Re-Connecting With Relatives
All Around the World
By SUSAN-MARY SMITH
When searching for your Celtic roots, often the best place to start is right at home. While it may be tempting to fly off to Ireland, Scotland, Wales or many other wonderful places, you'll have much better luck if you do some preparation before you go.
You've probably heard it or read it hundreds of times before, but the first people to ask are your own family. Start with yourself and start with the basics - name, birth date, place of birth, siblings names, name of spouse, religion, death date.
Have a new Family Group Sheet (downloadable free from various internet sites) for each person, and fill in the blanks as best you can. Once you've exhausted your own knowledge, it's time to start asking relatives for help. For obvious reasons, the more senior family members may be of most help. They'll remember people and events long gone, and may even have photos, letters, certificates, albums and other items to show you.
Sometimes when visiting a relative, it helps to have visual props. I like to take along a family heritage scrapbook that I've compiled. In addition, I take my digital camera so I can not only take a photo of the person I'm talking to, but also of any items they have that may be of use for my research.
Some digital cameras have options that allow you to take excellent, first-quality close-ups of documents. If you're thinking of upgrading your camera, this would be a feature to look for.
I like to take photos of documents and photos rather than asking elderly relatives to part with their precious belongings. While you may only INTEND to take them for a day or two, things happen and time goes by and meanwhile, you've upset someone unnecessarily.
Of course, take accurate notes when you're interviewing relatives. Listen more than you speak, because once people are on a subject, sometimes they remember more than they thought they knew.
Because I've a hopeless memory, I always take a list of questions I want to ask. I try and get as much information on a person as possible. For example, I'll ask my aunt about her father's brother who went to Australia after the First World War and I'll try and pinpoint dates and actions as best I can.
When did he leave? Why? From which port? What job did he do in England after the First World War? How did the family find out he died in 1924? A telegram? A letter? How did he die? Did he marry? (By the way, I still haven't found out all the details, it's a major brickwall for me, and one I'm intending to hammer down this winter).
Another thing I like to give to my relatives is a genealogy chart that I've created on the computer. There are various software programs that you can get to help you with this. I leave the chart as both a gift and a memory trigger.
Don't forget to thank your interviewee profusely! I always send a thank you card, and put them on my mailing list. Once a year I send every known relative (that's a lot!) a copy of the portion of my research that is pertinent to them. It's my way of saying thank you once more, and to continue the relationship we've forged. It feels great to have such a wonderful connection with people.
I find that talking to relatives and getting to know them is a wonderful experience and to me one of the best aspects about family research. It's put me in touch with people I had never known, but now I can't imagine my life being without.
I am now in regular correspondence with distant cousins all over the world, and we all have a common quest - to reconnect with family members that were dispersed throughout the world after the various events in the Nineteenth Century that split our family apart.
Susan-Mary Smith is a family history researcher from Quesnel, British Columbia. For information on fees for service, please contact her directly at smithjosephy@shaw.ca. To submit your perplexing family history problems for the column, please e-mail information to her for inclusion.
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