Family Echos

Mabel Gould, my mother's mother's mother

I started a new obsession this week...

There is a nifty little website called FamilyEcho.com, designed to let you input your family tree with as little or as much detail as you like.  The fields are simple, the method, straightforward.  The interface lets you see one family group at a time, which keeps the tree from looking cluttered, and allows you to export your results to other geneology programs, excel spreadsheets, etc.

So I've started a family tree.

Which is ironic, considering I'm not married, have no children, and am not closely in touch with most of the people ON this tree.  Actually, so far, the tree ends with my siblings.  But for some reason I find it fascinating to see how lives have been tangled and untangled throughout the past century.  This week I learned things I never knew... things I probably would have known if my relatives tried to keep in touch or my parents shared more of their history... but that's beside the point.  Through the power of public records, facebook and the internet at large, I now I know my grandfather's army service number for World War II.  I now know he had a brother and a sister, both formerly living within 90 minutes of where I'm typing. I now know that my great-uncle-in-law took over as COO and President for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (Google Allen Emery, that's the one).  And I found out that my father's brother's middle name is Judson... poor bastard.

Of course, my father's first name is Harold, which is probably worse (no offense, Grandpa).  No wonder he goes by Doug.

The part I didn't expect from this process is feeling like a voyeur.  A peeping tom.  How much am I prying into another soul's private history?  What should be politely ignored and what should be aired out for all to see?  Should I include my brother's brief marriage to a cheating wife?  Should I make contact with second cousins in Chelmsford who don't know I exist?  Should I rely solely on public record? 

Families with a deep sense of history (ahem...Eliza) have most of these stories and issues settled before they begin, because they were passed down through family gossip, letters, and artifacts.  Larger-than-life relatives become major characters in the tales told to their children's children, and they take on a life of their own.  My grandfather drafted on his wedding day... my grandmother finding out her father was alive...and remarried...50 years after he was presumed dead... the reverence in my Dad's voice when he talks about Uncle Dick, for reasons I don't understand.  There's so much history to discover...and so much star-power to be lost when they turn out to be regular people who owned houses, joined the military, started a feud. 

I have precious few artifacts... and the stories are convoluted, confusing.  I can feel the choices made when my dad decides not to share various answers to my questions, the filtering of information not open for judgment.  (How did he break his knuckle so many years ago?)  It's frustrating knowing you have to recreate the wheel when there's a perfectly good 10-speed nearby.  But alas, I have a stubborn streak that ironically, travels through maternal channels.  And I'm also learning a lot because of it.  Did you know you can lookup the birth dates and death dates via the social security website?  Talk about CONVENIENT.  :)

So a toast to my new project.  To relatives loved and lost, to those still living, and to those who don't know I'm snooping into their land ownership records.  :)