Texas is not Somewhere Else

My interest in family history started in 1957 in my 6th grade class in the four room school in a small mining town in Colorado. Our teacher introduced a segment of World Geography with the assignment that we should go home and ask our parents where our family had immigrated from to become residents of the United States of America. Originally our families were all from somewhere else, we were told. I volunteered that my family was from Texas and quickly learned that Texas did not qualify as somewhere else in the world view my teacher was trying to foster.

During Geography the day after we received this assignment, our teacher pulled down the big map of the world, which was on a retractable roller like a window shade, and called us one at a time to the front of the room, where we would get to hold the pointer and point out our ancestral home. I felt pretty confident that I would get more use out of the pointer than anyone in class, with the possible exception of Dorothy, who was somehow distantly related to me. I was more right than I knew.

Each 6th grade class member, I believe there were eight of us that year, went to the board took up the pointer and pointed to either Italy or Poland. Some pointed to both Italy and Poland, like my friend Gloria whose mother was Italian and father Polish. Then it was my turn. I pointed out England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Germany, and France. I was ready to explain that we were also Pennsylvania Dutch, but that did not mean Holland. It meant Germany.

My two minutes of fame was marred, however, when the whole class and the nosy fifth graders across the room started laughing. They thought I had made a good joke of the lesson. How could you be all those things? We all only had two parents, after all. I sheepishly returned to my seat, as our teacher took the beloved pointer from my hand and shushed the room. Now it was Dorothy's turn and I knew that her work with the pointer was going to clarify my intention. Dorothy was shy and quiet, but she was never any body's fool. She skillfully stopped the pointer on England, handed the pointer back to the teacher and sat down.

What I learned that day in World Geography is that if you are not clearly from one or two cultures you are nobody. I decided that day to find out how I had really come to be born in San Antonio, Texas and living in Colorado, U.S.A. I began pestering my maternal grandmother for information. A woman who loved history and a good story, like my paternal grandmother and all three of my great grandmothers, she was glad to oblige. I was eleven years old.

My original intent was to learn from what country and when our family arrived in North America. I had no idea then, or for many years after, that that intent would take me on a decades long circuitous journey through American History and some world events. In the earliest years, I diligently wrote down the stories, the names and dates, my grandmothers told me. Later in my college library, I searched through books and old newspapers for info on the surnames I knew. As a young mother my "time away" was not to go shopping at the mall, but to drive to the local LDS library and spend an afternoon looking at micro-fische images of old census records, court, marriage, birth and death records. I made trips to the Texas State Library and the Tennessee State Library part of my family's summer vacation. I searched through dusty court house records in Tennessee and Georgia on girl trips with a best friend who shared my interest. I sent off request for death certificates and waited weeks for something to arrive in my mail box, and little by little pieces fell into place on some of our family lines.

A new day dawned in genealogy with the advent of the Internet and the speed at which information can be shared. I may have found one or two pieces of information a year prior to the development of Internet research. Now I might run into the documentation of several generations in the click of a wrist. Both good and bad for researchers, the Internet can connect us to other researchers on the same family lines with good documented information, but can also proliferate misconceptions and errors of information and allows years of research and public records to be hijacked and charged for by organizations whose search engines are cumbersome and often ineffective. There are ways around all that; ways to protect against error. Copyright 2008 Susie Williams

Watch this blog for more information and links. Questions or comments email me at itsfamilyresearch09@gmail.com.

This post is excerpt from an unpublished book of my family history. This material is copyrighted and may not be used without credit to the writer.