Fueled by an explosion of online resources and several popular television shows, family history research is now outpacing quilting and gardening as the favorite hobby of Americans and Canadians.
People begin to explore their ancestry for many reasons, but for Fran Murphy, secretary of the Lakeside Genealogy Forum, it was the “sense of heritage” that first motivated her.
“When I started I didn’t even know that my father’s father had any brothers and sisters. It just opened a whole world to me that I never knew existed,” said Murphy, who has traced one line of her family back to 13th century England.
For some, the thought of starting a never-ending paper trail, having to sift through mountains of census, marriage, cemetery, land and military records, often to no avail, may seem daunting and not a great deal of fun, but the rewards can be unexpected.
For Jean-Francois Waigel of Switzerland, an Ajijic resident and speaker at the forum’s June meeting, the quest turned into an eye-opening experience that steered him through a fascinating swath of European history and led to his writing an extensive and eloquent family history that he will pass on to his children and grandchildren.
Among the “diamonds” that Waigel unearthed was a family link to one of France’s most celebrated writers, Jean Jacques Rousseau.
“The big thing for me is finding the stories, finding out about those ancestors,” says Forum President Marci Bowman, who has ferreted out an astonishing 10,000 close and distant relatives since she began her research after finding a box stuffed full of family memorabilia in the wake of her mother’s death.
Murphy notes that the family history bug usually takes hold at a later stage of one’s life and rarely when one is young and pursuing other interests.
“But at that point your parents are usually dead so you can’t quiz them. It’s too bad. Imagine the things I could have found out from my grandparents.”
The Genealogy Forum has been active for around ten years and meets at the end of each month. It attracts a good-sized crowd of family history enthusiasts, especially in the winter months, with the more experienced always willing to share their knowledge with beginners.
“We try to have some programs aimed at those without a lot of experience and some for those with quite a bit of experience,” says Bowman. “One of the things I tell people is to just keep listening, just keep absorbing because even if you don’t understand immediately, it goes into the back of the brain and all of a sudden it makes sense.”
With so many online resources now available to family history researchers, Bowman says the club likes to focus on “genealogy tools and how to use them.”
To give an idea how much the hobby has grown in recent years, she points out that Ancestry.com now has four billion records online and Family Search two billion.
The club also helps in explaining the variety of investigative options, which not only include looking at published records but also more creative methods of digging up ancestors, such as researching newspaper articles or a town or community’s local history.
“It involves patience and serendipity, and sometimes karma,” says Bowman. “It sounds goofy but in helping other people, I often find it comes back.”
In one goodwill gesture, Bowman once sent some photos she found of another family to their descendants and, to her great surprise, received back 50 postcards sent by her grandfather to his brother. “So I now have pictures of my great grandparents and a great-great grandmother, including one of him (her grandfather) going to see William Jennings Bryan and writing about how interesting it was.”
Some previous programs at the forum have included genetic genealogy, tracing common surnames, Confederate Civil War records, England and Wales civil registration, publishing your family history online and finding that grave.
The Genealogy group meets the last Monday of the month at 2 p.m. in the Lake Chapala Society Sala. The next meeting on Monday, July 29 will feature a webinar on searching for English ancestors. Everyone is welcome to attend.