"You don't choose genealogy; it chooses you."

So said Tony Burroughs, the keynote speaker at the genealogy conference I attended Saturday March 15. And when he said it, something just clicked. Because that's exactly how it feels. Genealogy can be a long, hard, frustrating process, but it has fallen onto our shoulders to remember our ancestors and to preserve the knowledge we gain for future generations.

The conference, "Family Roots III: Where to Begin, How to Continue and Share" was sponsored by the Genealogy Federation of Long Island and was an all-day affair at Stony Brook University. My cousin April was the one who heard about it and suggested we go. Besides the keynote address, we were able to attend four lectures, given by various professional genealogists.

We attended one on tracing German ancestry and one on tracing Irish ancestry, both of which were somewhat helpful - learned some quirks about German names, places and records, and several Web sites to check out for Irish ancestry records.

After lunch we attended a lecture, "Odd(ities) and (Dead) Ends: Details and Quirks of New York Vital Records," which was a bit helpful but basically just made April and me lament the sorry state of early record keeping, at least on the state and federal levels. The last lecture of the day was entitled "Prove It! Evidence Analysis for Genealogists" which was interesting from the perspective of someone trying to do genealogy the right way, by gathering as much information and "proof" as possible about the people in my family tree. April and I also commisserated about how much it might cost to hire the presenter to give this same "prove it!" talk to the many people researching our family tree who frustratingly don't go this route.

All in all, I can't say I learned a great deal about genealogy that I didn't already know, but it backed up and supported a lot of what I already do, which was nice. And April and I were the youngest ones there by at least 15 years, so I kept getting mistaken for a student at Stony Brook, which was a nice ego boost.

Other notes from the day:
1. Our ancestors are not just names and dates, they existed in a place and time, and it's important to get as full a picture as we can, and in order to figure out the next step in our search, we have to understand that place and time in which they existed. Genealogy, sociology, history...it all ties together!
2. One of the presenters gave personal examples of people in her family that she has traced and to see how she went from clue to clue to clue was an echo of how I work and it was just nice to see someone else who not only is also working hard to piece together the puzzle but who enjoys the challenge as much as I do.
3. Indirect evidence can be proof!
4. Siblings are key! I become more and more convinced of that as time goes on...if your direct ancestor's records don't give you what you need to get to the next step, always go to the siblings!!
5. The Internet has opened access to so many genealogical records to so many people who otherwise would never be able to use them, but it is not the be all and end all of genealogy research...get offline!!
6. Everyone extolled the virtues of the Family History Centre in Plainview, so I will have to make a stop there at some point, just to see what it's all about.

Brick walls

Anyone who does enough genealogy will inevitably hit a brick wall. All the easy research has been done, even some where you had to dig a little deeper, and suddenly, your family line just disappears and seemingly ends. Obviously, they didn't. Everybody comes from somebody before them, but if there are no records going further back, then your brick wall might as well have just spontaneously come to life. In many cases (at least on my family tree), the brick wall seems to be the immigrant ancestor. You can find them on all the census forms. You can find them on a ship passenger manifest. But now you have to rely on foreign vital records for research, some of which might be in a language you don't understand, some of which might not exist at all. Irish genealogy seems to be the hardest for me, even though it's also the most recent.

Now, my Raynor side has been in America for so long that on some branches I hit brick walls way before the immigrant ancestor. One that is particularly frustrating is Jacob Raynor, my 5th great-grandfather. Jacob is the common ancestor that brought cousin April E. into my life, as she is probably even more frustrated than I am by this common brick wall of ours (and so I'm hoping her diligence in researching him will be very helpful!)

Various Raynor genealogists have listed this Jacob, husband of Rebecca Raynor, as one of two people - Jacob, son of Daniel, born 1771 or Jacob, son of Joseph, born 1754. Daniel Raynor moved upstate, and based on her research, April is convinced that Jacob, son of Daniel, is not our guy.

So does that make Jacob, son of Joseph, our Jacob? I have yet to find any proof linking a Jacob and Joseph together. April is intent on researching wills and estate listings, though the lack of organization of those records at Hofstra University make that task an enormous undertaking. Families often repeated names - Jacob and Rebecca had a son, Joseph, so Jacob's father could be a Joseph, although Rebecca's father's name seems to have been Joseph as well. Prior to 1850, census records only list heads of household and other vital records become harder to come by. We know Jacob was dead by 1850 (as Rebecca is listed as a widow in the census), but we don't know where he's buried. Jacob, son of Joseph, came from somewhere, but I don't know who it came from or the reliability of where that person got that information. Sometimes, it can get so frustrating that all you want to do is bang your head repeatedly against said brick wall.

When that happens, I put that branch aside. I focus on another branch, or on adding cousins or rounding out information on those I already have. And then I go back, hopefully with fresh eyes and a renewed spirit of enthusiasm - after all, half the fun of genealogy is the challenge in figuring out the puzzle, right? Sometimes you just need a new idea, approach the wall from a different avenue, and if you're lucky, you'll start to find chinks. Many brick walls can crumble and even be broken down.

I had successfully researched my Dauch family line back to a ship passenger manifest from 1845: parents Nicolas and Eva, and children Andreas, Marie and Thomas, my 3rd great-grandfather. I had come back to this family recently to try and trace my Dauch cousins, not go back further than Nicolas and Eva, but inputting a name into Ancestry brought up a family tree posted by a man in Germany, tracing Nicolas and Eva back three or four more generations. Are those names sourced? No. Are they reliable? I have no idea. But this new information puts a chink into the brick wall that was Nicolas and Eva, a place to go from and try and bring this wall down.

Inevitably, we'll all hit the ultimate brick wall, the one that will stand the test of time. But new information, reliable or not, can be found every day. People just starting to become interested in genealogy will share what they know. Sometimes you need luck, sometimes creativity and ingenuity, and sometimes you'll find that the thing you were banging your head against wasn't a brick wall after all.

Ancestor profile: Hulda Lindemann and the General Slocum disaster

Hulda Lindemann is not a direct ancestor of mine. She is the sister of my 2nd great grandmother, Augusta Lindemann Stutzmann, but her story, what I can discern of it, is an interesting though tragic one.

Hulda, like her parents and siblings, was born in Germany. She was born about July 1876 and emigrated to the United States about 1891. The family settled in Queens and Brooklyn, New York.

Her sister and my 2nd great-grandmother, Augusta, married very well, marrying Rudolph Stutzmann, a successful funeral home director and later founder and president of Ridgewood Savings Bank, and it's possible that prior to her marriage she worked as a servant but she married in 1899, so there are no records of her prior to her married life. There are records, though, that her sisters, including Hulda, found work as servants in other people's homes.

In 1900, Hulda was working as a serving for the Feldhusen family: patriarch George, a saloon manager; his wife Maria; and their son, Nicholas. They lived a couple blocks north of Washington Square Park in Manhattan.

On June 15, 1904, St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Little Germany chartered the General Slocum, a passenger ship, for an annual trip that included sailing up the East River before heading to Long Island for a picnic. They had been doing this for 17 years. From maps, it seems the Feldhusens lived just outside Little Germany, but being German immigrants, perhaps they were parishioners at St. Mark's, or had family and friends who were members. Whatever the case, Maria and Nicholas Feldhusen were among the more than 1,300 passengers (most of whom were women and children) who boarded the General Slocum that day, accompanied by the family servant, Hulda Lindemann.

Now, in June of 1904, Hulda was almost 28 years old. All three of her sisters and both her brothers were married (3 of those siblings being younger than her). Not judging, since I am 28 and unmarried, but in 1904, when all her siblings had managed to be married off, I have to wonder why Hulda was not. Her sisters had stopped serving others and started families of their own, but Hulda remained in the Feldhusen house. What was it that kept her there? Whatever it was, it killed her.

The General Slocum caught fire by 10 a.m. that day. Most of the lifevests and lifeboats on board were useless. Instead of running the ship aground (and possibly spreading the fire on shore), the captain of the General Slocum stayed on course. Most of the passengers were unable to swim. Besides those that succumbed to the flames, many drowned, and some were crushed when the upper levels of the ship collapsed. In all, an estimated 1,021 people died, with 321 survivors. Prior to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the General Slocum disaster was the worst loss-of-life disaster in New York City.

I've read Brooklyn newspaper accounts of the disaster in the days that followed it, and they are devastating - a child who watched his whole family die, a mother who can't find any of her children, countless fathers who spent a last normal day at work only to come home and hear what had happened to their wives and children. There's a list of victims' names, identified from their remains, and the names Maria and Nicholas Feldhusen (age 12) are on it. In the 1910 census, George Feldhusen is a widower and living alone.

There's no Hulda Lindemann on the list. Like with 9/11, a lot of the victims just weren't able to be identified. But her family knows that after that day, she never came home. Her parents, Casper and Eva, are buried in Lutheran Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens, and though Hulda has no resting place, Lutheran Cemetery is where many of the General Slocum victims were buried, and where a monument was erected in 1905 to honor the unidentified dead.

Mad props to Ancestry.com

The Internet is a wonderful tool for accomplishing any kind of research. Unfortunately, because you don't have to be an expert and have credentials to post information to the web, there is a lot of drek out there. A lot. The Internet has filled the world of genealogy with countless amounts of misinformation - someone posts unsubstantiated information, which is copied by somebody else, which is copied by someone else, and its soon taken as fact. It almost makes genealogy research harder. I'm all for helping other genealogists out, for sharing of family research, but I'm also of the belief that if they can't back that information up, then you need to before you use it and pass it along to others.

So, lots of drek - anybody with access to the Internet can post their family tree, substantiated or not. But there's a wealth of good, factual information, a lot of primary sources that the Internet has opened access to, and for that, it has made genealogy research worlds easier. It's just all about being a savvy surfer.

For me, my Internet genealogy goldmine has been Ancestry.com. I started with a free trial and was quickly hooked. Like the rest of the Internet, there are parts of Ancestry that shouldn't be taken at its word - anybody can post an unsourced, unresearched family tree on their site. But the Ancestry community page lets you meet and talk with others looking for the same information you are - both family members I met doing genealogy, Milt Haase and April Earle, found me through Ancestry. And people can post queries from all over the world, so if you're doing research on your family from an obscure town in Germany, there just might be another user from that town who can help you out.

But most important about Ancestry are the primary sources it has unlocked, and that information has been a vital part of building my tree. I won't list every record they hold, but I have personally found important and interesting information from the U.S. census (they have them from 1790-1930, with the exception of the 1890 census, which was destroyed by a fire); the Canadian census; ship passenger manifests; naturalization records; newspaper obituaries; birth, death, and marriage records from individual states such as North Carolina, Minnesota, Texas, and California; passport applications; and banking records. The records available on the site run the gamut from broad, universal records like the U.S. census to special, regional records for a particular town or time period.

Of course, you don't ever get something for nothing. You have to pay to get access to Ancestry, and there are plans based on what records you want access to...full access to the site is somewhat pricey, but for someone like me who uses the site practically every day and who uses more than census records, it might be worth it to pay that price.

I don't think Ancestry is the only pay site out there with this wealth of information, either, but its the one I use and the one I love. Two snaps to them for making my research so much easier and restoring my faith in the Internet as a viable research tool.

Genealogical mystery: When did John Horgan die?

I have in my possession the clipped obituary of my 3rd great-grandfather, John Horgan. It reads: "On April 10, John Horgan, beloved husband of the late Julia Murphy and father of Mary E. Gorry, native City of Cork, Ireland. Funeral from his late residence, 352 E. 16th St., on Sunday, April 12, at 2 p.m."

The clipping is helpful in many regards - lists his late wife along with her maiden name, lists address, lists where he was born, lists date of death. Doesn't list year of death. Leaves out that one very important detail. And it's very, very difficult to find a death certificate without that bit of information.

The clipping is of that one obit, too small to show what newspaper it came from much less what date it ran. I let it slide for a little while, before I finally put my Nancy Drew cap on and decided there was just too much information there, too many clues, to just give up on ever knowing the date.

I went with the obvious first: he had to have died after 14 Aug 1890, because that's when his daughter Mary was married, and in the obit she's listed with her married name. Going a step further, I realized it listed his funeral as being *Sunday*, April 12. April 12 only falls on that day of the week every couple of years and luckily my genealogy program, Personal Ancestral File, has a date calculator on it. Starting with the year 1890, April 12 falls on a Sunday in the years 1891, 1896, 1903, 1908, 1914, 1925, 1931, 1936, 1942, and 1953. Ten years is certainly much more doable than 60.

But could I narrow it down even further? I decided to flip the obituary over and see what was written on the other side of the newspaper page.

It happens to be a headline: "Griffo beats William in fight between 'Kids.'"

A Google search turned up the information that Young Griffo was an Australian boxer who came to the U.S. in 1893 and was pretty much retired by 1911, dead by 1927. That left me with the possible years of 1896, 1903, 1908, or maybe 1914. Looking for the date of the actual fight turned out to be next to impossible, partly because I didn't know the exact name, Kid Williams (not William), that Young Griffo was fighting. But 4 years is a much easier search than 10.

As it turns out, sending away for a death certificate to the Municipal Archives still proved fruitless and I think the one time I traveled there myself there were still too many microfilmed records to scroll through (I was looking for other records as well and after a few hours, my head feels like its going to explode and I just have to go home, to continue the search another day.) It was my father who actually got his hands on the death certificate and I don't think I ever asked how he found it. But even though my legwork proved to be unnecessary, it also proved to be correct.

John Horgan died on 10 April in the year 1908.

Worlds apart, but part of the same family: pooling information with the gene pool

At home, I can talk genealogy with my grandmother and my father. That's about it. They're the only ones who get my excitement over some new genealogical discovery. My friends just look at me like I have two heads. And you can discuss genealogy on message boards and stuff, but it's likely that no one's really going to share your excitement unless the information you're gushing over is info that concerns them, too (my father tries, but unless I'm jumping up and down over something I discovered about his side of the family, he's not too invested in sharing my excitement...)

But chances are, you're not the only person researching your particular tree. And that's where discovering long-lost relatives comes in. My Raynor side of the family is up to the gills in long-lost relatives - they're easy to find because the Raynors have their own genealogy association you can join. They're not cousins, they're not second-cousins, and more often than not they're not even third cousins - sometimes, the relationship you share goes so far back, you really can't even consider yourself family. Except that you both call Edward your 9th great-grandfather. Which can't help but kind of make you feel like family anyway. Especially when one of you has a copy of a will or a family Bible that lists relatives that pertain to you both. Or when her great-great-grandmother saved and gave her photos of cousins that are your direct ancestors. So these relatives can be a valuable resource. But it can also be nice to just get to know them as "cousins" and as people.

Two examples for ya: about 7 months ago, I was contacted by Milton H. from Georgia. Milton is 75 years old and my 2nd cousin 3 times removed. We were both researching Barbara Reinhardt Haase, born in New York in 1841, my 4th great-grandmother. He sent me a number of very nice e-mails, and we spoke on the phone several times. He was the one who shared with me that his cousin remembered my 3rd great grandfather, Edward Haase, and his fruit stand. He shared with me a number of stories, we exchanged the respective Haase genealogy we had gathered, and most valuable to me was a photo he possessed and shared with me of Barbara and 2 of her sisters, which must have been taken somewhere at the turn of the century.

I used to only focus on my own direct genealogy, but as I became frustrated by the number of brick walls I was hitting (do enough research and you will end up hitting a brick wall. Finally get through that one and you're guaranteed to find another), I decided to branch out my research into the cousin realm. So when Milt e-mailed me, I already had him on my tree! To put a voice to the name was nice, and his information on his siblings, aunts and uncles, and children, helped me in really filling in that Haase cousin line.

Around the same time I heard from Milt, I got an e-mail from April E., my 6th cousin once removed. We were both equally frustrated with the brick wall we had hit with Jacob Raynor, her 6th great-grandfather and my 5th. Because she lives in Baldwin, the next town over, we've been able to meet up several times to share info, talk, and strategize. What's nice in this situation is that we're close in age as well, and so can commisserate with being young researchers in a field that seems to be filled predominantly with people of an older persuasion. I don't think I've been much help to April in the sharing arena, as she is kind of an expert researcher, but she's been invaluable to me, sharing copies of wills and estate lists among other things. I think maybe I've been helpful though in being someone who gets her excitement over a find...or frustration over the lack of one. We went to a local archives to look over all the estate holdings they had microfilmed in the hopes of finding anything on Jacob or his wife Rebecca's family, only to both be horrified that not only were they not indexed but they were not in any kind of chronological or alphabetical order. She is much braver than me, as she is planning on going back. I still get a headache just thinking about that day.

But overall, the genealogy pool makes me think about the human family: we're all much more closely related than we think. There are people living in this world who are so different from me, who lead lives that are completely alien to me, and we are as closely related as 3rd or 4th cousins: a retiree in Germany who was a pilot for Nazi Germany during World War II and who spent several years in a Russian prison camp; young Mormons living and teaching in Hawaii; a young Southern Baptist girl who was home-schooled, only wears dresses, and doesn't believe in dating; we are worlds apart, but we're part of the same family.

Ancestor profile: Mary Ellen Horgan Gorry

Mary Ellen Horgan Gorry, my 2nd great grandmother, is one of those people for me. Despite several trips to the Municipal Archives in the city, I haven't been able to find her birth certificate, but my father found in my grandfather's basement a record of her baptism on 11 Aug 1873 at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in New York that gives her birthdate as 6 August that same year. As far as I can tell, she was born in New York. According to her father's obituary (also found in my grandfather's basement - packrat extraordinaire!), he was born in Cork, Ireland, and I think I have found a ship passenger manifest that shows Mary's mother, Julia Murphy, was also born in Ireland.



I have also had trouble finding Mary in the 1880 census - I have a theory that I've found them in Manhattan under the last name "Holgan" but that's still just a theory. As far as I can tell, Mary was an only child. Thanks to the destruction in a fire of the 1890 census, there are a lot of holes in a lot of family histories, something that continues to frustrate me in my research, but according to a marriage certificate, Mary married James Gorry on 14 Aug 1890 at Immaculate Conception Church. According to his death certificate, he was a brass finisher.



James and Mary had four children: Joseph Francis on 11 Nov 1891, twins Mary and Ellen on 4 Jun 1893, and Elmer Anthony (my great-grandfather) on 28 Jul 1896. Both of the twins died the same month they were born. James and Mary were married for only 7 years. After falling ill in October of 1897, he died on 1 Dec 1897 at about the age of 29, leaving Mary a 24 year old widow with two young sons. The cause of death is somewhat illegible on his death certificate, but its possible that one of the words is "pulmonale." "Cor pulmonale" is a problem with the heart resulting from a respiratory disorder. But the heartache was not over. Her son Joseph died of acute endocarditis less than a year later, 3 days short of his 7th birthday.



Back then, there was no Social Security. Women couldn't vote. Most women did not have jobs outside the home. Most 25-year-old widows would remarry, not only to ensure their own livelihood but to ensure the livelihood of their children. Mary was young; she could have had more children, started a new family. But she didn't.



I don't know where her father is all of this. I can't find him in the 1900 census. He died in 1908 and Mary is listed in his obituary. But in 1900, Mary and Elmer were living with her husband's family - her mother-in-law, Mary Corr Gorry; her two spinster sister-in-laws, Mary and Hannah; and her bachelor brother-in-law, Michael.



By 1910, the situation had changed. Michael, Mary, and Hannah Gorry had moved to Brooklyn and taken their 13 year old nephew Elmer with them. Mary Horgan Gorry had lost everything - her husband, her father, her 3 children, and I imagine it broke her heart to not have her son with her, but I think maybe she knew she couldn't hold down a job and care for her son, too. In Brooklyn, Michael was an ironworker and Mary and Hannah were dressmakers, maybe from home, maybe able to work and care for Elmer at the same time. In Brooklyn, Elmer was able to go to school, almost all the way through high school. In Manhattan, Mary was living with her cousins, the Hallorans, and working in a pencil factory.



During World War I, Mary corresponded with a soldier named R. Morrow, who from his photo (letters and photo courtesy, again, of my grandfather's basement), looks African-American. In 1920, Mary is still living with the Hallorans and working at a pencil factory. Ten years later, she and her cousin Jeremiah Halloran are still at the same address, but she was working as a launderer at a branch of Bellevue Hospital. By that same year, 1930, she was also a grandmother to Elmer Anthony Gorry Jr., my grandfather, living across the river in Queens. She died 31 Aug 1955 at the age of 82.



I imagine Mary as a strong woman - maybe the tragedies that plagued the early part of her life left her broken, but she survived. She did what she needed to do to make sure her son had his own chance at a good life. She didn't rely on a man to take care of her; she didn't remarry because she had to. I imagine she was probably very lonely at times too. Maybe James was the love of her life. Maybe she couldn't bear to marry again. Life was probably a struggle. But she had her son. And she had her two grandsons. And she lived to see two great-grandsons, one of which is my father. She inspires me when I feel like my own tragedies in life are too much - I have her blood in me, and I have her name, so maybe I have some of her strength, too.

Ancestor profile: Charles Haase

Sometimes, as our family trees grow and the information we find paints a fuller and more complete picture of individuals, there are certain people who jump out at us. As in all things, some people have more compelling stories than others. I offer these ancestor profiles as examples of the kinds of stories you can find, the kinds of people you can discover, and also to illustrate what resources I used and how I pieced their stories together.

Charles Haase is my 4th great grandfather, on my paternal grandmother's side. I first learned about Charles from his son's birth certificate. I went through a whole convoluted journey to paint his picture, but there was a lot of information there to be founded - I used U.S. census forms, I ordered his death certificate, I visited his grave where I learned he was a Civil War veteran, I got his pension records from the National Archives in Washington D.C., and successfully tried out the New Jersey archive system to get his marriage record.





Charles was born in Germany, in Saxony according to the 1870 and 1880 U.S. Census. Those census years as well as his marriage record put his birth somewhere around 1838-1839. According to his death certificate, he emigrated from Germany about 1855. I have a record in the 1860 census that I've gravitated toward as possibly being him living in Manhattan with a mother named Louisa but I can't prove it...





He's listed in the New Jersey Marriage Registry as marrying 20-year-old Barbara Reinhardt, daughter of John and Catherina, on July 12, 1861. They were married in New York but resided in Union Hill, Hudson County, New Jersey. His occupation was as a hatter.





When I visited his grave in Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn, I discovered that Charles was a Civil War veteran. According to Civil War records, he enlisted as a private on 22 September 1864, and was drafted into Company H of the 33rd Infantry Regiment New Jersey. He mustered out 1 June 1865 in Bladensburg, Maryland, same rank, company, and regiment.





Looking up Company H of the 33rd Infantry Regiment online for the time period of September 1864-June 1865, I found out it was part of the Army of the Cumberland. While Charles was with them, they took part in the occupation of Atlanta (Sept. 2-Nov. 15), Sherman's march to the sea (Nov. 15-Dec. 10), the siege of Savannah (Dec. 10-21), the Campaign of the Carolinas January to April, 1865, the advance on and occupation of Raleigh April 10-14, among others. The regiment lost during service 6 Officers and 72 Enlisted men killed and mortally wounded and 85 Enlisted men by disease for a total of 163. This immigrant hatter from New Jersey saw more of the country than he probably ever would have dreamed (and probably more bloodshed and gore in more time away from his young family then he ever wanted) during the war. He was only about 26 years old and besides his wife, he had a young daughter, Louisa, at home.





In 1870, Charles and Barbara were still living in Union, New Jersey and things appear to be back to normal - Charles is still a hatter, and besides daughter Louisa, they now also have a son, Edward (my 3rd great-grandfather). In 1880, Charles has moved his family to Brooklyn, and all but one of his six children are born. His mother-in-law is living with them, he is still a hat maker, and his son Edward is listed as being a "fruit huckster" (according to Milt Haase, another descendent of Charles, his cousin vaguely remembered Edward, and that he grew up to be a grocer, which became the family business).





Sadly, Charles Haase died on January 10, 1891 at the age of about 53. While his death certificate lists his cause of death as nephritis or kidney inflammation, more information is provided in the Civil War pension records for his wife from the National Archives. In December of 1890,Charles Haase applied for a pension on the grounds that he was unable to work due to "rheumatism, asthma, heart trouble, kidney troubles and several complications of diseases (that produce) general disability." He died a month later, after which his widow applied for a pension to support herself and her three minor children: Louis, Jacob Frederick, and Josephine.

Genealogical resources: cemeteries

I love cemeteries. Yeah, I know...weird doesn't even begin to describe it. Even before I developed an interest in genealogy, I used to love going to the cemetery with the Girl Scouts on Memorial Day to place flags on the graves of veterans. I find them to be very peaceful. And I remember getting really excited when I realized I had family buried in one of the cemeteries we went to. I should've realized then what my future held for me.

Anyway, cemeteries are another source of genealogical information, especially if you're lucky enough to live in the vicinity of ones where family members are buried. Sometimes, like in the case of your parents or grandparents, you already know where to find them - my mother is in St. Charles Cemetery in Farmingdale, my grandfather is in Holy Cross in Brooklyn, his parents are in Greenfield in Hempstead. Other times, a death certificate can provide this information - that's how I discovered family plots (and in one case, a mausoleum!) in Evergreen and Lutheran Cemeteries in Brooklyn.

But why visit the actual cemetery? From personal experience, being able to see and touch a family member's name on a headstone makes me feel closer to them and makes them feel more real. But headstones carry a lot of important information - other family members buried in the plot that you might not have known about or who you did know about but needed dates for. I visited my 4th great-grandfather's grave in Evergreen Cemetery and discovered he was a Civil War veteran when I saw it engraved on his headstone.

Sometimes there isn't a headstone, like in the Gorry family plot in Calvary Cemetery in Woodside. They were just too poor to afford one. But the cemetery office can still provide you with a list of names for most if not everyone buried there.

I have always found the cemetery offices to be extremely helpful. In most of the cases of my cemetery visits (Calvary, Holy Cross, Lutheran, and Evergreen are all in the same general area, so sometimes I would make a day of it and visit two or three in one trip), I had never been there before. Sometimes they need a name, sometimes they need a death date, but usually they can find your family member in their index and locate their burial site on a map for you.

I have had mixed results when trying to get the names of those buried in a plot with no headstone - for that, there is usually a fee. One cemetery (can't remember specifics but it was definitely one of the Catholic cemeteries...) wanted to charge me close to $100 for all the names. All he would tell me for free was how many people were in the plot and when they had died. But the people at Lutheran Cemetery were very helpful with that and the price was reasonable (I think maybe $20 for what turned out to be 4 or 5 names).

If you don't live near a cemetery where you have family, many cemeteries will give you this information over the phone - of course, policies and prices vary, but you can find a lot of that information, as well as phone numbers to call, online.

Genealogical resources: archived records

For the most part my ancestors came to New York and through the years, stayed in New York. Up until my dad and my maternal grandmother, those lines pretty much stayed in the vicinity of Queens-Brooklyn-Manhattan, which has made the New York Municipal Archives a great resource for me. I first found them online at http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/html/vitalrecords/home.shtml. Among their holdings are microfilmed birth (prior to 1910), death (prior to 1949), and marriage certificates (prior to 1930) for the five boroughs of New York City. The services aren't free, but the fees and wait period are extremely reasonable. I found many valuable records by sending a search request online - I discovered the names of once nameless parents, I found addresses by which to look up the family in a corresponding census record, I found birth dates and maiden names. But I didn't find everything I was looking for. As exciting as it was to receive a new record in the mail, it was equally disappointing to get a nearly empty envelope saying the search had been unsuccessful.

Well, I only live 40 minutes from the city. If I couldn't rely on others to do my search for me, I would do the search myself.

Open weekdays from 9-4:30 (1 on Fridays), the Archives are located in Manhattan right by the Brooklyn Bridge. For $5, you get access to a microfilm machine for the entire day. I went armed with paper, pen, and a list of names, dates, and places I was looking for and spent the whole day there on more than one occasion.

Sometimes I was unsuccessful. But sometimes, I had pay dirt. It's convenient and easy that the Archives have a search request online, especially for those people looking up New York records who don't live in the New York area. But for those who can get into the Archives to continue an unsuccessful online search, it can make all the difference. The search itself can be tedious - I think microfilm machines are hard on the eyes to begin with, and it's not long before your eyes start to cross and every birth certificate blurs into the next.

But doing the search yourself lets you work with variables - when you order a search online, you get to look for one name. In my case, maybe the name was of my ancestor James Gorry. But Gorry is a tricky name - on James' birth certificate, did they spell his last name Gorry, or was it one of the many versions I've seen on census forms and other documents - Gorey, Gory, Gaurry?

As it turns out, it was spelled Garry. And his birth certificate is issued to "male Garry." I never would have found that online.

Another person I couldn't believe I couldn't find was my great-grandfather, Elmer Anthony Gorry. Records that are more recent tend to be easier to find - record keeping in earlier years was spotty at best, but Elmer was born in 1896. That record was practically brand new! Each record type is indexed several different ways, and since I had his birthdate, I think that's the index I used to find him. Turns out he, too, was listed as a Garry, not as "Elmer Garry," but as "Anthony Garry."

There's another fee to print out any records you find and the whole experience is usually very taxing and exhausting, but the point is, birth, death, and marriage certificates can be an invaluable resource, not only to continue your search but to discover an interesting family story (like the marriage certificate I found that proved my great-grandmother was born only seven months after her parents were married), and sometimes you are lucky enough to be able to go that extra step in a search and that the chances of being successful by doing the legwork yourself may be worth it.

Genealogical resources: one person's junk is another person's treasure

When I started doing genealogy, it was just a hobby and it was just for fun. It had to be for fun, because I started a lot of my research in college, where my main resource, due to convenience and lack of funds, was the Internet. The great thing about the Internet is people can post information about anything from anywhere. The bad thing about the Internet is people can post information about anything from anywhere. What you find on the Internet can give you a place to start - a name to look for, a date to find - but there's a lot of bad and just plain wrong information out there, and it's meaningless unless you can back it up with facts.

A couple of years ago, my dad brought home his grandmother's death certificate and funeral bill, which he'd found in the basement of my grandfather's house (as it turns out, sometimes being a pack rat ends up being a good thing - you may save lots of useless junk but occasionally you might save something valuable and useful.) He also found lots of old photos, an old diary of one of his great aunt's (who, if she were alive today, I would take real issue with because, being sensitive about her age, she erased any dates and mentionings of her age in everything she owned!), a datebook his grandfather kept for the entire year before his father was born, and a 100-year old family Bible with the names of all the children and their dates of birth listed on the inside cover. These were facts. These were things that could back up and prove (or disprove) any information I found on the web.

The Internet is a good place to start, like I said. But unless you're using a site like Ancestry.com where you have access to primary sources, it's only good enough for the most part for speculative, "fun" genealogy. Family records and heirlooms like the ones that apparently filled my grandfather's basement for years can provide proof. And they can provide information with which to further your genealogical search - death certificates can give date and place of birth, parents' names and place of birth, mother's maiden name, addresses, places of burial. My father found clipped obituaries, letters written to my great-grandmother by a soldier pen pal of hers during World War I, a baptismal certificate for his grandmother, another funeral bill for another relative...family members may be holding onto resources and not even know it! For someone who isn't a genealogist, a funeral bill is just a bill. It doesn't matter if it's 100 years old. It's just junk taking up space. But everything is a clue, a part of the story. If you can find it, you can not only fill in pieces of the puzzle, you can find more spots that need pieces filled in.

The Wild, Wild East

They had to settle and build towns from scratch. There was nothing but wilderness and Native Americans, both of which could be inviting or could be hostile. 200 years later this landscape would be the wild, wild West but in 1634, when 10-year-old Edward Raynor sailed to America with a group of English settlers that included his uncle, his aunt, and his cousins, he was greeted by the wild, wild East.

Edward Raynor was the reason I became interested in genealogy. I remember seeing the actual family tree drawn out by Gerald Van Sise Raynor and other family historians, showing each branch through the years, from Edward's grandfather, all the way down to where my mother's name was scribbled. I remember having to do a family tree project in school and being told we should consider ourselves lucky to be able to get all our grandparents names and possibly any of their parents and thinking to myself that I wished I could go back further than 15 generations.

Anyway, Edward. My direct ancestor, the man who started it all. He was orphaned before he was 10, and sailed to America with his uncle Thurston and Thurston's family on the Elizabeth, landing in probably the Boston area. The European settlement of America was still very, very new. Jamestown had been founded only 27 years earlier, it had been only 14 years since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth on the Mayflower, and only 13 years since the first Thanksgiving. Thurston appears to have been a leader among his group, and like the wagon trains and prospectors who 200 years later would migrate west across the continent, Edward and his uncle spent the next 10 years migrating south, helping to found, build, and settle towns such as Wetherfield and Stamford, Connecticut, along the way. Sometimes I tend to romanticize it the way life in the Wild West is often romanticized, but I can't imagine it was an easy life - Thurston's first wife apparently died somewhere along the way and he remarried, water mills washed out and had to be rebuilt, lawlessness had to be dealt with, and Indian attacks occurred, such as during the 1636-1638 Pequot Indian War. Around 1644, now 20 years old, Edward was uprooted again when Thurston was among a group of English settlers who were granted land in the middle of Dutch territory on Long Island (present-day Suffolk County was English land, but Nassau County, which is where the group settled, was part of the Dutch colony). They settled what is now Hempstead, where they farmed, fished, and raised animals that grazed on the Hempstead Plains, the only prairie east of the Mississippi River. Thurston eventually got itchy feet again and moved his family east to Southampton, while Edward elected to remain behind, settling the Great South Woods on the South Shore of Long Island where he founded what would become known as Raynortown and eventually Freeport, which is where my family still lives today.

Edward Raynor was where it all started. But as I began to become a more savvy genealogist, realizing I could take other's work as a place to start but shouldn't rely on it as fact unless I could back it up, I realized there was still a lot of work to do. Primary sources needed to be found. The Raynor family had done a great job of tracing the Raynor family name, but what about the mothers? My name is Gorry but I am just as much a Raynor as I am a Gorry - to me, the female lines were equally as important. And I had three other grandparents whose genealogy I knew little to nothing about.

But I often still think about Edward, who had lost both his parents, spent three months on a ship crossing the Atlantic, then spent the next 10 years continually starting over, struggling to survive, exploring virgin territory, learning and creating and not even realizing that he was changing the landscape of history. I often think that those Europeans who came to America for whatever reason possessed a more adventurous spirit than those who stayed behind, and following that logic, that those Americans who headed West were more adventurous than those who remained on the East Coast. But at least in the case of the Raynors and those like them, there was no civilization to escape...the East was wild enough.

Why we tell the story

Genealogy, for me, is not just about gathering facts. It's not just a person's name and important dates. Genealogy is writing a story - where did a person come from, what did they do for a living, where did they live, who did they live with, getting the fullest picture possible and then trying to figure out their motivations for the things they did, putting their life in context of that time and place in history and wondering what their everyday life must have been like. Why did my great-grandfather leave Ireland? Why did my grandfather's grandmother, widowed in her 20s, never remarry? What was it like for Edward Raynor, not even 20-years-old, to settle in the heart of Dutch territory on Long Island with nothing but trees and streams and Native Americans around?

I'm a reader. I'm always interested in a good story, a well-rounded story, a true story (a story can be "true" even if it's fiction). And I don't believe in destiny, but I believe that everything that happens - every decision we make and every action we take - leads us to the point at which we find ourselves. I wouldn't be the person I am today or where I am today if not for everything my ancestors did and were before me. And I can honor them by remembering what those things were and helping future generations remember what those things were.

Becoming Nancy Drew

This blog is about genealogy, in case that isn't obvious. But I'll get to that soon enough.

When I was younger, I discovered my mother's complete collection of Nancy Drew books and being an avid reader, I devoured them. A detective who was a high school girl? How cool was that? I was quickly hooked on mysteries and soon decided I wanted to be a detective.

When I was a little older than that, my family went out to eat at a seafood restaurant in Freeport, the small village on the South Shore of Long Island where I lived. When I opened the menu, I saw the first page was the story about the founding of Freeport by a man named Edward Raynor. It immediately caught my attention and kept my interest because my mother's maiden name was Raynor. Coincidence? Could this Edward be a distant relative? How might they possibly be related? What would Nancy Drew do to solve this mystery?

As it turns out, this first case of mine would have made a very boring book, as the Raynor family, one of the first English families to settle Long Island, had already been extensively researched and my maternal grandmother, the keeper of our family tree, had given my mother all the information in a handy-dandy binder. Edward was an nth-grandfather. Mystery solved.

But my interest was piqued. And over the years, it only grew. And I soon realized that my Nancy Drew days, pathetic as they had been, were not over. What about my dad's family? Where had they come from? What was their story? And my mother's mother? Her dad was born in Ireland and claimed to have seen a leprechaun (a story that even today my superstitious Irish side is reluctant to entirely dismiss), but that's all I knew about her family. And what of these women who had married into the Raynor family - the Seamans, the Pearsalls, the Smiths - all early important Long Island families in their own right...what were their stories? The mystery was far from over. There was still a lot of work for Nancy Drew to do.

For me, doing genealogy is doing detective work. It's starting with names and places and photos and stories and looking for the facts to not only back them up but to connect the pieces of the puzzle. Geneology is like having a haystack full of needles, and not only looking for the individual needles, but also the threads to tie them together.

Since those beginnings, my family tree has grown many more branches, and I have become its keeper. But with each needle discovered, there's another one to look for. The mystery only continues to grow.

I'm not an actual detective. I'm just a lowly newspaper reporter. But turns out I get to be Nancy Drew after all.