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The Family Tree Puzzle

Why bother with family history?

Socrates’ guiding rule was, “Know Thyself.” These words are of eternal significance. No better advice has ever been given. When one begins to explore this dictate, it leads to profound understandings about ourselves. To better understand ourselves we need to know where we came from. Studying the history of our ancestors contributes in a big way to our sense of family and belonging.

We all—young and old—enjoy a good puzzle. And, nothing off the store shelf can match one’s own family history for challenge like finding the pieces to one’s family picture. My family’s annual Christmas picture puzzle was always completed with the enthusiastic help of my mother, now recently deceased. While hunting for pieces we often talked ‘family’ with her. An enriching and satisfying time together.

Unlike the store-bought puzzles, the pieces to our family history are not finite in number. The family puzzle is far more complex. It contains surprises, mysteries, intrigues and, perhaps, even the odd villain we’d rather not talk about. Names, dates and places of birth are only the bare bones of our family members—living and dead. The stories surrounding these individuals add flesh to these skeletons. The stories are the stuff that make us real people.

Learning about the lives of our parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and more distant ancestors makes genealogy a fascinating, very personal hobby. It is a gift that we can give to family members not yet born as well as satisfying the curiosity of the living.

Parents have a responsibility to educate and foster family history interest in children. Our sense of self, who we are and where we may be going derives, in large part, from our identification with family. Besides inherited physical and psychological traits, there are often other attributes that seem to repeat. Patterns exist in families. A number of branches of my family are made up mainly of farmers, another branch mainly doctors and yet a third, teachers. A big common denominator is our immigrant-to-Canada roots.

Mothers, aunts, uncles and, particularly, grandparents, are in a privileged story-telling position. They are able to share the anecdotes that put flesh on the bones of long gone family members making them real people in the minds of our children.

So, how does a busy parent gather family history information? How can households where both parents are working full or part-time, fit this activity into an already overloaded day? Some suggestions:

1. The computer is basic. And, you must purchase family history software. The Latter-Day-Saints provide software that can be downloaded free from the net. Two other excellent software providers are: Legacy and Family Tree Maker, which may be purchased for $100 or less in business supply stores such as Staples or Future Shop. Such software makes information gathering much, much easier than recording data, photos and personal histories by hand into scrapbooks. It makes editing easy—and editing is an essential task. Today’s young people are very computer savvy and able to navigate within such software, not to mention the Internet generally. So, put them to work on the hunt for ‘What really happened to our cousins, the Dicks, on the Titanic before it sank in 1912?’
2. Internet based genealogy resources are growing at a rapid rate. One of the fastest growing sites is Ancestry.com. Recently, its Canadian equivalent, Ancestry.ca, which contains a fully indexed census for 1911. Both of these sites require payment to access in-depth data. But there are many other sites with bulletin boards where you can find other people around the world who may be looking for info on the same family you are researching. There exists a worldwide collection of three billion records and four billion names to be explored. I have made connections with many people around the world via such sites and with whom I share data.
3. The Family Album. Nearly all families have these with their share of old, cracked and yellowing black and white photos. Have these scanned and added to your family history software. Then, once saved and backed up on a CD or on a USB memory stick, you not only will have saved precious photos and data for posterity, but are now also in a position to share with other family members— who do or do not own a computer. Genealogy software enables you to create all kinds of family, ancestor, descendant charts and reports (with stories and photos) for printing.
4. Most important: Pick the brains of the elder members of your family before it is too late. Their long-term memories are often pretty accurate—and they have stories to tell! Once these wonderful family historians die, so too do their stories and hard facts. After a grandparent has passed away a common lament is “I wish I had spent more time talking with and recording what they said!”

Unlike the Christmas picture puzzle, the family puzzle is ongoing. It will always be a work in progress. But, if you like puzzles and enjoy history, family, both the living and the dead, can provide fun, challenge and the satisfaction of knowing your roots and seeing yourself in the broader scheme of things. This is the insight of which Socrates spoke.