On Genealogy—Lessons in Finding Your Past

by Joan M. Kay
from The Kaitlyn Mae Book Blog


Your ancestors made history.

Wherever your folks hail from—Virginia, Jamaica, England, China—they were the very fabric of that culture. They belong in a history book, somewhere, somehow. For figures such as George Washington or Napoleon Bonaparte, scholarly biographies are easy to come by and are worthwhile reading for any student of history. But what about your ancestors? In which book do you read about their contributions to history? Unless you are a descendent of, say, Patrick Henry or Thomas Jefferson, you won’t find one.

You must research and display your family’s history yourself. This can be done in the form of a novel, or alternatively, a (non-fiction) thesis, or study of a town or county where your family lived. Your non-fiction work will prove invaluable to many future generations of family historians, while your fiction will provide pleasure to history lovers everywhere, though will be thoroughly distrusted by other fact-searchers, and rightfully so.

On the fiction side, if you’ve read or seen Alex Haley’s Roots, you’re familiar with the concept of putting obscure ancestors into history and letting them roam free there. It’s a fascinating hobby. And for the late Alex Haley, an extremely lucrative one—though the rest of us might just have to settle for fascinating, which is more than fine with me.

To that end, I break genealogy down into two labors of love, first assembling your family tree and then—using fiction or non-fiction as you prefer—placing the family members in history.

The latter is my current passion, though the former, a family tree, is where we must start.

As an Afterword to my novel, God’s Mountain, McLaughlin’s Valley, I show how family research led to the creation of two of MY most beloved characters in history, Hugh McLaughlin and Nancy Gwin.

Never heard of them? Until 1999, neither had I.

I’ve been tracing my McLaughlin ancestors for over a decade now and a lot of those years I have literally been at it as a full-time job, researching for the novel based on my Revolutionary War ancestors. Quite a bunch they were, enough to convince me to write a novel, something I had no experience in. But we muddled along together and finally managed to get the amazing story of Hugh and Nancy McLaughlin out there. It’s the story that won my heart; that I had found, piece by piece, long forgotten on courthouse shelves and archivists’ microfilm.


Your Ancestors—They’ve apparently gone missing… So how do you find them?

Primary Sources

The U.S. Census—your most basic search, and sometimes your most fruitful.

For research on American ancestors, your first stop in genealogy should be census records. Microfilmed reproductions of the U.S. Census (taken every ten years since 1790) are stored at the National Archives in Washington, DC; at Archives repositories across the country; through inter-library loan at your local public library (ask your librarian for help; she’s a gem, I assure you), through LDS Family History Libraries, and online genealogy services, such as Ancestry.com, which offers an invaluable search engine to locate your ancestors in the census records, though you must pay a fee to access their online census images.

Privacy laws govern the availability of census records. They are not available to researchers until more than 70 years after the enumeration, so the most recent records you may research are from 1930. If you have information on your ancestors from before 1930, you’re in excellent shape to begin your search. If you can, always begin with 1930. Don’t skip back to 1870 because your great-aunt May swears that your great-great grandfather Alphonse lived in New York, New York then—find out for yourself. (If you’ve yet to reach your pre-1930 ancestors, I’ll deal with your particular stumbling block in a future column.)

Different challenges and opportunities come along with each decade’s census. The enumerations of 1790, 1800, and 1890 are generally unavailable for many areas; 1810 to 1840 include the names of only heads of households, not individual family members. All you will find in these years on dependents is an age range (0-5 years, 6-10 years, etc.) and a designation of male or female. Beginning in 1850 each family member was enumerated separately, with name, age, race, relation to head-of-household, etc. Records are broken into counties and usually several counties within the same state will appear on each roll of microfilm produced by the National Archives.

In research for my current novel-in-progress, about the Civil War, I am relying heavily on census records from 1860 in Pocahontas County, Virginia (now West Virginia). Useful to me in the 1860 records is the listing of occupation, schooling, and worth of personal and real property of each citizen. You may also find there the boundaries of neighborhoods, which is particularly useful because, historically, many families stuck close together, and the mother of the Smith family next door to your Jones relations may actually be that long-lost aunt you’ve been trying to find. Even unrelated but close neighbors hold clues to your family’s history. For example, neighbors very often emigrated together in groups. If your family were to suddenly disappear from an area and prove hard to find elsewhere, a quick search of their previous close neighbors may give you a clue to where they have moved, or moved from.

So, using a “family group sheet” to keep your records on (download available at http://www.ancestry.com/save/charts/familysheet.htm) and starting with the 1930 enumeration, document carefully (roll numbers, page numbers, repository, etc) each fact that you find there, working backward in time through the US Census Records as far as they will allow. I’ll check back in on you soon—with more Lessons for your search.

God’s Mountain, McLaughlin’s Valley - Joan M Kay.

Hugh McLaughlin never knew he changed the world.

His story begins when, as a young man, Hugh loses his father, is forced into servitude, and in order to regain his freedom, marches into the Revolutionary War.

Join Hugh and the Continental Army at Valley Forge; accompany him through the ordeals of war as he is surrounded by death, infected with smallpox, wounded and finally taken prisoner. Witness how these experiences shape the character of a man.

But this story encompasses more than the Revolutionary War; it delves into the personal wars tormenting each of the major characters. When Hugh returns home to the mountains of western Virginia, he falls in love with Nancy Gwin, the daughter of a wealthy planter. They marry against her family's objections and for the next decade, Hugh and Nancy battle through the estrangement of her family and prejudice from their neighbors. Finally, the full power of his life and spirit is discovered.

This is a story you can get lost in.

2005, 5½x8½, paper, 340 pp. $33.00 K3280 ISBN: 078843280X

Books are also available from the author at 30% off and at Amazon.com