With and Without a Trace
I wanted to find out more about my family history, but I needed some help getting started. It’s a painstaking process—but well worth the effort.

BY ERIN PHELAN

I was pulled into the world of genealogy by my mother’s innocent comment as we prepared for my brother’s upcoming wedding. The guest list had been restricted to family and close friends. While my future sister-in-law had over 100 relatives flying in from as far away as Dubai, our side had less than 20.

My mother looked flustered. “Surely we must have more family than that?”

My brother and I shared a glance. Unless mom could find some long-lost cousins, we’d have to hire extras to fill the pews. But it got me thinking: Why didn’t we have more family? For my new sister-in-law, family isn’t simply siblings and first cousins—some of her favourite relatives are great-uncles and third cousins, blood ties linked through several generations. I realized how little I knew about my family history. I wanted to get a sense of my ancestors’ lives and perhaps uncover a long-lost relation along the way.

According to a recent Ipsos-Reid survey, 80 percent of Canadians are interested in learning more about their family history. Tracing roots has become one of the world’s fastest-growing hobbies. There are thousands of genealogy societies, books and magazines, and hundreds of thousands of websites. One of the most popular, Ancestry (.com, .ca and .co.uk), has digitized more than five billion records, every one a clue to someone’s ancestry.

So what has sparked the intense interest? Says Jeremy Palmer, a genealogist with Achievements Ltd., an international research organization in London that conducts research for a fee, “Some have said it is due to family breakups, others to the lack of community. But really, it’s like taking part in your own detective story.”

That’s true: There are codes to crack and mysteries to solve. You can spend years following family lines—and, if you aren’t smart, lucky and well-prepared, you can drown in names and dates of ancestors who don’t belong to you. You will hit roadblocks, and many of these will be beyond your control. But, as I am about to discover, there will be eureka moments that make the entire journey worthwhile.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

According to the 2001 Statistics Canada census, about a third of Canadians—some ten million—still claim ties to England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales. A Toronto resident, I’m the quintessential Canadian smorgasbord: I was born to an English-Canadian father of Irish descent and a half English/half Welsh mother, and I have a stepfather with Scottish roots. So, where to start? Experts suggest novices pick just one family line, from either your patrilineal roots—in my case, the Phelans—or your matrilineal. From there, you should decide on a specific line: your dad’s dad’s or your dad’s mom’s; or your mom’s dad’s or your mom’s mom’s.

I’ve always wanted to trace my Irish roots, but that’s too daunting for a beginner: The Irish were not the most diligent record keepers, and many records were destroyed in the 1920s civil war. I decide to start with my stepfather’s Scottish family, named Lothian. The Scots have good genealogy resources, and I’d been planning a trip to Edinburgh with my husband anyway. Before we go, my stepfather gives me a smattering of names and dates to work with and tells me he believes his ancestors lived on streets behind the famed Edinburgh Castle.

But at the General Register Office in Edinburgh, staffers shake their heads at my bungled notes. “Oh, lass,” one tells me, “I wish people knew they should bring more than this. You have to have full names and specific dates, otherwise you’re looking for a needle in a haystack.”

I am disappointed, especially as I tour the excellent records office. For £17 ($37), visitors can access census records; indexes of birth, marriage and death certificates; parish records and more. But I depart empty-handed and decide to leave the Scottish ancestors to my stepdad to trace. I’ll try focusing on my mother’s family—specifically my mother’s mother’s line, which originated in England.

Roadblocks

Genealogy experts say that once you’ve decided on the line you’ll follow, take small steps. Start with yourself and move backward, writing down names and dates of ancestors you know. Get hold of birth, marriage and death certificates from living relatives or by going online. Gather photographs, family Bibles (which often have a place to record important dates) and scrapbooks. Next, interview your oldest living relatives. Be specific: What street did they live on? Who were they named after? Did they fight in any wars? But be careful: Memories can be weak, and sometimes your relatives will only tell you what they want you to hear.

“Accept nothing as the truth,” advises Paul McGrath, genealogist with History Television’s Ancestors in the Attic. “If your relative tells you a story, double-check it. If they say this person died in November 1885, find the death certificate, look for an obituary.” Why? One wrong name or date and you might hit a dead end, or you’ll be tracing a family that isn’t even yours.

I begin my search in April and by May hit my first roadblock: My mother tells me most records and photographs she’d kept were destroyed when our basement flooded in the 1970s. Then my mother and her cousin Adelaide—two of the few living relatives on my maternal line—can’t agree on the first name of their maternal grandfather (my great-grandfather). Adelaide says it was Oscar Ebeneezer, but my mom is positive it was something else. Is every family like this? How can I succeed if I don’t have the right names?

I feel like giving up when I have my first eureka moment: Adelaide sends me one birth, one marriage and one death certificate she’s found at home. They confirm the names of my great-grandparents and my great-great-grandparents. There’s a copy of a photo of a man with mutton chops in military uniform and a picture of a war medal. These are clues. I stare at the sepia photograph of my ancestors, staring back at me from over a hundred years ago. Who are these people? Where did they come from and what did they do? What was life like for them? I will see their faces in my dreams.

The Toolbox

I go online to see how far I can get with what I’ve found so far. On Ancestry.co.uk, I find census records that cover name, age, occupation and place of birth. My next step would be to use those records to search for missing birth, marriage or death certificates and order copies from the relevant records office. Peter Calver, founder of the website LostCousins, volunteers to help me.

An expert’s assistance is the most important tool a novice can use, and in one afternoon, Calver does what would have taken me days. I discover my relatives in the 1850s were shipwrights in Cornwall and Portsmouth, in southern England, and my great-grandfather—the one whose first name my mom and her cousin couldn’t agree on—was born in Bermuda.

For help like the kind I got, experts recommend joining a genealogy society. There are some in Canada (Go to rd.ca for a comprehensive list.), and a quick Internet search will return a number of United Kingdom-based groups that will help you simply out of a love for genealogy. Enthusiasts will provide context of local history and may even do legwork for you—like taking photographs of gravestones—as part of buddy programs.

Family Mysteries

Each generation you go back doubles the number of your ancestors. In a few weeks I’ve gone from a handful in my family tree to over 50. I find more pieces of the puzzle when my second cousin, Liz, who is Adelaide’s daughter, phones me from Portsmouth. She has a birthday book belonging to our great-grandmother, Bessie Eliza, that lists the birthdays of her children, parents and siblings. I recognize many names from the census records, but some are unfamiliar. Liz wants to help me unravel these secrets and convinces me to come to the town of our ancestors and get to the bottom of our family’s mysteries.

First, I seek the advice of Paul McGrath. With over 30 years of experience, McGrath has successfully traced families back 500 years, and his own family tree has some 13,000 names.

An expert knows how to read a photograph, and McGrath is intrigued by the soldier with the mutton chops. In ten minutes, using the marriage certificate of my great-grandparents and other clues, he deciphers that the soldier is my great-great-grandfather. He’s convinced that if I search military websites, I’ll discover his regiment was posted to Bermuda, which would be why his son, my great-grandfather, was born there in 1880.

Just as I’m getting ready to prove the Bermuda hypothesis, I receive another package from Adelaide: She has found pages folded into an old family Bible, lists of births, marriages and deaths from the side of the family I now know as the Bermuda side. I go online and am able to confirm this family-tree branch back to the late 1700s in Bermuda. I am stunned.

I think of one of my fondest childhood memories. My parents took my brother and me on holiday to Bermuda, where we rode scooters and skipped along pink sand beaches. I remember feeling at home; my brother says it is one of his favourite memories, too. I know now there’s a reason why we felt this way about that island: It was in our blood.

The Final Picture

Okay, so what about my Cornwall-born great-grandmother, Bessie Eliza, the wife of my Bermuda-born great-grandfather (who eventually went to live in England, where he and Bessie Eliza were married in 1905)? Liz greets me at the Portsmouth train station with an enormous hug. Before this genealogy quest, we barely knew one another, but the last few weeks have brought us closer. Liz navigates the city, pointing out the house my mother grew up in, the dockyard our ancestors worked in. I can almost see my great-grandparents strolling the boardwalk as young lovers.

A visit to a local records office can be a tremendous boost to family history research. Diana Gregg, a local historian from the Portsmouth Records Office, gives us an informal lecture on the history of the city. We get a sense of the life of a shipwright, and how the Great War turned Portsmouth into a town of widows.

“The wars changed life for women like your great-grandmother,” Gregg says. “They lived through one world war, then the Depression. Just when Portsmouth started to flourish again, bombs fell around them in World War II.” I later find out Bessie Eliza took in washing, cleaned houses and worked in a stocking factory after her husband was killed in World War I.

Gregg solves two great mysteries. Through baptism records, we discover the unfamiliar names in Liz’s birthday book are Bessie Eliza’s three baby boys—none of whom survived past their fifth birthday. It breaks my heart, thinking of my great-grandmother losing those children; my heart breaks again when we go to the cemetery and discover they had no tombstones. Gregg says this was common. “People didn’t have the money.”

The other mystery Gregg solves is also through the baptism records. We discover that while our great-grandfather was born in Bermuda and named Oscar Ebeneezer Symonds, he died as Frederick Ebeneezer Symonds. At some point, he gave himself a new name! This is why my mother and Adelaide couldn’t agree on it, and why I couldn’t find his military record. But after we confirm his “new” name, we find out he died in battle in France in 1918. A final piece of the puzzle has clicked. We’d never have made this discovery using the Internet alone.

I look at Liz as she pores over microfiche and know I’ve found what I was looking for: Liz might be a distant relative, but she is family. The way she laughs reminds me of the way I laugh; we have the same large forehead, courtesy of our Bermudian great-grandfather. We have the same work ethic that was instilled from our great-grandmother who worked three jobs after her husband was killed and struggled to raise her three surviving girls. Be-fore we embarked on this project we were remote cousins; now we’re like sisters.

My goal was to find long-lost cousins, and now I know there are more out there. I regularly check the LostCousins website and hope I’ll find a match. Meanwhile, my stepfather has been bitten by the genealogy bug and has so far traced his line, the Lothians, back to the 1800s.

Next, I’m going to tackle the Irish side of my family tree.

Back to square one.

Look for Part II of this article, in which Erin Phelan travels to Ireland with “Ancestors in the Attic” to trace her paternal line, in a future issue of RD.