When people reach retirement age, if they’re lucky, they find themselves with more free time on their hands. They’re also likely to be thinking about “legacy” issues, and wishing that they had asked more questions about family history of the relatives whom they’ve outlived. So genealogy is a natural topic of interest for older folks: a tendency that was reflected in the makeup of the audience at the New Paltz Community Center the evening of February 1, when a couple of dozen mostly grey-haired wannabe researchers turned up to hear Marny Janson’s presentation titled “Meet Your Ancestors: Genealogy 101.”
Janson is a member of the New Paltz Historical Society, which sponsored the event, as well as a vice president of the Ulster County Genealogical Society and a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists. She told the group that she had “got hooked on genealogy as a young girl,” after being erroneously informed by her Liverpool-born mother that they were related to North Pole explorer Robert Peary. Though her own research proved the family lore incorrect, it turned up other tidbits that lit the spark for a lifelong passion. “I love being a detective,” Janson told the group. “I wanted to be Nancy Drew when I was a little girl.”
Investigating one’s genetic roots can provide more tangible benefits than just fun and satisfaction of curiosity, though, according to the presenter. Discovering the facts and stories of family history can help forge emotional links between generations. Evidence of one’s ethnicity can also be parlayed into eligibility for certain types of college scholarships, and some seekers even turn up lost life insurance policies or other inheritances.
But mostly, the joy is in the quest, which Janson warned can draw the investigator off in so many different directions that it becomes unmanageable — especially nowadays, with so many online resources accessible for free and new databases constantly being uploaded to the Internet. She recommended keeping your goals simple — “one generation at a time…by all means, start with yourself” — and your records clear and detailed. “Find documentation for every event, and record where you found it,” before chasing down the next thread to its source. She suggested learning to use a “snipping tool” to capture partial screenshots of webpages, then pasting the URL of the pages where they were found on the same Word document.
Roots Magic and Legacy Family Tree are two software programs designed for organization of genealogical data that have basic freeware versions available, but she noted that some researchers are more comfortable with paper storage systems such as file folders and binders. Free templates for charts and forms are also easily available.
The Internet these days is exploding with sources of records to pursue genealogical research. For a relative beginner, Janson recommended “focusing mostly on what you can get for free. You can spend a fortune on genealogy if you want,” but it’s by no means necessary. The first place to look, she said, is www.familysearch.org, which “has everything you want. It’s run by the Church of Latter-Day Saints, but the site has nothing religious on it.” Two other useful all-around resources, www.ancestry.com and www.heritagequest.com, have a subscription charge, but are accessible for free at most libraries.
Through these and other online tools, the amateur genealogist can follow the tracks of lost ancestors through such treasure troves of information as the US Census, birth, marriage and death certificates, church, civil, military, pension and court records, deeds, wills and inventories, local newspapers, gravestone inscriptions, passenger lists and naturalization records. Through a screenshot of a steamship passenger manifest, available from www.ellisislandrecords.com, Janson illustrated how they contained such details as the names and ages of families traveling together, their occupation, birthplace…even addresses to contact relatives in the home or destination country, in the event that the ship should sink.
It’s easy to see how one such tiny factoid can lead to another and another — all needing to be cross-checked with documentation from multiple sources, whenever possible — until genealogy becomes an all-consuming obsession. To obtain copies of the free handouts of basic information that Janson distributed at the workshop, e-mail her at mljanson1@gmail.com. And if you want to take the full-immersion plunge, check out this summer’s catalogue from the Lifelong Learning Institute at SUNY New Paltz. Marny Janson will be offering a full eight-week Genealogy 101 course on campus in the fall of 2017.
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