Question of the Week: Who or what got you interested in genealogy?

Question

Did someone or something first spark your interest in family history and genealogy? Who or what was it? Tell us with an answer below or share the question image with your answer on social media. Thanks!

Comments

My husband's brother John E. got me into genealogy. I was hooked the very next day he talked me into it..

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I wanted to know my family who my granny and papa's parents were.  I knew my mom's maternal grandfather and my Daddy's maternal grandmother.  Why did i not know my other great grandparents.  The search was on.  I also wanted to know where the shield with family Crest came from.  It wad my maternal grandfather's.

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About 1995, I came across some of my deceased father's papers. His middle name was Eugene, and thought 'where or from whom did he get his second name'? I knew his ancestors came from Paisley, Scotland but wasn't even sure where it was located.  So started my genealogical journey...  Sadly, I have not been able to fulfil my quest.

I am so grateful to WikiTree for its creation and especially the creation of the Relationship Finder, and the 'Featured Connections' which has really helped my discover my family's history and connection TO history.  Thanks WikiTree.

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I was 10 years old sitting at my Grandmother Florence Russell Norris' kitchen table, trying to record a family tree on a piece of typing paper. The father had eleven children with the first wife and eleven children with the second. I couldn’t fit them all on the paper! But, it was Grandma’s stories that intrigued me. I wanted to see for myself how they were kin to me. I'm thankful for the genealogy databases we have now.

Knowing family origins was important to my Grandmother. She didn’t have a father growing up. That was something that truly bothered her - not having a complete family. (He came back into their lives twenty years later, a broken and dying man.)

Her mother, Mary Howard Spiers, was the first person of royal descent to marry into Spiers Family. (Descended from Lord Edward George Fitzalan Howard, first Lord Howard of Glossop, second son of 13th Duke of Norfolk, Henry Charles Howard.) Our Spiers were descended from Henry Spiers of Scotland whose lineage was proved by a Land Patent in 1744 in Prince George County, VA. (from Descendants of Henry Spiers, Pioneer Scotsman, complied by Mary Spiers Kennette). 

Her father, Charles William Robins, was born in 1859? and orphaned at 4 years of age – his father William? Robins a seaman and his mother, a 16 year old Hughenot, Marie Louise DeMahuren. The family story is that Marie was pregnant so the young couple asked her widowed mother for help – they were turned away and disowned. William Robins died in 1863, supposedly while on a ship. Marie was pregnant and died giving birth to the child. Charles was made a ward of the Court as his father had Seaman’s Insurance. He was “adopted” by a young couple, Alonzo and Lucinda Russell of Lowell, Massachusetts (FamilySearch - Massachusetts State Census 1865 - has Alonzo, Lucinda, and Charles Robins (6 yrs) and Ann C. Russell (22 yrs).

I have information on his adult life (his first wife and twin children, as a travelling newspaper reporter out West and in Europe during the WWI, his second marriage to and divorce from my Gr grandmother Mary Spiers and the descendants from that marriage.)

We visited Lowell and found where his adopted family (Russell) lived and where they were buried. We didn’t have enough time to research him in the Massachusetts library. Family Search and Ancestry haven’t been helpful before the 1865 census. Each census had a different birthplace and birthdate.

We found where Gr grandfather Charles is buried in Portsmouth, VA (died in1936 where he had been living with his adult children from the first marriage).

Also, most of his children were known for their red hair – Ireland or Scottish?

The search for information on my Gr grandfather Charles William Robins Russell is ongoing. My Grandmother Florence died in 2001, not knowing her paternal lineage.

Hopefully I find more about his lineage before I pass!

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My grandpa Smith would drop little bits of information about our family when I was a kid. He was a character and we never knew whether to believe him or not. That was about 60 years ago!

I became very ill 6 or 7 years ago and needed something to keep my attention from the pain. I decided to join Ancestry.com and start a tree. Imagine how pleased I was when I found that my grandpa’s stories were truthful! I’m descended from very early settlers who are notable in New England, and on Long Island, New York.

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On my 18th birthday my mother handed me an envelope and I thought it was a birthday present; well it wasn't money or a car title, it was a letter from her explaining that she wasn't my natural mother. I was shocked to say the least. The letter explained that my natural mother passed away when I was about 1 1/2 years old and my father remarried about 1 year after.

The next few years I searched for my mother's grave and found it. I saw that she was buried with her mother and father and another member of the family. Eventually I came across another headstone nearby in the same cemetery, that belonged to the other side of the family. And as I searched the cemetery I came across other headstones of ancestors. Thus began my journey into my ancestry.

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A family gene study which was hardbound, 500 copies were printed in 1986

It was a travesty. There was no interaction btw the author and printer...5-digit years, misspelled words...contacted typhoid, wrong birthdates of living people, recognizance instead of reconnaissance, etc.

It is so embarrassing to have copies of this book sent all over the world.  So that's how I got interested in genealogy..

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I was adopted as an infant.  After I entered High School, the questions came to me. Who am I and who is my "real" family?  This haunted me for years, so after I reached my adult years, my daughter wanted me to find my birth family.  We finally found them after about a year or two.  My daughter was in the Daughters of the American Revolution, (DAR) and she was excited when she found a Patriot in my Direct Ancestral Line.  I finally had a family of my own, after I had reached the age of 60 years.  I became very passionate about Genealogy and finding out more about my family.  I have met my Birth Mom and half-sister.  It was a wonderful reunion.  I was her "Birthday Present" on her 92nd Birthday.  I talked to her and my "sister" on the phone just about every week, as I live in South Carolina and she lived in Colorado.  I am so glad that I flew out there for her birthday, as it was her last.  She passed away in 2019.  My daughter went to Colorado to meet my Mom and her Grandmother 2 months before my Mom passed away.   I really miss her, as I was looking forward to spending more time with her.  I have been a member of The Daughters of the American Revolution since 2011.  I have become very involved in doing Genealogy just about every chance that I get.  I grew up with people who knew where their ancestors came from, but I didn't know if I even had a family.  My adoptive parents were very loving and gave me a good home, a good education, and made sure that I had teenage years to enjoy.  I was accepted within the family, but I still had that question, "Why was I adopted?".  I got my answer when I went to see my Mother.  My daughter has been working on my "Family Tree" and whenever I start reading and looking at the information, I want to know more.  I had a DNA test done and my Mother had one done also.  We matched as parent and child.  When I got the results which have been updated, it showed that I am 48% Norwegian!  Never did I ever dream that I was almost 1/2 Norwegian.  So that really started me in researching my path back to Norway!  That is why I got interested in Genealogy.  That is why I joined WikiTree.  I am hoping that I can find my link to Norway.  I just want to know all I can find about Who I am and Where did "My Family" come from."  I would appreciate any help that I can get from the WikiTree group of Genealogists.  Thank you for reading my Life Story.

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I used to hear stories about family from my maternal grandmother all the time. Unfortunately she passed away a couple of years ago. I became intrigued with our family tree as no one had complete information on anyone from the past on either side. My curiosity got the better of me and I decided to complete the family tree as completely as possible.

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My dad gave me his family history from the Chouinard association which acquired years ago.  I decided to look for a way to make it accessible for the whole family and that kicked off the family hunt.  Had no idea Wikitree existed nor any of the others aside from ancestry.com.  I believe all of this should be free as much of it is public information.  Love what I have built and am hooked!

Answer 1

A family story about my 3rd great grandfather who served in the English 54th Regiment of Foot during the time of the American Revolution, got me interested in genealogy.

He served from the summer of 1777 until the war ended. After that, his unit relocated to Canada for several years. As the story goes, an officer insulted my ancestor's lady, after which my 3rd great grandfather struck the officer who fell and struck his head on a rock, resulting in his death.

At that point my ancestor abruptly deserted and fled to Upstate New York.

I wanted to find out more about my ancestor which led to discovering a fair amount of information over time.

Answer 2

What got me interested in genealogy was a family reunion that my family attended when I was young. My mother got interested in researching our ancestors, and I went with her to our local library as we started the hunt. There was no internet or computers then. All we had at the library was an extensive collection of genealogy items to look through. Other relatives helped to gather information and passed the information on to my mother. And so the hunt began to find our ancestors.

Answer 3

My name is one of those that you always need to spell out to people. I noticed we are really few as well, where the other spelling variations seem to be with many more. Then one day a family member ordered a rather expensive family tree from a commercial company... yeah you know: 90% fake news in there, and I decided I could do better, starting with real documents .

I am still working on it though, and WikiTree forced me to re-evaluate all the birth certificates which is a nice to do thing after 20 years of gathering all bits and pieces.

Comments

My interests started in a similar way! I'm finding it incredibly satisfying to be able to connect almost anyone with my last name.

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My Dad had spent a couple of years interviewing the older family member, visiting Graveyards and court houses and pouring over microfilm of the US Census. I had spent about the same time doing the microfilm thing. I had amassed about 300 Family Sheets I had filled out about every name in the southern counties of Indiana, that we though might be related. Over the years, I've proven about 50 of these sheets are related. I review the remaining sheets from time to time in hopes of finding another relative. After all that, my Dad put an ad in a genealogy magazine about his paternal grandparents. The first two responses were horrible. They took my Dad's data but returned nothing. The third actually gave Dad some information. Dad sent back data about his father and two of his uncles who served together in the S/A War. He told the guy that he had more but would not send it until the guy sent more. Six weeks later, a big envelop arrived with 257 loose leaf, single spaced pages. The guy ask forgiveness because he was able to add Dad's date to this work but the printer needed to close out the book or increase his cost to print it. We got a loose leaf version, I think the galleys. I've used this book as a tertiary source since 1979. I can't use it for better than that because no one told this guy he needed to quote sources. We have no idea where any of it came from. However, I've used hundreds of leads from this book and only found one item I couldn't source elsewhere. I no longer have family interested in genealogy. If I did, I would do the research for this book and publish it on the internet with the sources. By myself, this would be a task I could not live long enough to finish.

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Great story John!

Answer 4

Stories my mother related about her father's childhood during the Civil War. His father left to serve in the Confederate Army so he and his mother and baby sister went to paternal grandfather's plantation for the duration of the war. He remembered quite a bit and my mother remembered what he told her. As I grew older I wanted to know who his family was so the research began.

On my father's side, his great grandfather immigrated from England to Louisiana in the 1840's. Those stories were interesting but all the court house records were burned during the Civil War. We have found out quite a bit but still stuck on that line and research continues.

Answer 5

My own marriage in 1987 sparked my interest in genealogy.
At dinner, all the older relatives talked about their weddings and weddings of ancestors who were no longer living.
Since I knew some but by far not all of these names, I later asked them to tell me about it all again in detail and took notes.
I then also visited some of them and copied or photographed the documents and family Bibles they showed me.
But at some point there was an end and I got no further and that made me even more curious and I went to the archives to understand the story even further backwards. And I still do that today, every new name awakens in me the interest to also look for the name of his parents and siblings; only that today I rarely go to archives but do most of it online.

Answer 6

The answer for me is 4 images, all of them inspired me to find out more and fill in a myriad of missing information. 

The first one is a family tree I was given because I am one of the many descendants of Charles Richards 1839-1905, all his known and traceable descendants received a copy of the tree. I had to shrink this image because the original is huge. The caption should say 1975 not 1970. 

The second image is also of a family tree, this is my husband's family, it was included in a textbook about early settlers in Ontario, based in information in the family bible. The book is out of copyright and we own several copies. 

The third image is of the sword my husband's 4th grt grandfather used at the Battle of Waterloo, June 18, 1815, that sword hangs on my living room wall.

The 4th image is of my 3rd great grandfather, and his descendants, the young boy is my grandfather

Comments

These are great! What a collection to start you off, M.

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Pip, the family trees certainly made it much simpler to get started. Another bonus is that there are 3 extended family groups that share information just like mini WikiTrees. After 10 years I have only found one error on the Richards family tree, children attached to the wrong father and none on the Dods tree.

Answer 7

Back about 1960, my great-aunt Florence Bogart told me that an ancestor was a farmer in New Amsterdam, near what is now Hell's Gate.  Another ancestor was said to have been a minister in the Dutch church and performed a marriage ceremony for Aaron Burr.  I looked thru a biography of Burr and found that a Rev. David S. Bogart performed the marriage ceremony of Aaron Burr and Madame Jumel. Using links to David Bogart I was able to follow my branch of the Bogart family tree back to the original migration from Holland.  I spent a long time at the New York Public Library's genealogy room.

Answer 8

A family tree project my children had in elementary school.  I was amazed how little we knew.  The seed was planted.

Answer 9

Preparing for an 80th birthday celebration in which I was the host.  I discovered a bunch of famous people who were distant relations and used that as my speech.

Answer 10

My father-in-law, LeRoi Nelson, was working on genealogy for my mother-in-law, and I have the work he did. He died in 1973, when I was only 28. Seeing what he was working on, I think he was trying to get my mother-in-law into DAR. I sure wish I could ask him. Then ten years ago a friend at work showed me what she could bring up on the internet, and I was hooked.

Answer 11

Our family never talked about ancestors. We did, however, visit the cemetery to take flowers from the garden for parents/grandparents on each "Decoration Day". Sometimes we would also go across the road to the "old Sands cemetery". This was spooky as a 7 year old, overgrown with sunken graves. In 1973 the local historical society undertook the task of cleaning up that cemetery because a Revolutionary War soldier was buried there. Later visits captured my curiosity as how that soldier, Samuel Sands, might be related. The picture is my gggg grandfather's gravestone from a visit in 2011.

Comments

Societies that do cemetery decoration days know their genealogy. This still happens a lot in the North Carolina mountains.

Answer 12

A long time ago at a kitchen table not so far away.....

What got me interested in genealogy was basically all the stories I heard growing up. I grew up in an Italian-American household and that always meant going over to grandma's house and she'd have her sisters all there. They'd be talking about their parents or some other relative and tell my brother and I stories. Since I always asked a ton of questions, I asked for more info. Then I asked my great-aunt on my dad's paternal side since my grandfather was long gone by that point.

From there my quest for knowledge grew and I ended up asking relatives on my mom's side. I liked hearing the stories about how my great-grandparents came over from Italy or Quebec or how I had lines back to the American Revolution. I loved hearing all of these stories.

I guess as a writer it made sense. I always wanted to learn more and that's how I got here. =D

Answer 13

I'm a data analyst and my background is in psychology. For me, genealogy and the social sciences scratch the same itch. How do we take the complex, many factored human experience and distill it down into some numbers and concrete facts that we all agree mean the same thing? And when we encounter someone else's numbers or a collection of facts, how do we combine them with other's peoples numbers and facts in a way that lets us learn more about our complex and many factored human experience?

I have an ancestor named Jefferson Davis Chappell who was born in 1861 and his father died in 1863. That's just a tiny scratch of facts about his life, but it's an incredible amount of information about how this man intersected with history.

Comments

Kathryn, your background gives you a fascinating way to look at family history.

Answer 14

Several years before she died my mother started putting together a "Grandparents' Memory Book" for our children. At the time I put it to one side intending to finish the job at a later date, but of course never got around to it. Early in 2020 my father had to go into a home I started clearing his house in preparation for putting it on the market.

I knew both my parents tended not to throw away anything that might be of interest but was surprised to find boxes of old photographs and documents going back several generation, and not just from my parents, but grandparents, aunts and uncles as well. As this was about the time that the Covid pandemic started to reduce what we could  do I decided to start sorting out it all and produce a coherent record. Once I started I kept going back further and wanting to find out more and record it for others.

Comments

Martin, my grandparents also saved “everything,” and I got most of it. Lots of stuff that interested me. I’m glad I got it.

Answer 15

My paternal grandmother, Bennie Greye, had been researching her own and her husband's family tree for years, and as I got older she shared the books and documents she had. I slowly became more interested as I took home the books - now after her passing I am the family genealogist! I really enjoy the puzzle of genealogy and knowing where my ancestors came from.

Answer 16

a friend,Mormon , asked me to go with her to a genealogy talk. After the meeting we were given a booklet with family group sheets to begin our research.  I knew my Dad and Grandparents were all born in the same town in Tennessee, but little else. Same with my Mom's side of family, knew they were born in Texas but not much more.  My Mom said one of my cousins was working on her side of family, so I began working on my Dad's side of family.  Been working on all of family since then, and that was 1972.  Like others have said, just researching, they become more than just names that you heard, but almost alive, in my mind.   It is the best time ever!

Answer 17

I've always had a love of history.  My paternal grandmother had anecdotes of her family's history and stories for each and every thing in her house.  Since my grandfather was career US Navy, they lived many places over the years and traveled extensively after his retirement.

Answer 18

When I was in the fifth grade, our school assignment was to make a family tree. My whole family got involved in my project. My grandmother had her grandfather's Bible from the Civil War; my grandfather's sister had a family Bible written in French; my father's brother had two Bibles: his mother's and his grandmother's. It was amazing that so many people had come together to produce me!

To make a chart of all this information, I had to leave out all the brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, and I still needed a large piece of shelf paper to fit everyone on. I remember drawing around a domino to make the boxes for the names. My tree did not fit onto the bulletin board with everyone else's, but earned a special place along the back wall.

The next year, the fifth graders had the same assignment. Mary Chu just asked her Chinese grandmother; her tree was much bigger than mine ever was, but I don't think she had as much fun.

Answer 19

My mother got interested in genealogy when I was a kid. I think it was when she saw the movie Roots on television. She got one of the "family tree", fill-in-the-blank type of books and went to work. She worked on a hand-drawn family tree graph, and I would help her to fill it in.

One weekend we took a trip to Barnsdall, Oklahoma, to go find the grave of one of her ancestors in the small town cemetery. The only information she had was that it was by a tree. I went with her, and I ended up finding the gravestone first. We were both excited, and we did a pencil rubbing of the gravestone, as it was difficult to read, and also so we had a record of it. Back home we were able to knock down a "brick wall" and add more family information to the tree.

My paternal grandfather got a little involved too. He saw what my mother was doing, and he ended doing some research on his side of the family. I remember he went back to Kentucky for a family reunion and came home with more information that he gave to my mother to collect.

When I grew up and left home, she ended up giving me the "Family Tree" book, with all of her information. I was the only of the siblings that seemed interested. I ended up being estranged from my family for many years for a number of reasons. Although I reconciled with my dad towards the end of his life, and I've gotten together with a niece and a couple of nephews. I'm still not close to the rest. But oddly, I'm the repository of the family information.

I went through a divorce in 2015, and in 2016 I found WikiTree. Since then I've entered all the information I had and research so much more and broken down so many brick walls. I remarried in 2019, and have had more family to research. Everything keeps going.

Comments

Eric, your visit to the cemetery to find the grave is very similar to my grandpa getting me to help him find his grandparents’ graves which he thought were lost.

Answer 20

I wanted to know more about my paternal grandfather, [[Teeter-1026|Harold Chester Teeter (1898-1952)]], who died at age 53, six years before I was born. His life story wasn't shared by his family and I was curious to know why. I now know some of his story and I'm proud that he's my grandfather. My search has given me a better understanding of how tragedy fractures families. I feel a closer connection with my ancestors, having experienced my own share of tragedies.