Members of the Indian River Genealogical Society spent the weekend helping others discover their roots and learn the techniques needed to become top notch ancestry detectives. Volunteers united novices with experienced genealogists and highlighted the extensive resources available to them at the inaugural Family History Expo, held at First Presbyterian Church last Saturday.
“We have one of the top ten best research facilities in the nation for a community of this size at the Indian River County Main Library’s Genealogy Department and Archive Center,” said Carol Robinson. The department is headed by historian Pam Cooper.
“First we make sure that they know what we have available and show them their options for online resources,” said board member and webmaster Bob Inhoff. Members have created a searchable database of local cemetery records and an index of obituaries published in local newspapers dating back to 1913.
Marcia Eyberse showed ways to find family tree sites already begun by other family members and demonstrated how to merge information.
Others shared their own stories of genealogy and “GIGs,” short for Genealogy Interest Groups. Country of origin GIGs at the Expo were represented from Poland, Germany, Ireland and Sweden.
“We’re all members of the Swedish GIG,” said Diane Macgowan at one booth. “We have been meeting at the library for 10 years and have a pretty close to 100 percent success rate in researching family members.”
To track family members Mcgowan says they need names, birth dates and generally the area of a country they came from.
“We have had some really good experiences,” she said. “About a year ago a woman came to me and said she was planning a trip to Sweden. Her two grandparents came from Sweden and we were able to find where her grandmother came from, as well as found her grandmother’s family and church.”
By the time she was ready for her trip, relatives in Sweden were already organized to meet and greet her.
“After my parents were deceased I began thinking about all the old stories and looking at the grandkids and asking what kinds of stories will I be able to pass on to them,” said board president Bob Satola, who became interested in his family history about seven years ago. “At first it was just an interest in the family tree but you get into it more.”
He visited Ohio and Pennsylvania to see the hometowns of his grandparents and says, “It was very sobering, very warming.” He has also found that there is some humor to getting to know your family’s past.
“My aunt was a genealogist back in the ‘70s and she came back and told us, ‘Well, I found a horse thief and someone who was hung,’” Satola said with a laugh. “Everybody’s got some of those stories – the ones that have never been told in the family.”
Friends Deborah Burnett and Linda Sullivan were on opposite ends of the genealogy research spectrum.
“I started at the ‘baby step table’ they have here because I know that I need to get organized,” said Sullivan. “It’s fun to look on the web but today they taught me how to categorize things better.”
“I live, eat and breathe genealogy,” said Burnett, who has extensively researched her family.
Over at the beginners table, Harri-Ann Irwin said, “I think this fair is great. My mother’s family was really into genealogy and we were too young to be interested. Now I want to know more and they have really helped me.”
The Indian River Genealogy Society meets at 9:30 a.m. the second Tuesday of the month, September through May in the first floor conference room of the IRC Library.
