Peeking Into Your Past

BY GREG STOTT
FROM EQUINOX

IT HAS been said that, like Sherlock Holmes, genealogists crave the hunt, and I am in a position to agree, since I myself have donned the deerstalker cap. It began one fresh fall day in 1989 with the birth of my son, Jeremy. Inspired by fatherhood, I began assembling a time capsule, with the idea of including a family tree and a few details about Jeremy's lineage. On putting pen to paper, I was shocked by my ignorance. Beyond my grandparents, all born around the turn of the century, I knew nothing about my roots except vague British origins.

       Hardly a problem, I thought: A few months to peek into the past and collect some names would be all I needed. As I queried relatives, however, the peek turned to a nagging need to know. Why had my great-grandfather left Yorkshire, England, for Canada after World War I, when he was more than 50 years old? Had he really dared to buy 100 acres and start farming in southwestern Ontario at that age? And had he really made and lost several fortunes in his life? For the first time, I recognized his keen, restless ambition as a trait shared by Grandfather, Father, many relatives and me.

       Intrigued, I began searching for answers. In a fortuitously timed visit, I spent an afternoon with an older cousin, a woman who would begin to slip into the murky grip of Alzheimer's just a few months later. As she opened boxes, clues and information tumbled out. An old passport belonging to a great-grandfather yielded physical details about both him and his wife. She was tiny, barely five feet, and deaf. I later learned she had lost her hearing to scarlet fever as a young girl. He was lean and balding, with grey eyes and a scar on his left arm.

       In the course of the afternoon, I ran a copy of his birth certificate through my hands and contemplated details from 1869. There were the names and occupations of his parents and their places of residence, information that would allow me to order their birth records and, in turn, discover the names of another generation.

       English census records from the latter half of the 19th century introduced me to the complete families; and while the dates of births and baptisms helped me construct a chronology of the generations, it was the details of individual lives that grew meaningful. How could I not wonder about my great-grandfather's brother, Harry, who, the 1881 census told me, was just 14 years old when he worked as a labourer in a "brick clay mine." And what of his father's obscure occupation? It was years before I learned that a fettler either cleans the machinery in woollen mills or sharpens knives or files needles to a point.

       In my quest, I discovered English commercial directories that revealed the occupations and addresses of my ancestors in the first half of the 19th century. Transcriptions of gravestones in various cemeteries, fastidiously indexed by volunteers, yielded more facts, sometimes even a cause of death. Land records and wills also helped reconstruct lives. Knowing that civil registration of births, marriages and deaths was required in England after 1837 became a tool rather than some bit of arcane trivia.

       In time, after scouring old English parish records on microfilm, I broke into the 17th century and, with the glee of a safecracker who has figured out the combination to a mysterious vault, found several more generations. Today my inventory of ancestors and relatives numbers almost 2,000.

GENEALOGICAL research is an undertaking that can be begun or stopped at any time but is rarely ever finished, for one can never expect to gather every relative. Assuming an average of four children per union over eight generations, the numbers are daunting, beginning with two (the original couple) and expanding to four, 16, 64, 256, 1,024, 4,096, and 16,384. Tally the numbers, and the sum is 21,846 individuals. Toss in the spouses, and the number balloons to 43,692. Subtract the original couple, who were already counted, and you are left with an awesome 43,690, for just eight generations.

       I am but one participant in what has become one of the most popular pastimes in the world. Not long ago, when Rick Roberts of Global Genealogy Supply invited subscriptions on the Internet to his cyber publication The Global Gazette, he was swamped; upon returning from a weekend away from his Milton, Ont., home, he found more than 700 e-mails. At the Broderbund Family Tree Maker web site, more than 70,000 different visitors log on every day, conducting more than 300,000 name searches to contact others whose research may overlap theirs.

       It may seem ironic that CD-ROMs and the Internet spur people's curiosity about their ancestors, but it is precisely the World Wide Web that is revolutionizing genealogy. It is also credited with lowering the entry age from the 50s and 60s. "More and more, we're seeing people in their 20s, 30s and 40s coming to our booths at conferences," says Roberts.

WHAT DREW Sherilyn Bell, 36, and Jeff Stewart, 36, of Toronto to Salt Lake City, Utah -- on their honeymoon no less -- is a quest that draws many impassioned family historians. In genealogy, most roads pass through Salt Lake City. It is there that the Mormon Church, known officially as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), operates The Family History Library, the largest library of its kind in the world.

       Located near the Mormon Tabernacle and Temple, the library hides its riches in a catalogue of human existence recorded on more than two million rolls of microfilm (a single roll is equivalent to three 500-page books), some 700,000 microfiche records and almost 300,000 books. Every month the collection grows by another 1,000 books and another 5,000 rolls of microfilm, the work of some 265 camera operators who daily copy archival records from around the world.

       It is a collection that chronicles at least a few details of the lives of more than two billion people, some going back as far as early Chinese clans, though the bulk of the inventory begins about 1600 and runs to the early 1900s. The Church hopes to acquire at least 80 percent of the vital records of five to six billion humans, almost ten percent of the 70 billion people demographers say have populated the planet.

       Attracting some 800,000 ancestrally smitten folk each year, The Family History Library is, in the words of one wag, "a Disneyland for genealogists." At first glance this Disneyland seems decidedly short on fun. Everywhere, people sit before banks of computers and microfilm and microfiche machines. Many wear the same studied look as people at work on jigsaw puzzles, which is not far from the truth for most genealogists.

       It is only after several hours in the place that a visitor becomes aware of a palpable sense of drama behind all the furrowed brows. Look to a corner of the British floor, where a couple exchanges high fives. They have finally found his great-grandfather. On the International floor, a rabbi dabs at eyes that glisten with the realization that -- contrary to popular myth -- a large inventory of civil records of Jews in Eastern Europe survived the Holocaust. He's found some of his own.

IN LITTLE COTTONWOOD CANYON in the Wasatch Mountains, a 30-minute drive from Salt Lake City, the master copies of the Church's huge inventory of microfilm are stored in a network of vaults burrowed deep into the side of a granite mountain. It is a place where temperature and humidity pose little concern, a major issue when you're the archivist of the human race and you're storing 60 years of microfilm, an inventory worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Surrounded by security cameras, the vaults are protected by thick steel shields reportedly capable of repelling a ten-kiloton blast.

      

The Roots Tool Kit Books Sourcing Canada: Genealogy Addresses (1998 edition) by Elizabeth Barclay-Lapointe (Buckingham Press) How to Climb Your Family Tree: Genealogy for Beginners by Harriet Stryker-Rodda (Genealogical Publishing) In Search of Your Canadian Roots by Angus Baxter (McClelland & Stewart). A revised edition will be available in the fall. Searching for Cyber-Roots by Laurie and Steve Bonner (Ancestry) Web sites The Geneology Home Page The National Archives of Canada The National Library of Canada Cyndi's List of Genealogical Sites on the Internet Everton's Genealogical Helper Family Tree Maker Global Genealogy Supply

The Granite Mountain Vaults are also where many of the microfilms are copied and distributed to more than 3,400 LDS Family History Centres, small satellite libraries located in 64 countries around the world. In Canada, there are more than 120 centres.

       The Mormons' impressive catalogue of humanity is the result of an act of missionary zeal. Latter-day Saints believe that families are eternal and marriages can endure forever. Church members are taught that they have a religious obligation to trace their own genealogies and to perform temple ordinances, such as baptisms and sealed marriages, on behalf of their ancestors. To connect with deceased relatives posthumously, the Church encourages members to collect information -- principally dates of births or baptisms and of marriages.

       To make genealogy easier for members, the Church decided a century ago that it wanted the benefit of information such as government civil registrations and parish records from other churches around the world. The Church has run into some distrust but says most other churches and a surprising number of world governments have recognized a value in the Mormon commitment. At stake, after all, is a huge inventory of human events, some of which is losing the battle against scourges such as mildew and is susceptible to events of more biblical proportions, such as floods and earthquakes.

       The Church points to the example of a fire that destroyed the entire inventory of government records in the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. Unable to issue even a passport or a birth certificate, the government contacted LDS officials who had microfilmed the entire records just months before. With the help of the Church, the Cook Islands government was back in business.

LARGE Mormon families play a key role in applying genealogy to medical science. One of the hubs of research using familial databases is the University of Utah's Eccles Institute of Human Genetics. Utah is ideal for such studies because the state has a concentrated base of large, stable families, largely because of Mormons, who have tended to stay put over the generations. The Mormon records and the willingness of families to participate in genetic research helps scientists studying the genetics of cancer and other diseases.

       The scientific effort to tap into genealogy extends outside Utah. Family-history software is inviting users to enter medical information such as cause of death and common diseases; and more and more, genealogists are getting calls from researchers seeking help in tracking down patterns of disease.

       While there are fascinating medical-science spin-offs to genealogical work, the attraction for the amateur genealogist will always be the ability to reach across the generations to establish surprisingly revealing connections. That continues to be the motivation for people such as Sherilyn Bell. As she consults old files in The Family History Library and other archives, digging deeper into the story of her life, Bell knows her efforts have already helped heal a rift in the family caused a generation before she was born by circumstances surrounding a schizophrenic grandmother.

       "When my grandmother was young, she tossed the family Bible and a lot of keepsakes into the furnace," says Bell. "I was in my 20s before I realized I had relatives. I thought then, Enough time has passed. I want to know."

       Now Bell knows, and so will her children, when they come along. And when they ask, "Mommy, where did I come from?" she will have the answers.

PHOTOS: © GREG STOTT
© 1998 BY GREG STOTT. EQUINOX (APRIL/MAY '98), IS PUBLISHED BY MALCOLM PUBLISHING LTD., 11450 ALBERT HUDON BLVD., MONTREAL, QUE. H1G 3J9