Be the Biographer of your family

Be The Biographer of your family LET YOUR ANCESTORS VOICE SPEAK. TELL THEIR STORY.

 I enjoy teaching family history and in my classes I am always stressing the importance of accurately recording our family history. I want my students to understand and use sound research methodology and to be more than an internet genealogist. I want them to understand that there is more to researching our family history than hitting the green leaf on ancestry.com   Don’t get me wrong, I use ancestry.com and it is a terrific resource that I subscribe to but we seek the truth from all the wonderful repositories that hold information and we want to be more than a name collector.

Charting the basic information of our ancestors is just the beginning. We must tell their stories.

The names we discover give our ancestor’s identity but their records tell us how they lived danced and sang and offer us a snapshot of the communities and the world in which they lived. Our story will be so much more fascinating and interesting if we describe the emotion and the personality of our ancestors than if we only collect their names or list the facts.

I have a picture of my great, great Grandma, Mary Casey Carver. But I know little about her, the woman she was. Written oral family history states that she was from Effin, Co. Limerick, Ireland, was educated at the national schools and lived on the River Shannon. She survived the potato famine and emigrated with her sister who died aboard ship, whose name has always been a mystery. But who was my great, great grandmother?

In researching my great, great grandparents I learned that Mary was the mother of seven children, two having died in infancy.  I know she was born in Ireland about 1835 and married my great great grandfather, John Carver, in Norwich, Connecticut in June of 1856.

In 1869 the young family migrated from Connecticut with a group of friends with the purpose of moving to Nebraska.  Mary was a farmer’s wife and lived in Nebraska for the remainder of her life having died in 1906 and is buried next to her husband in Sacred Heart Cemetery in Burchard, Nebraska.

No records have been found listing her parent’s names and no obituary notice was written. She was not named on any property nor voting lists or county biographies. These are her basic facts from the records I have found for Mary to date.

We all hope to locate a lot of records on our ancestors but sometimes there are not a lot of factual records to work with in which to write the stories of our ancestors. So how do we write the story about Mary Casey Carver when records are scarce? How do we give her personality?

 We examine every bit of information we have for clues. We broaden our knowledge to include what we know about her family and community. We read local newspapers. We learn the history of the communities she lived in and we create a timeline of historical events that would have shaped her world.

 We recreate her life with the knowledge and information we have. And we begin to tell the story of who Mary Casey Carver was. We can tell the story behind her name and be true to the known facts.

If I was to include the likely way the family would have traveled when they migrated from Connecticut to Nebraska in 1869 her story would become more interesting.

If I were to include what their journey would have been like I am adding more details.
If I were to describe how she likely felt, I am adding emotion and giving her personality.

 I have not found Mary’s passenger record but I can imagine how she felt when her sister died at sea. I could write:

“Her final goodbye was to her sister said somewhere over the vast ocean near the end of their voyage, an unceremonious burial as cold as the Atlantic waters. She did not want her burial in the icy cold dark waters and she stood silent, her composure almost stiff, as her sisters body was led to drift away into the sea until lost and washed out of reach. Not one tear could be released. Not that day”.

 We do not need to write expansive narratives and I could shorten it to say “Her final goodbye was to her sister said somewhere over the vast ocean near the end of their voyage, an unceremonious burial as cold as the Atlantic waters”.

 With just one piece of information I have described emotion. I have given her personality and shown some insight into how Mary likely felt having buried her sister at sea.

 Not all of our family history is going to be written in the past tense but we can use the same principles that we apply for our ancestors as we do for the living.

My brother is the consummate story teller and his subjects are often about family. He can stand in a crowded room and capture an audience and make you laugh. We shake our heads hearing the stories repeated, knowing it won’t be retold the same yet he remains true to the facts and we anticipate the reactions.

 Story telling is an old tradition. It is oral history. I don’t think he has written down a thing but he has shared family history. He has given me a story line. I can begin with “Your Uncle John…”

I have family history and personality.

 My brother also has three older sisters and three younger sisters. Just writing down our names it becomes obvious that my brother did not grow up in a male dominated world. What a story he could tell! There is always more to be learned about a family and we need to look beyond the obvious facts.

 I can look at family traditions. The tradition of having oyster soup on Christmas Eve is a familiar ritual for many of us that dates back generations and we likely all have similar traditions.

 My mother is a third generation American born of Irish emigrants. I realize that potatoes are a mainstay of American diets but she could cook potatoes a hundred different ways with every meal and has been heard to say how much nutrition is in potatoes and that if the potato was the only food at our table that we could survive. I have always wondered how much Mom may have been influenced from our family having survived the potato famine and how much her reasoning was because she genuinely liked potatoes.

 I can be reasonably sure that Mary Casey Carver planted potatoes in her vegetable garden and had memories of the potato famine. I would likely be correct believing that she shared some history of having survived the potato famine with her children. I can write and elaborate about the potato famine and how in part it likely shaped the woman she was.

 We can learn about our past from our mothers and grandmothers and the men in our life too. We only need to examine why our family acts and behaves the way we do.

 If we have old heirlooms and family pictures they have a story waiting to be told. While most old photos capture a serious looking ancestor and Mary Casey Carver’s was no exception, some photos offer us a terrific snapshot of who our ancestors were. There is an old black and white family photo of my Mom and her family posing for the camera with the standard straight posture but in the background my Uncle Leonard is captured with body in motion and a mischievous smile that shouted he was full of life. Had I not known my Uncle this photo would have given me an immediate window into his personality. Adding a name and a story to that immortalized face brings personalities to life and we use it to tell our stories.

There are a lot of ways we can tell the stories of our ancestor’s personality and the lives they led. We just have to look for them. We use the information we have gathered to build a medical history of our family by recording the known causes of death of our ancestors. Property records or the lack of them can suggest if our ancestors lived a comfortable life. Occupations suggest a lifestyle.

 Given names can leave us clues too. James Arthur Garfield Thompson born in 1880 was named after President Garfield and we can be reasonably certain that his parents had a political reason for their son’s namesake. The history of the locations and time era suggest how our ancestors may have lived their daily lives. Our ethnic and religious backgrounds may have influenced how our ancestors led their life.

 My research on Mary Casey Carver is unfinished. But when information is scarce I continue to challenge myself to learn more about my ancestors by analyzing the records I have discovered to record the personality and lives of my ancestors.