

Then we came to his maternal grandmother's side. There was some information but nowhere near as much as on his grandfather's side. One interesting detail came out. It seems that one of his grandmother's older sisters was "killed by a witch" in Austria before the other siblings came over to the US (where his grandmother was actually born - we think). I keep pressing for more information on this little tid-bit but none is forthcoming.

The work is stressful when information isn't coming out though I consider us far luckier than my grandmothers were when they started - at least we have the internet. There are more brick walls than successes which leads me to call our efforts "internet archaeology" but when you finally get through you feel fantastic about the progress and those pieces are even more precious to you. It's easier to tackle when you have goals in mind - points you are trying to reach or reasoning for those goals. It's also easier when you have unusual circumstances in your family that gave others the motivation to do a lot of research before you as I have in my own family.

The most important thing is that neither of us have large amounts of family left who can pass on information to us and so the goal has become putting it together before those few left are gone and leaving it for those who come after us so that they will one day have access to all of those things that we have wondered ourselves. It's a labor of love for family and finding those roots from where we grew. I'd recommend it to anyone - even if there's already been some work done in your family.

The Trash Heap has spoken.