Genealogy can be a messy subject! I’ve spent the past 2 days sorting through boxes and notebooks containing family group sheets, handwritten notes, interview write-ups, newspaper clippings, photos, how-to articles, maps, and all the other stacks of ephemera connected with doing genealogy the way we did it before computers came along.
Even though digitized records are great for conducting research, who is to say today’s blips and bleeps of e-data will still be readable to the next generations or even to ourselves a few years hence? Programs become apps, apps become media, media changes format. All this electronic stuff whizzes out of date faster than it comes in. So all my discoveries, even the most current ones, end up on paper, in sheet protectors, and in notebooks.
Yesterday I found the above photocopy of the very first family history notes I ever made. They were originally written on a school hall pass way back in 1964 or ’65 during a conversation I had with my Grandmother Leta Whalen. When I asked her about our family, she told me, “We are Yankees.” (And she didn’t mean the baseball team!) She then recounted the names and birth dates of her grand and great-grandparents dating all the way back to 1786.
Our family is very lucky that our first-person family histories reach so far back. My grandmother was born in 1874 and had my father in 1912, when she was 38. My father was almost 42 when I was born 1954. Grandma was raised by her Grandmother Maxon (born in 1813) so she certainly learned not only of her own mother’s history, but heard first person of her grandmother’s early life too. Family history was important to Leta Mary Clarke Whalen and she made sure to pass it on.
I am so lucky to have had that conversation and to have written it down. Grandma Whalen passed away on October 29, 1965 at 91 years of age.