Holiday dinner table great genealogical resource | SCNOW

Frankie Liles says recent TV shows have made genealogy looks easy, which it isn’t.

You could say Pat Clark left no headstone unturned as she traipsed across an Augusta, Ga., cemetery 10 years ago looking for her maternal grandfather’s grave to fill in blanks on her family tree.

Her grandfather died in 1925 on the same day Clark’s mother was born, so he never got to meet his newborn.

Clark’s mother died in January 2001. On Mother’s Day that year, Clark felt the need to complete her mother’s story. Living in New York at the time, she and her husband went to the Georgia cemetery where relatives were buried and methodically started walking the rows of graves.

Eventually, near the end of a third day of looking and with the help of two curious cemetery workers, they found the headstone for Peter Merritt, her grandfather.

“I could not believe it. It had his name, the year he was born, the year he died and it had his wife’s name. Right next to him was his mother,” said Clark, who lives in Midlothian. She snapped photos.

“I shared it with my sisters and brothers that I found Grandpa. I was ecstatic about that,” said Clark, a retired assistant principal turned professional genealogist.

Tracing one’s family history can be rewarding but also time-consuming and emotional. It can unearth shushed family secrets, but also foster new relationships with cousins you didn’t know, and even offer practical information, such as insight on illnesses that might run in the family.

The Thanksgiving holiday, which typically brings together generations of families, can be an ideal time to start interviewing relatives for a genealogy project.

Start with the oldest person there and get them talking, said Frankie Liles, a local researcher, writer and genealogist, and governor-at-large of the Virginia Genealogical Society.

“Ask, ‘Who is the oldest ancestor you can remember’ or ‘Do you know who your great-grandparents were, and where were they, and what can you remember about them,’” Liles said.

Keep paper and pencil handy, preferably use any of the family group or pedigree charts that can be found online to take notes.

“Always, always write in pencil on these charts because you are going to change stuff all the time,” Liles said. “Just get them talking, and if you can do it in front of a video camera or tape recorder, even better.”

NBC’s “Who Do You Think You Are?” and the PBS series “Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” shows that trace family histories of celebrities, have helped fuel interest in genealogy, Liles said.

They also make genealogy looks easy, which it isn’t, said Liles, who has spent more than 20 years searching her history, which dates back to the 1600s in Henrico County.

Clark’s trip to Georgia was to get to original source records. With the dates from the headstones, she was able to go to the Georgia vital records office and get death certificates.

“From the death certificates, I was able to get husbands or wives, different names that I didn’t have,” Clark said. She also searched the local telephone book for the last name Merritt, an uncommon name in Augusta. About a half dozen were listed. She started calling, asking if any knew of a family relation to Peter Merritt. Two of them were relatives, she said.

In doing searches, expect to find some surprises, perhaps some unwelcome, such as illegitimacy or adoption. Often, relatives took in children of widowed or deceased relatives in unofficial adoptions.

“Many folks start out and think they know everything about their family in the 20th century, and they get some surprises,” Liles said. “People should be prepared for this and try not to judge their history but to incorporate it and do their entire family history and bring it forward. Sometimes I think it can be like a healing.”

Although 10 years ago Clark had to travel hundreds of miles to confirm family information, today it’s possible to find a significant amount online on free and fee-based websites.

Millions of records have been digitized by state libraries, historical societies and organizations such as FamilySearch International, the nonprofit organization sponsored by the Mormon Church, and by Ancestry.com, which offers a paid membership service.

Census records, records of births, deaths and marriages are the obvious places to begin looking, but there are collections of probate records, christenings, pensions, military records, land records and more online as well.

“In the past five years, more has been out there than ever before,” Clark said.

FamilySearch’s free website, www.family

search.org, has more than 2.5 billion records online, said spokesman Paul Nauta.

“We are producing about 160 million new images a year, from microfilm conversion and new digital acquisitions,” Nauta said. “What that means to patrons is that we are publishing 30 to 50 million new records a month.”

Those records are from all over the world. The organization’s paid staff is supplemented by an army of about 100,000 volunteers who help. Some are provided with digital or traditional microfilm cameras, then fan out to capture images of records. Others transcribe documents and index them.

“We are generating more digital images of historic records than our core of volunteers can index in a year,” Nauta said. They could easily use another 200,000 volunteers, he said.

Clark said she does volunteer transcribing and indexing of historical records for Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org.

“That’s how all that information gets out there,” Clark said. “We just sit there and type all of this information in, or scan it in, or whatever, so that the most information we can get out there, we do.”

Clark, Liles and numerous other experts and organizations help with genealogical searches. There are local and state genealogy groups, archivists at libraries, and historical societies that can help. The Library of Virginia and the Richmond Public Library occasionally offer free genealogy programs.

Software, ranging from basic programs to those that will create a book from the information, can help organize it.

Inevitably, family researchers will hit a wall and not be able to trace any further. In the South, many county records, for instance, were burned, lost or pilfered.

“Southern genealogy is very difficult because of the lack of records, and we have to piece together so much evidence … to make the lineage work,” Liles said.

“The stories of the families … are so poignant and wonderful, it’s worth the work. And you are reading real history, history that you did not learn in school.”