Winston Churchill once said "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."
A popular hobby for many of us is tracing our family histories. For many years I have used Family Tree Maker software to record and research my family ancestry. Information most typically used in genealogy research are birth, death and marriage records, obituaries, census, church and cemetery records and other official documentation such as immigration, military (e.g. Civil War), and property title deeds. In recent decades the internet has provided an extraordinary amount of easily accessible information to help find those elusive clues to our ancestry. Many genealogy enthusiasts get their start from the family bible. A detailed record of births, christenings, marriages and deaths can often be found on the chest of drawers in grandma's bedroom, in the pages of her bible.
We are each, of course, a product of our genetic makeup. That microscopic double helix called DNA is responsible for giving us our inherited traits; hair and eye color, physical stature, and susceptibility to disease. At conception we each receive a combination of the genetic traits of our father and mother - and all of their ancestors. Researchers now know that our DNA contains information that has been passed down relatively unchanged from our earliest ancestors and studies are underway to try and find the most recent common ancestors of humans.
DNA, however, will not tell us how our ancestors lived, how they survived, what personality they had, why they went to war or what their aspirations might have been. These are the things that interest me. Ultimately we can only speculate about these facts, unless we get really lucky and find written records. Once or twice I have hit on a mini-treasure trove of information by visiting County Court Houses or by posting a request on a message board on a Genealogy web site.
One of the mysteries of my pedigree concerns my paternal great grandfather. He was evidently killed prior to his son's (my grandfather) birth. All that was known about him was his name, Cicero McDaniel. He was married, in about 1884, to Ferriby Henrietta Bedingfield who was born in Georgia in 1859. I suspect he might have been involved in some nefarious dealings as the whispered version of his death described a barroom brawl and intervention by the local sheriff. The Bedingfield family was descended from William Bedingfield who was born in England in 1662 and died in Brunswick, Virginia in 1694. I have been unable to find a trace of Cicero McDaniel's pedigree however. It is this sort of mystery that grabs my interest and frustrates me so much.
When one of my sons became diabetic at age 12, I was asked by his doctor whether there was record of diabetes in our family. At the time (1984) I had to say I was not aware of anyone in our family who had the disease. Since then, my genealogy findings provided some answers. My paternal grandmother had 10 siblings, all of whom lived into their 80s. One of her brothers had several children who suffered from diabetes. It is hard for me to imagine how anyone could have survived with that affliction in the days before the discovery of insulin and the medical support offered today. For me, this was a glimpse of how useful genealogy can be.
Often the motivation for many researchers is to try and find some famous person, or family, they might be descended from. It might provide a great conversation starter to state that one is descended from the British Royal family, George Washington or Attila the Hun. I stumbled upon this kind of relationship some years ago, when discovering my great-grandmother's (Jeffalonia Spradley Ford, b. 1851 - d. 1944) mother was born Elizabeth Boone. Elizabeth was the daughter of a brother, Samuel, of Daniel Boone. Among Jeffalonia's personal effects was a newspaper cutting about her father. The article mentioned her father's relationship to the famed frontiersman and in the margin my great-grandmother had proudly scribbled, "Daniel was my uncle." It seemed that even in those days, everyone was quick to brag about a famous ancestor.
Sprinkled among the written accounts of my ancestors are stories of the Revolutionary War (1775 - 1783) and how wives coped in the absence of their husbands who were away fighting. A g-g-g-g-grandfather, William Talley McGraw, was one of three brothers who came to America before 1850, from County Cork in Ireland, during the potato famine. He married Ann McWaters in Georgia and they had 4 children. William died as a Civil War (1861 - 1865) POW in Fort Morgan, Alabama. Annie got word that he was sick and got on a train by herself, armed with a pistol) to go see him. By the time she reached him he had died of Yellow Fever. She took several injured or sick Confederate soldiers home with her and took care of them.
My great grandfather John Wofford Ford enlisted in the Confederate Army at age 17, was captured by Union Forces, and managed to escape and return home as the war was ending. This is real American history. It is a shame that so many were only partly literate and few could afford the time to write down their stories. Most people in those times were expending all of their energy in surviving and raising their families.
As the power of the internet increases, more and more obscure records will become available online and the search for information will give more accurate and detailed results. During the last century the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) began the compilation of an International Genealogical Index (IGI). This is an incredible program of hundreds of millions of records of individuals who lived between 1500 and 1900. This resource is available free or at minimal cost and has contributed greatly to the increasing interest in genealogy worldwide.
Our children and grandchildren need to hear our stories. We need to write them down for posterity. Until the last century incredible amounts of written records and stories were lost when county courthouses and churches were destroyed by fire, during wars, or just through neglect. With electronic record keeping today, there is no reason why our personal histories can't be kept forever. Each individual story is an important part of the amazing mosaic of our human history.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana, 1863 -1952)