Shaking the Family Tree

New day...new week, new subject!

Now that I have gotten just a little bit older (like older than dirt!) I find my interests are changing. One thing that changed for me about 10-15 years ago was my interest in my ancestors. It's called genealogy, and this was something I wasn't particularly interested in until about the age of 50. Until then it was just a bunch of old people I didn't know, nor did I really have any interest in knowing them...especially since they were long since deceased.

I believe it was one day when some pictures and an aunt's genealogical search results ended up at a family dinner that I suddenly found that I kind of cared to find out all I could about our family history. 

My grandparents have all been gone for a number of years now, and when they were alive I didn't ask about what they knew of our roots. So, it was a search mission to find out all I could about where we came from and how we arrived here.

The aunt was my father's sister who had taken an interest in genealogy and made a trip to Pennsylvania where  the Schrantz relatives settled many years ago. There are still descendents of those relatives living in Pennsylvania (or at least there were at that time), and she made the trip, asked the questions, took the pictures and shared with the family. 

It wasn't long before my search spread from the Schrantz family to the Painter family (and that is a huge number of people!) and to my mother's family, the Dinkins and Peterson families. The more I researched, the more I wanted to learn.

I immediately began researching on the internet. I became a pro at "Google searches". Sometimes I hit pay dirt, and other times I turned up nothing. In retrospect, I would have taken those Google searches as hints but not necessarily facts. Turns out that people can put any old thing up for a family history, mistakes and exaggerations included, and through sharing, it begins to become the "truth". I learned an important lesson in all that, go to the sources!

Sources are hard to come by when you are 1500 miles from the home roots of your family, but I found people along the way that were more than willing to share what they knew and send copies of the records they had uncovered. I also discovered some fairly reliable websites that I felt I could trust.

A few interesting stories from my research:

• By posting online I was able to connect with a researcher who was looking for information on the Hamblet family, which is my paternal great-grandmother's family. We worked together compiling what we knew and were finally able to locate death dates and burial locations for Emily and Alford Hamblet in Oregon, former residents of Keya Paha County.
• When researching some census records for George Michael Sayler, I was running down the list of names and came across Abraham Faith. Now that name seemed familiar! George Michael was a 4X great grandfather of my dad...Abraham Faith was a 4X great grandfather of my mother...and they lived on the same street in Somerset, Pennsylvania in the early 1800's, never realizing that they would someday share common descendants. It was a small world even then.

  

  Levi and Fanny Elizabeth Kimball Painter...Wedding Picture--1859

• By posting what I knew of the Painter family on Ancestry.com, a lady contacted me. It seems that my great-great grandfather, Levi Painter left his family in Ohio, moving west in search of a new life in first Iowa and eventually Nebraska. None of his family ever heard from him again, and my research (which was pretty straight-forward beings as how he resided in Keya Paha County for several years) was the first clue they had about what had become of him. The Painter family is a large family, and I was able to send her over 900 names of Levi Painter's descendents. This branch of the family tree seems to be growing increasingly fast these days!
• Apparently some people knew where Levi was buried, but all I knew was Madison County, Nebraska. While Teri was living in Norfolk, I visited for a weekend intending to interest her in my genealogy research. She was up for it, and we did our research, planning to spend an entire Saturday afternoon scouting cemeteries in search of Levi and Fannie's graves. We were in the first cemetery for about 30 minutes before we found their gravestones, alongside the stones for their daughter and son-in-law. We spent the rest of the afternoon at the movies.  It was almost a little disappointing to find what we were looking for so soon! There is no longer any family living nearby to honor the graves so Patsy and I stopped by one Memorial Day and put some flowers on their graves. It just seemed fitting to honor them that way.
• A cousin (several times removed) came from Seattle, Washington in 2005 to research the Sayler family (part of my dad's family). We struck up a good friendship and corresponded for several years, sharing our research. We felt we both gained a lot through that venture.
• My mother's family is from eastern Nebraska, so we made several trips to visit family and research the family tree. Her aunt, at the age of 95, was still very sharp and had wonderful recall of family dates and events. She was able to fill in some gaps and provide a lot of insight. (Sadly she passed away in 2009.) We also traveled Burt County to visit places where Mom grew up. And, best of all, I was able to reconnect with some cousins that I hadn't seen in many years. Sadly one of those cousins has since passed away, and I am so glad we were able to spend some time together getting to know each other again.

I could go on and on about the interesting things I have found and the connections I have made, but you get the idea...I have really enjoyed my genealogical research. So much so that I have tried to expand it to include Mike's family. Fortunately, Mike's grandmother was also a very sharp centenarian and always enjoyed sharing her memories with her family. 

Mike's grandmother, Blanche McCoy (with sister Odetta) on her 99th birthday

I credit Mike's grandmother, Blanche McCoy, with interesting my kids in genealogy. Michael, especially spent many hours sitting with her and listening to her stories of time gone by. She passed away in 2014 having shared many memories with her family. Each of the kids will talk about stories she shared, and sometimes they are the only one that heard a particular story. Together we can piece together a lot of family history.

I have gained so much realization from my research:

• We are all a small part of a big world. If you are generation one and go back to the 10th generation, you will have 512 ancestors at the 10th level. That's a total of 1,022 direct ancestors. And that will probably take you back to about 1800, which is pretty recent in genealogical years.
• I would not be living in Springview, Nebraska had it not been for the pioneering spirit of my ancestors. Who would look on a map, never having heard of this place, and make a plan to move there? Nope, it is was the decisions made by numerous relatives that has placed me here.
• Not knowing most of these people personally, I have no idea where I get many of the traits I exhibit. Who in the family threw the OCD gene at me? And who thought it was a good idea to pass on the "short and plump" gene? 
• And there are a few genes that were obviously in existence that I wish I had gotten some of, like the enterpruenurial gene or the adventure gene.
• And I'd really like to know who was the introvert that passed along the trait that makes me feel like being my own best company some days.

If you are interested, I have a few hints learned from the mistakes I made and the sources I discovered:

• I mentioned the caution about relying on Google searches for accurate information. But often times they can lead your search to accurate records. Look but don't take it as the truth until you have copies of the actual documents or records.
• Pictures are gold when it comes to genealogy. I was handed a picture that a cousin didn't have any use for. From the writing on the back I was able to find the family that would treasure it and send it to them. Turns out the picture was of Schrantz relatives but had been handed to a member of the Painter family. Never throw away a picture!
• The Find A Grave website (www.findagrave.com) website is one of the most useful tools I have found. At the present time there are over 150 million burial memorials available for search, with more being posted daily. I am a contributor for the website, having posted over 1500 memorials, which is a pretty modest number compared to some contributors. I try to make them as complete as possible, including obituaries whenever I can. I have received many notes through the years thanking me for doing them and telling me how much it helped someone else's research.
• Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com) is a subscription genealogy website. It is very expensive, so I subscribed for a few months and really worked the site. Since then I have let my subscription go, but am still able to view my family trees and make changes to them. I just can't do searches but feel that I have basically gotten the most from the site. I still have my leaf hints showing up and I check them periodically to see if it would be worth the money to resubscribe, but so far, no.
• Another valuable resource is census records. Ancestry.com has kind of had the corner on them for many years, but they are also available at other sites, you just have to dig a bit deeper to find them. And, all census records are sealed for 70 years, so at the present time, the 1940 census is the most recent census you can find any records on. Also, the 1890 census was largely destroyed by fire, so that is a gap in information.

I have done this long enough, and had access to many of the courthouse records as well as a reasonable complete set of Springview Herald newspapers that I am now receiving calls and queries to do research. People almost act like they hate to ask, but I am always happy to get them. Many times there is just nothing I can find, but often times I am able to provide obituaries and records or cemetery pictures and info.

One thing that has made me feel so good about genealogy research is the way people are so willing to help others. Only on one occasion did someone ask me to remove an obituary from a Find A Grave website because they didn't want to share the information with other family members...they wanted others to have to beg for it also! In all the years I have done this it is the only instance of ill-will I have witnessed. 

So, genealogy is not for everyone. Some people just aren't interested, and that's OK.  Some of us are interested, and we can be annoying about it! We become excited with our findings and mistakenly believe that everyone else should be as excited. My apologies to all I have bored this way...and maybe it is you who are reading this blog today! 

I recently began a Pinterest board for genealogy. and it is growing by leaps and bounds. Feel free to check out my genealogy board and follow it if you are interested in what's there. I will admit that I have done a lot more "saving pins" than reading but I am working on it. 

Finally I leave you with a quote:  

Some family trees have beautiful leaves, and some have just a bunch of nuts. Remember, it is the nuts that make the tree worth shaking. – Unknown