Researchers delved into the past last weekend, beginning Saturday at the Indian River Genealogy Society’s second annual Family History Expo, held at First Presbyterian Church’s McAfee Hall. Their curiosity peaked, many families continued to dig a little further into their roots on Sunday at the Indian River County Main Library’s Archive and Genealogy Center.
GIGs or Genealogy Interest Groups from specialized branches of families were on hand at the Expo, coming from Ireland, Sweden, Italy, Poland, Italy, Ireland, and Germany to help research European family roots.
An Ancestry.com YouTube video, Barefoot Genealogist by Christa Cowan, played in a continuous loop, offering basic tips to people interested in beginning the daunting task of learning about their family history.
Top tips included:
• Work backwards, starting with what you know about parents and grandparents
• Scour public records for certificates, cemetery records and news archives, and
• Check for existing family trees on such websites as Ancestry.com and the free FamilySearch.org.
One of the most important tips, according to Cindy Hineman, IRCGS board member, is to not get hung up on spelling.
“They asked our ancestors if they could read and write but no one asked them if they could spell,” Hineman explained.
Pam Cooper, supervisor of the Library’s Archive and Genealogy Center, has helped many people research their ancestry and can attest to the difficulties involved with spelling issues.
“There are 43 different ways to spell the name Smith alone,” she said. “One time I found that the census taker in this little town in Wisconsin had just come from Wales. I was wondering why all the German names were totally screwed up when I was doing my research.”
Cooper said genealogy is about finding connections and she worries about future generations being able to discover family stories. For while technology has made research simpler, many tools of the past are fading away.
“Most people are being cremated so there aren’t cemetery records, and many papers no longer carry full obituaries,” she explained.
Attendee Donna Nightingale acknowledges that technology would have benefitted her search, but she said that 40 years ago she and her husband did it by getting into their pop-up camper and traveling to their families’ hometowns. The search was a fun adventure, shared with their four children, and she believes that those family research trips inspired her children’s love of genealogy.
“It was all about the history,” said Nightingale. “I had no knowledge whatsoever, since my mother and grandparents were gone, so when I would find out something it was like finding some magic.”
“To know who you are, you have to know about where you came from,” said IRCGS President Bob Satola. “It is important to find out the why’s of the reasons your family did what they did.”
Cooper tells people that genealogy is a great way to learn more than just family history; giving them the tools to learn how to delve into court, government and church records in library archives.
“It’s about our lives,” she added. “It’s a challenge, a mystery and people want to know about their past connections.”