Hi everyone!
It's time to get to know another one of our wonderful WikiTreers. This week's member is Ken Spratlin.
Ken became a Wiki Genealogist in July of 2018. He is quite active in our US Southern Colonies project.
When and how did you get interested in genealogy or family history?
I became interested 10 years ago. I had just visited family back in Georgia, and was shown my mother's "blue binder". She had passed away a few years earlier and left it in her things. During the mid-1990s, she filled a 2-inch binder with pedigree charts, xerox copies of court records, headstone photos, and copies of emails exchanged with 2nd and 3rd cousins I had never heard of. She had never mentioned her interest.
My interest was initially just idle curiosity. What was she up to? Where are these places she visited? We are from the northeast corner of Georgia. Who are these people in cemeteries in the southernmost parts of Georgia? She did love a road trip.
It is interesting to flip through the blue binder now and see the early CompuServe, Mindspring, and EarthLink email addresses, and early genealogy websites with trees, search, and chat boards.
Among our family, knowledge of our ancestry was very limited. Growing up, we were told we are 50% Irish, 25% Scottish, and 25% Dutch. That was the extent of it. (Now, our tree doesn't support that at all!) Growing up, I consumed books on American history. My career diverted me from that love for a couple of decades. As I began to dig into those pages, it re-sparked my love of history.
What are some of your interests outside of genealogy?
I am a child of the space race. My earliest memory of TV is staying up late and watching the first moon landing. That remained my interest, and I have two degrees in aerospace engineering. After working at NASA and with a NASA contractor for a decade, I moved to Silicon Valley and a job developing GPS and location-based services. So I am comfortable with math, software, and complexity. I tend to tackle problems from that perspective, admittedly even when it isn't the best approach.
In retirement, I fiddle with computers, maintain a genealogy website and blog, and occasionally write software. I enjoy helping with my son's Scout troop, and camping in the Rocky Mountains with him.
What is your genealogical research focus? Has the focus of your research or work changed over the years?
Most of my family lines trace back to pre-1700 Virginia. My wife's lines tell a more diverse immigration story—Europe to the midwest United States, arriving in Massachusetts in the early to mid 1600s, Canada in the mid-1800s, or directly to the midwest United States in the late 1800s.
Early on, I worked on our entire family tree, every line, just trying to trace each line back to arrival in America. This was relatively easy for a large portion of our tree despite almost three-fourths of the lines arriving early. I have only dipped a toe in the water of the other one-fourth, my wife's Scandinavian lines.
Along the way, my interest and passion shifted. Despite most of our ancestors living very ordinary lives, I keep finding them in unexpected places—a passing reference in a history book, on a roadside historical marker, on a map in a place named after them. They manage to speak today despite often leaving little in the way of a paper trail.
Now, my passion is to discover their stories, share them with family, and preserve them for future generations. I spend less time filling in the tree, and more time making sure the existing lines are solid, the sources are reliable, and their stories are told.
(interview continues in comments)
