Source 51

When I was a teenager, I sat down with my maternal grandparents, Gagee and Gramps, along with my own parents. We sat in the living room of the house I grew up in down in Warwick, Rhode Island. My Mom was in and out because she was trying to get dinner on the table for us all. I asked them to give me the family tree. I sat with a pad of coarse, beige sketch paper and wrote down everything they said, as best I could. I knew very few genealogical note taking conventions, so there are narrative bits mixed in with rough trees made up of names, dates and connecting lines and arrows!

In the intervening years, my sister Karen and I have done research and continued to do what we can to keep adding twigs and branches. Coincidentally, Chuck has been doing lots of research on his family as well. Today, Karen called to say she had a hot lead to fax to me. What arrived was information on our maternal great great grandfather’s family. Karen thought this family of six belonged to us, but some of the information was throwing us off. I pulled out my yellowing sheets of sketch paper and sure enough, buried among the lines and arrows were the little gems of information that allowed us to be absolutely sure these were our peeps!

While Chuck was listening to my side of this very excited and animated conversation with Karen, he pulled out the laptop and began entering information into Reunion. He has been a prince of a guy in re-entering all of my family’s information which got left behind in a PC death a few years ago! Gradually I read off details as he digitally hopped from one relative to another. That’s how today, those notes from a family conversation some three decades ago, became “source 51” in our family tree!

:: I can’t encourage you strongly enough. Ask the questions of the oldest generation. Write down the answers. Enter the information into a database. Tell the stories to the younger generations. Everyone deserves to be remembered. No one wants to be forgotten...