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| My first stab at family history, aka my high school Senior Project. |
This is a blog about family. This is a blog about uncovering
the stories of the people who came before me. This is a blog about
understanding how I got to be where I am, because of how my parents and
grandparents and great-grands beyond got to be where they are and were.
I’ve been doing family history research off and on since
2001, and much more seriously since about 2007. A fair amount of the credit (or
blame, depending on how you look at it!) goes to two of my high school
teachers. One, my AP U.S. History teacher, assigned this awesome project where
we went to the historic Woodland Cemetery in West Philadelphia,
chose a headstone, and researched that person’s life through records at
archives and repositories across the city. To be honest, I don’t remember a
darn thing about the person my group chose – not even his name. But what I do remember is how cool it was to get to
search through historical records and actually find out what this person’s life
looked like at a time when the world looked different than the one I knew.
(It’s also the first, and only, time – to date – that I’ve eaten lunch in a
cemetery. I’m a terrible Victorian!)
Around the same time – maybe junior or senior year - my
English teacher had us read Toni Morrison’s Song
of Solomon. Spoiler alert, if you’ve never read it, there’s a children’s
rhyme that pops up several times in the story that turns out to reference the
family history of the story’s protagonist. There’s a haunting coolness to that
that made me wonder what I might be able to find out about my own family. I
took that question and ran with it – my senior project was a cookbook with
family recipes that I got by visiting and interviewing family members in DC and
Columbus, OH.
What really sealed the deal, though, was something my
Grandma in Ohio
told me before I went away to college. (Nope, not a deep, dark secret!) She
told me that when she heard what college I’d decided to go to, she went to
church and told her fellowship how proud she was to be the daughter of a coal
miner whose granddaughter was going to Harvard. The sense of motion, the sense
of time, and really, the sense of history in that statement – especially
knowing how and where both my parents grew up – has stuck with me to this day. So
has the question of what I could learn about my coal mining ancestors, and all
the other folks who came before me, on both sides of my family.
In the past 14 years, I’ve answered a lot of questions, and
raised a thousand more! I’m going to use this blog to share a lot of the
information that I’ve found, first and foremost with my family, but also with
all my genealogy and history buddies (and hopefully new ones as well). Maybe
I’ll even connect with new family, or with fellow researchers who can help me
break down brick walls in my family history.
I’m looking forward to this blogging journey and hope that
you all – family and friends – will take it with me. More than that, I hope
you’ll participate: sharing stories, memories, photos, and family recipes, and
maybe writing a post here and there for me to share! At the least, I hope
you’ll leave comments, ask questions, or just tell other folks about what’s
here, so we can keep this information – our stories – alive for generations of
family to come.
P.S. My posts won’t all be this long!
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