Roots

Once upon a time, I worked full time as a magazine journalist, covering the interesting people and places across Tennessee, especially in the rural areas. I still do freelance work for the magazine, and recently I did a feature on the new interpretive center at the Alex Haley Museum in Henning, Tennessee, a very small town north of Memphis. Haley is most famous for the novel Roots, on which the ground-breaking 1977 TV miniseries was based. Haley is responsible for getting a lot of people, especially African-Americans, interested in genealogy and their family histories.

A few years ago, I started working on my genealogy and found out a few things I'd not known before. My mother's paternal side came from Germany before the Revolutionary War and took part in that conflict, and I believe I could technically qualify to join the Daughters of the American Revolution if I so chose. I know the man and his son who came from Germany came into Pennsylvania then moved to North Carolina, where they were living at the time of the Revolution. The family eventually migrated to what is now Roane County, Tennessee and then on to Western Kentucky, where I grew up. Each Memorial Day when I take my mom around on what I jokingly call the Annual Tour of Cemeteries, one of the ones we stop at holds the graves of some of those early ancestors who migrated to Kentucky. Unfortunately, some of their grave stones are probably either lost in the forest or so worn down that you can't read anything that might have been etched in the stone.

Now, my dad's side, that's a different story. I haven't managed to get back very far, and I stowed all my genealogy work away in a plastic tub several years ago. But the new program Who Do You Think You Are? sponsored by Ancestry.com, which helps celebrities trace their family histories, has me itching to give it another go. I know that's their plan, to get you interested so that you fork over the money to join Ancestry.com, but it's working. There are things I can find out through public records and through the genealogy materials offered by the Latter Day Saints church, but I think I might join Ancestry.com soon, at least for a few months to see what they have available. I want to know where my paternal line, my birth surname, hails from. My dad hasn't a clue. He didn't even ever know his grandparents because they died before he was born. His dad was 50 when my dad was born, so he died when I was only 5 and I never had a chance to talk to him about his family's history. I wonder if his father or grandfather might have fought in the Civil War though because my grandpa was born in 1889. While many people my age still have their grandparents, my grandpa would be 122 this year. My other grandparents died when I was 10, 15 and 24, all before I got interested in family history, sadly.

It's less the names and dates I'm interested in than the human stories and the connections to other countries. Before my ancestors set their feet on America's shores, where did they call home? What did they do for a living? I'm guessing some good peasant stock, but that's okay. But it would be great to come across a surprise like Tim McGraw did in last week's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? He's always been a fan of George Washington, so it was an awesome moment when he was allowed to see a journal kept by a 16-year-old Washington when he was surveying in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and mentioned staying at the home of McGraw's ancestors.

So after I meet a couple of deadlines, I'm going to drag out those old materials and start organizing them and getting copies of official documents to back up some of the information I found on online forums. Hopefully this time I'll be able to trace my paternal roots back to their country of origin, just like Alex Haley did when he followed the branches of his family tree all the way back to Gambia.

Do you enjoy genealogy? Do you know where your family hails from? Any interesting family history tidbits you'd like to share? And if you have tips about effective genealogy research, please share those too.

Prize time! Family is an important aspect of the continuity series (Codys: First Family of Rodeo) I was in last year with five other authors. One commenter today will receive a copy of my October 2010 release, Elly: Cowgirl Bride. That's in addition to our daily Go Red pin for the lucky winner.
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Go Red for Women is trademarked by the American Heart Association, Inc. Romance novel downloads provided by Belle Books.Source URL: https://gbejadacosta.blogspot.com/search/label/genealogy
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Chasing Grandmama....

By Jeanne Adams

I've been chasing my husband's Swedish grandmother. Now doesn't that sound exciting?

Relax, people, she's been dead since the 1960s. I mean that "chase" thing metaphorically. You know. Genealogical chasing. I know, I know, it's one of those crazy things I do when I'm supposed to be doing important things like laundry, or paying bills, or taxes.

Hunting the dead. Pretty serious. The Internet has made this brain-frying pasttime a lot easier, but it's still frequently a puzzle. Take Grandma Adams, for instance. She imigrated from Sweden. Her name was Linda Carlson.

Yeah, you guessed it there were hundreds of Carlsons that came to the USA. Literally, hundreds. They came from all over Sweden. Lots and lots and lots of Carlsons. And Andersons. And Dahlstroms. And Olsons. And they named their children Gustave and Olaf and Linda and Emma.

Guess what? Those names I listed? They're all kin in some way to Gramma Carlson Adams. And did any of them leave any trace of who they were or where they were from? Ohhhhhh, no. They came here and got jobs and got married, but they changed their names to Roy, and John, and Elle.

So, it's kind of a puzzle. Truth be told, I actually like puzzles, which is why I do genealogy research. Of course, it's also why I frequently tear my hair out over the aformentioned research.


Ironically, when you get to the whole Adams side of thing? Pretty easy. Just head north on I-95 to Boston. Hang a left, go to Quincy, Massachusetts and pick a graveyard. Can't swing a dead...ancestor...without hitting an Adams relative. Lots of documentation. We genealogy buffs love that documentaiton stuff.

Of course, we have to give a nod of thanks to the Mormons too. They are wicked crazy about preserving genealogical data. They've almost single handedly worked to save all the Ellis Island records.

Problem is, they just store it. They don't authenticate it or check it. There are no genealogy police, at least I don't THINK there are.... (Of course, there supposedly are no fashion police either, but given my atavistic inability to wear white shoes after Labor Day, I believe they do exist.)

Ahem. But I digress.

Here's the problem. People go to Ancestry DOT com, they find their family tree and voila! they import hundreds of years of data, stuff other people have posted.


Geeee, isn't it great?

Not so much.


You see, they don't check the facts. (Remember Joe Friday? Just the Facts?) Well, there are a ton of entries in one of my family trees where people have added "facts." Problem is, those facts - usually extra children no one had ever found before! Wow! - aren't cross-checked. Like, did that kid's birthday fall before the mother turned sixty? What about the four kids on one family tree I just ran across that were born...(drum roll...wait for it...)after the mother was dead!

Miracle birth indeed.

Fact checking is important. Source documents are important. Really. Really. Important.

So, despite the temptation to accept that Lovisa Carlson who came on the ship Chrisitana out of Stockholm is Gramma, as several people have tried to suggest, I've resisted. I know better. I checked the dates. I checked the parents names (which, miraculously, I know!) So, nope. She's not the one.

Its hard to reisist in writing sometimes too. You know, they show stuff on TV - surely THOSE folks did their research right? They got the science right, surely? - or someone writes something in a book and other writers copy it because, well, surely THAT author did his research, right?

Seriously, now. You don't believe that, do you? When I was researching stuff for Dark and Deadly, I had to call my local arson investigator. After I convinced him I wasn't a psycho - hey, it wasn't easy, I was calling to ask him about bombs! - or a firebug, he gave me some interesting info. You can start a fire with a molotov cocktail, but you can't really blow something up. Not really.

Hmmmmm. Not at ALL what I expected. I mean, I'd seen the shots on the movies where someone throws the lit bottle full of gasoline and BLAMMO! Turns out, you get a big whammo, but its all show. Fire. No blammo.

And that bit where someone shoots at a car and it blows up? It so doesn't work that way. Really. You actually have to hit the battery to get that effect. Guess what? That means you actually have to know where the battery IS. I had to go look under the hood of my car to remember where it is on my car. Got another "guess what" for you. It isn't the same on every car.

So, if you wanna shoot one? You gotta know where the battery is on that make and model. Same thing with the gas tank, which, I've been told is just as hard or harder to hit than the battery.

So no blammo with a bullet unless you're really, really, really good and you have to know your cars.

Who knew?

But like the kids that get added to the Family Tree Maker and AncestryDOTcom lists after the poor woman's dead, if you don't check your sources, you get it wrong.

Of course, there's also the issue of getting it totally right, but no one believes it - ask me sometime about the helicopter in the beginning of Dark and Dangerous sometime! - which is a whole different blog. Snork.

One of these days come soon, I'm going to figure out the whole Gramma Adams riddle. The information, as the X-Files likes to say, is out there. I'm pretty good at research. I'm gonna find her. And her brothers and sisters. Allllll fifteen of them. Yep. And hey, they're dead, it's not like they're going anywhere! Haha! (Sorry, genealogical humor there. Oh, the other one is the bumper sticker: I brake for Graveyards, which I do)

So, what about you? Where do your people hail from?

Are they long time Americans (1600's for my family)?

Are they Swedish? Grins.

Or, are they Irish, Scotch, Indian, Latvian or Persian? Or something entirely different?

And have you ever caught a writer in a research mistake?

Grins....c'mon...spill!
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