My grandfather sold his business and retired in 1976. He and his wife, my grandmother, retired to a life of peace and quiet at the lake. It seems that golf wasn’t enough to keep Grandma occupied, however, so they soon bought an RV and began taking long trips together. My sister and I were treated to a couple of vacations with them — Dogpatch USA, Tom Sawyer’s “hometown”, Royal Gorge. They developed a taste for the snowbird lifestyle, relocated to Texas and Arizona for the winter months. Eventually, they started taking trips to the Appalachian region, as well.
I’m not certain when Grandma picked up genealogy as a hobby. Those Appalachian trips — Kentucky, especially — were research ventures. She would come home and regale us with information about new relatives she had identified, but I was still too young to pay much attention. I do recall her stories about visiting much-distant cousins in the “hollers” of Kentucky, sitting on front porches of the oldest “grannies” she could find. I think those stories are what first caught my attention, and I began to listen to her reports of latest discoveries.
This was still the late 1980s, and her research was done by exchanging actual letters, and by spending hours scanning microfiche films is hopes of finding the next vital clue. She spent many more hours organizing her information by typewriter. By the mid-1990s, she was asking me for information about using computers for genealogy. I didn’t know enough to give her good answers, I’m afraid. I had never heard of online research — Ancestry.com was founded in 1997, and FamilySearch in 1999. I bought a computer program and transcribed all of her reports, in hopes of saving her some typing time, but she never adopted it herself.
The exercise gave me an up-close-and-personal look at her discoveries, though, and I began to take a real interest. Now, when I visited, *I* was asking *her* what she had learned recently. We had a lot of good conversations about long-dead relatives, while the living relatives tried not to look too bored.
Eventually, time and old age put an end to their travels, and Grandma turned to wrapping up her research. She published her first book in 1991, generously giving Grandpa top billing on the list of authors, recognizing his support of her work along the way. Three more books would follow, but by the year 2000, she was beginning work on downsizing her possessions, and she eventually threw out all of the research documentation she had created. If the family history were to continue, it would be my project now.
It wasn’t until several years after she passed away that I took up research of my own, and that’s when I made a horrifying realization. All four of her books were chock-full of facts, figures, dates, and stories, but there wasn’t a single source citation to be found anywhere. Her files were long gone, as well.
For years now, I’ve conducted my own research, using Grandma’s books as sources themselves, just as if I had found them on a library shelf. It’s a valid technique, I think, but I have always felt that it doesn’t do justice to her work and the inspiration she passed on to me.
So my next project will be to validate and verify the research she published in those four books. Hopefully, I’ll find her conclusions to be solid and justified. Perhaps I’ll gain a clue to break down the brick wall that always stymied her. Possibly I’ll discover somewhere she went astray, and will upend everything we think we know about our family line. I’ll never know until I try, right?
I’m using the blog category Legacy to journal my progress, if you’d like to follow along.
Here’s to you, Grandma Julia (Edwards) and Grandpa Jim Laughlin.