1 Ask Yourself Why You''re Doing This; or, Genealogy for Beginners Ask yourself why you''re doing this." Pat Roberts, a woman with a stylish haircut, some serious jewelry, and the no-nonsense voice of a high school guidance counselor, stared out at the group of strangers who''d shown up for the introduction-to-genealogy seminar that morning at the Boulder Public Library. I suddenly realized what was coming: just like that guidance counselor, this enigmatic gatekeeper was about to tell us whether our expectations were realistic or just plain ridiculous. "Ask yourself why you''re doing this," she repeated, this time with a rhetorical spin. "If I put that question to each of you, I''d get twenty different answers. So ask yourself: What do you hope to find?" Other people''s history In my case, it was a circus tent and a dentist. And a cattle farm in Mississippi and, of course, Windswept. I''d come to the Boulder Public Library looking for the truth, if it existed, behind both the tall tales told by my family as well as the silences.
I didn''t suspect scandal, but I wouldn''t be surprised to find some. This seemed realistic; at least, it didn''t seem totally absurd. I was also looking for one other thing: a strategy. I was looking for Jacksons-my Jacksons, among an ocean of people who shared my name but not my DNA. Jackson is the twentieth most popular surname in the United States; in the year 2000, 666,125 Americans were named Jackson. We are legion-but whom did I mean by "we"?1 My father, Jon Anthony Jackson, is one of eight children spread out over seven states. They like each other, yet they rarely see each other. As a family, we neither send nor receive regular Christmas letters.
Frankly, most of us probably feel virtuous if we can remember all the cousins'' names. Now that my grandfather Jabe and grandmother Grace Jackson are dead, there is no central "home" to return to-not that many of their children visited much, anyway. Whether that is normal, I don''t know, but it sure didn''t make for a strong sense of heritage. I''d spent seven years getting a Ph.D. in history . other people''s history. It had never occurred to me to look into my own.
Recently, this lack of family narrative began to bother me. The furthest back I could trace my ancestors was three generations: my great-grandparents. That barely got me into the nineteenth century, and I started to feel a little, well, irresponsible about it. I''d spent a lot of time in graduate school tracing the history of African-Americans, people who lamented their history of enslavement not only for its obvious privations, but also because of the way slavery erased their family connections, as parents, children, siblings were separated and sold, names changed, and records lost. Something similar had happened on my mother''s side of the family, Russian Jews who fled persecution to come to the United States in the brief window of time when such a migration was possible. So what of the Jacksons? I knew they''d arrived in this country before my maternal ancestors, but how much earlier? I had no idea, and no one was discussing it at the Jackson family reunion, because there was no reunion. Ever. Oscar Wilde wrote that "to lose one parent .
may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness." So what if you''ve misplaced your entire family tree?2 Life offers some reliable milestones guaranteed to thrust family in our faces. Weddings, for example. My husband, Ben, has two uncles, one aunt, and four cousins. Me, I have six (surviving) aunts and uncles just on the Jackson side alone, with who knows how many cousins (and, sadly, I didn''t). For a couple trying to plan a small wedding, you''d think the Bride''s Side of the aisle would be the problem here, but no. No, because it barely occurred to me to invite any of my Jackson relatives: I hardly knew most of them. The wedding planner in me was relieved, but the Jackson in me felt, for the first time, a little sad about the etiolated state of the Jackson family horticulture.
Another major milestone was the birth of my son-or rather, the forty weeks leading up to it. It was a magical time filled with excitement . and paranoia, nausea, and more questions about my family health history than I''d ever imagined possible. Causes of death, incidents of stroke, commitments to sanitariums? I needed the information fast. The eventual birth of my healthy son did, of course, provoke all the expected but nevertheless poignant emotions related to the Circle of Life and the perpetuation of the family line, but honestly? It was the endless medical interrogations that really got me thinking about where this baby came from. Weddings and births are happy reminders of the ways we are all connected to the billions of human beings who walked the planet before we got here (over 100 billion at last count). Funerals, of course, prompt similar thoughts, and also force us to think about our own mortality. None of my grandparents were at my wedding; they had all passed away by then-but I had only attended one of their funerals.
I was never very close with any of them, but with the birth of my son, I found myself missing my grandparents and trying to remember how they looked, how they sounded, and the stories they''d told. Jabe Cook Jackson was the most riveting storyteller among them. Born in Alabama, he was one of those southerners who turned every utterance into a memorable bon mot. Some family stories are told more often than others; among Jabe''s eight children, each one might have a different version of a canonical yarn, and each version would be equally funny and vivid. Sheer numbers contributed to a Jackson family narrative pieced together according to the rules of the old game of Telephone; stories are repeated and commented upon, then subtly changed and passed not only from father to son, but also from sister to brother. Growing up-and even now that I am, ahem, grown up-every once in a while a relative would drop a Family Bomb. A Family Bomb was one of those Jackson family stories so bizarre and unexpected that it threw everything into a new light. They usually appear in a conversation apropos of nothing in particular.
One involved a mysterious black "brother" of my grandfather-a Family Bomb first dropped when I was about twenty-two. My dad just happened to mention it during an otherwise unremarkable conversation: Oh, and another thing: your white, southern grandfather grew up in Jim Crow Alabama with a black orphan boy around his own age whom he considered a brother. Never knew what happened to him. Right. Or: Actually, when we first moved to Kingsley, the whole family lived in a circus tent. Sure. And: You''ve never met those cousins? They''re the ones who own a cattle ranch, and when they got tired of asking the bank for money, they started their own. Their own what? Their own bank.
Oh. So there was the black brother question, the circus tent issue, and the First Bank of Jackson mystery. There were others, too. Why, at Grandpa Jackson''s funeral, did my righteous, devout Christian aunt Mary insist to the undertaker that my Baptist-minister grandfather-her father-was Jewish? Why did my grandparents name their home in Kingsley, Michigan, Windswept? It sounded like a southern plantation-was it an homage to a lost antebellum homestead? I didn''t know. With all these questions in mind, I began to seek answers. I hoped my background in American history would help. I had a lot of experience with old records and dusty documents, but I had never applied it to my own family. I''d gone to the introduction-to-genealogy course that morning in an attempt to bring all my Jackson relatives, dead and alive, together-if only on paper.
I wanted to gather them up and make sense of them if I could. The name gatherers Within one second of walking into the meeting room, I''d made my first major discovery: I am not alone. It''s not that I found my long-lost Jackson cousin sitting there. It was that I found so many other people, strangers to me, each on their own identical quest. I am not alone is a sentiment that resonates on many levels when beginning a journey of family history. In this case the numbers signified something surprising: forty-seven people had taken time off work or arranged a babysitter in order to come to the Boulder Public Library on a Tuesday morning, all to get help with their family trees. I was definitely not alone. It didn''t surprise Pat Roberts, of course.
As the secretary of the Boulder Genealogical Society and its director of education, Pat had witnessed what the rise of the Internet had wrought: a whole new generation of genealogy enthusiasts eager to Google their family trees. Once the province of orphans and aspiring Daughters of the American Revolution, the world of genealogical hobbyists is now exploding in popularity, thanks in part to the immense new repositories of data on the World Wide Web. That''s why Pat was here: to guide all of us in this journey-a journey that more and more people were making every day. How many people are actually doing genealogy? According to the official Directory of Genealogical and Historical Societies, Libraries, and Publications in the United States and Canada, there are twenty-two thousand genealogical and historical societies; twelve thousand genealogical and historical periodicals; and ten thousand public and private genealogical and historical libraries, archives, and collections. Looking through the directory, I found an average of thirty to fifty genealogical societies per state, divided by county, city, and som.