Family Tree: The Next Generation

Today I took my daughter to visit my grandmother, Mary Cronin Raynor, for the first time. My cousin had a son last June, but Elena is my grandmother's first great granddaughter. They almost had the same birthday - I went into the hospital on April 5th, my grandmother's 98th birthday, and Elena was born the next morning. My grandmother, god bless her, will probably outlive us all, but at 98, I was afraid she and my daughter would never get a chance to meet. So I was very excited once Elena was cleared by the doctors as being old enough to go out to public places once she hit 2 months. Although we didn't actually make it to the assisted living facility until now, just shy of her turning 3 months. But everything finally went smoothly! Elena took a (very rare) nap today and was on her best behavior - she and Grandma were both so excited! My grandmother is still fairly with it for an almost-centenarian so was asking me all sorts of questions about the baby, and it was so wonderful to see Grandma want to hold the baby and to see her making faces at her and talking to her. In addition to the fact that I had been wanting to visit my grandmother since I hadn't seen her since my baby shower in March, it was a weight off my shoulders for them to finally meet each other - Grandma's the one who got me interested in genealogy and laid the groundwork for not only the research on my mother's side of the family tree but also some of my dad's branches, so I think it was especially meaningful for both of us for her to meet one of the members of the next generation, one of the next budding branches on our tree.

Three generations of Marys

Great-grandma and Elena finally meet!

98 years and 1 day apart...but finally close enough to hold hands!

Happy Father's Day to all the dads in the world, past and present

Family history pays a majority of its attention to patrilineal lines of genealogy but besides passing along to us our names, fathers have a great influence on their children and who their children become through both their presence and their absence, in that way influencing each successive generation. So today we remember all the fathers on our trees, as well as the mothers who act as both father and mother either through choice or loss, we remember the good and the bad about them, because everything they did or didn't do, whether it be your father, grandfather, or seventh great grandfather, has influenced the person you are today...isn't that cool?

A special shout out to my own father, Tim Gorry, who is the only member of my immediate family who thinks genealogy is as fun and interesting as I do...thank you for letting me share all my discoveries with you and not have your eyes glaze over, and thank you for all the research and fieldwork you do yourself to help grow and enrich our family tree! And another special shout out to my fiance Sam, who is celebrating his first Father's Day today - thank you for the gift of our beautiful baby girl, the next generation of our now combined family tree!

Sam and our 10 week old daughter Elena.

Old school - with my dad at the beach. Probably Jones Beach, probably 1980.

Indiana Jones and the genealogical pursuit

My 2-month old is down for a rare nap and not only was I inspired yesterday to write about this but Cousin April over at Digging Up the Dirt on My Dead People just wrote about this too so it look like it was meant to be!

First, the thoughts that were going through my mind - yesterday I was watching a documentary on Indiana Jones and real life archaeology and as with anytime I see or hear anything about history, it was making me itch to do some genealogy. And while I was thinking how cool it would have been to be out in the field, in search of mystery and adventure, like an archaeologist like Indiana Jones and lamenting the fact that the golden age of archaeology was long over, I was thinking about how genealogy is kinda like archaeology, because the fieldwork is so important to finding and solving those mysteries about our family trees.

So Cousin April was talking about the broadcast yesterday on Radio Boston about the impact of technology on genealogy - please visit the link above to read more about the interview and April's opinions on it. As I've stated before, I love that the Internet has exposed more people to genealogy and piqued their interest in it, that it's made more documents and databases available to us and helped us break down previously impassable brick walls, and that it has helped us connect with distant family members and share our collective knowledge about our trees. The Internet has also, unfortunately, helped spread a lot of bad information, because it's so easily accessible; it has made genealogy a copy-and-paste hobby for a lot of folks; and it has made some people forget (or maybe they never realized!) the importance of genealogical fieldwork. It's not just about finding your grandparent's address in a census on Ancestry.com - it's, if possible, visiting the address or neighborhood and seeing if the house is still there and how much the neighborhood has or hasn't changed. It's not just finding a death certificate or record on Familysearch - it's going to the cemetery to visit the headstone (or lack thereof - that alone will tell you whether or not your family was poor or well-off) and seeing if you can find out who else might be buried there and who the plot belongs to. And it's realizing that some of the most pertinent information you are seeking probably ISN'T online - it's in a tiny church's hand-written recordbooks, or in an old newspaper that's only available on microfilm at the library, or in the dusty archives of your local town hall, or maybe even in your own grandmother's photo album or diary.

So, technology, yay; but also, fieldwork, yay.

The other thing I was contemplating as I fell asleep last night was how multi-disciplinary genealogy is, which Cousin April also touches on. Genealogy doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens in a geographical area, and it happens in a historical time period. It's not just about collecting names and dates, although that can be fun. It's about what happened in between the birth date and death date, about our ancestor's lives. I love a name and date when I've finally broken through a brick wall, but eventually, I want a place, too, and maybe an occupation. In my dreams, all my ancestors would be fleshed out individuals - I would be able to know their whole stories. That will never happen. But each of us has at least one ancestor we can round out - when and where did they live? Did they grow up on a farm or in the city? Did his mother die when he was young? Did he have any siblings? Did he follow in his father's occupational footsteps? Did he emigrate to another country? Why did he - were the reasons economic? Religious? Was he escaping a war? Was he a youngest son with no other prospects? Was he just an adventurous spirit? Are there any newspaper articles about him? Was he a productive member of society? Was he a social misfit or pariah? When he died was he able to afford a funeral? His own cemetery plot? A headstone? Are there any photos? Do I have his eyes or his mouth? His temperament? These are the things I want to know as a genealogist. These are the mysteries I want to solve. When it comes to genealogy, I want to be Indiana Jones - how about you? :)