Genealogy for beginners: Significance for seniors

What is genealogy? It is the study of our ancestors: our parents, their parents and all those who have gone before.

It’s not just about straining your eyes looking at miles of microfilm, flipping through old newspapers or musty legal documents and getting grimy hands from years of dust, it’s about rooting out those stories that bring your ancestral family members to life and seeing how they fit into history.

Genealogy is about finding clues, following a trail, discovering where your ancestors came from, how their world affected who they were, how they lived, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren — leading all the way down to you as the descendent.

“In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage — to know who we are and where we came from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning,” according to Alex Haley, author of “Roots.”

Searching your family’s past is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together, said Sheryl Curtis, a teacher at Chase County Schools in Imperial, Nebraska. She loves a good mystery, she said.

“My maternal grandmother used to take me with her every year to visit family graves on Memorial Day. She would always tell me how important it was to remember family — to not forget,” Curtis said. “It made an impact on me.”

She said she began tracing back her own family history in the early 1980s. “I just do it for myself. I’ve always been fascinated with history, and I really enjoy researching,” Curtis said.

She has traced her family back to the 1600s when they came to this country from Europe.

Curtis has found evidence during her search that she had family members who were involved in the French-Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the American Civil War where her family fought on the side of the north and World War I.

It can be interesting to find how past family experienced situations that can relate to events of today.

“My great grand uncle was drafted into the Army in July 1918 during World War I and sent to Camp Lee in Petersburg, Virginia, to an army base of 48,000 soldiers. The first case of the Spanish flu was admitted to the infirmary on Friday, Sept. 13, 1918. My uncle would become a casualty of this virus, never even making it to theater,” Curtis said.

As an example of where some information can come from, “the story about my great uncle was in a 1918 Albion, Nebraska, newspaper,” she said.

Click here to read the full article in our FREE Have the Time of Your Life section!