Why try to climb the branches of your family tree?
As a pre-teen, I wondered where my family came from. I knew where and when my parents had been born, and I’d heard some family surnames mentioned in the past, but beyond that, there wasn’t much information outside of anecdotal family lore.
Through my teen years, I learned that my Dad’s family had settled in Prince Rupert, and my Mum’s in Victoria, with the names Love and Owens on his side, and Clarke, Marks, and Gillman on hers.
The idea of family lineage – lines and branches of relatives – took physical shape once my Dad showed my some family history charts that had come from his brother, my uncle Charles Eggert Love. Dad actually pulled an old, faded, rolled-up photostat out of his briefcase and started telling me about the Scottish clans in our distant past, and some vague relation who’d been a consort to Bonny Prince Charlie or something. As with any stories my Dad told, it all sounded far too colourful and exciting to be real. I’d learn later that the colourful story my Dad was telling was relayed to him orally, and composed through the efforts of his brothers and his cousin Osborne Love, who was a major genealogist in our family. Much of what I learned had likely come due to his efforts.
By the year 2000, I was 34 and had become interested in doing my own research and documentation of our family lineage. I began creating a family tree database based on Osborne’s hand-drawn charts, the family letters and photos I’d kept over the years, and my memories of Dad’s stories. (After Dad’s passing in 1989, all his colourful, entertaining tales became canon to me, and I felt a strong obligation to record them.)
Entering all the names, dates, and relationships was kind of magical to me; a digital version of the family tree began to form, going back about two hundred and fifty years, to the era of Clanranald in Scotland and the American Civil War in the U.S. It all started to make me feel like I was actually part of a vast worldwide network of people – something both old and venerable.
My father’s colourful stories had always tended to cover his and my mother’s lives, told with passion, but through the subjective filter of his ego and biases. I took his colourful renderings of the past with respectful grains of salt, knowing that sometimes another point of view or a little impartial evidence can shift the meaning of a story. Doing my own research could add some objectivity, or bolster grandiose stories with factual records. I wanted to own some of the stories in my own way.
As the years went by, I found that exchanging letters with Dad’s “Cousin Os” gave me more insight, and a real appreciation of how much more work and time used to be involved in researching family history. I don’t how anyone did it before the Internet came along. Os mailed me photocopies of his updated family tree charts, and a letter filled with details of family members, dates, and events.
My own research continued using my Family Tree Maker software, web searches, online government databases, and commercial services like Ancestry.ca. After sharing a copy of my database to the World Family Tree Database project, I began to hear from distant relations who were doing similar web research and who’d discovered my online tree. I was delighted to discover relations who had photos of people I had in my tree: they had pictures without details, and I had details without pictures. The speed and efficacy of online data publishing and the ability to meet and share information with relatives was an incredible, and welcome, electric shock to me!
My online research felt most gratifying once I found my maternal grandfather’s name on a passenger list for the ocean liner “Megantic”, from when he was twelve or thirteen. It was his immigration to Canada from England. Later, I discovered his applications to serve in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War One, and later on, to join the Northwest Mounted Police (the precursor to the RCMP).
Moments of discovery about my grandfather were amazing little watershed moments for me: they helped to paint pictures of my grandfather’s early life, fifty years before I ever met him. I was finally able to picture him as a young man and the more I learned about him, the more I identified with his interests, hobbies, and values.
By searching and reflecting on my family lineage, I discovered things about myself and built a stronger sense of compassion and connectedness with my predecessors.
