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2/1/15

Digging Up Their Family Roots Yielded Joy, a Few Surprises and Lots of Inspiration

By Robert R. Schwarz

            Enlightenment ,  esteem , love, a stronger spiritual faith, more  empathy,  and an exhilarating sense of being linked somehow  to everyone in the world. It's  what several people in and around the St. James Catholic parish in Arlington Heights, Illinois,  say they get from charting their   Family Trees.
            " Exploring my family tree ," says 68-year-old Mrs. Diane Culhane, has taught me the meaning of faith, hope, and love. It's  been a spiritual journey among other things. " She is one of millions of Americans who have used  the online Ancestry.com  (http://www.Ancestry.com )  to create  more than 60 million family trees that today document over six billion profiles.
            "You might say I have become addicted to genealogy and family tree research ," says Mrs. Annette Winter, a 57-year-old pharmacist who sings in her church choir. She's been working at it for six years , having charted 1, 600 ancestors that include  the 4th king of Scotland and a passenger ( on her father's side ) on the Mayflower. At her computer on the dinning room table, Annette has constructed family trees for several friends and a co-employee,, helping  them to re-connect with long lost relatives.
            "It has been very enlightening to research my family roots in Bavaria , Germany , because many of the records that I have used have been church records  such as baptisms, marriages, and deaths,  that come from the on-line digital archives of the diocese of Passau, Germany, " she says.  " I have spent hours deciphering Latin inscriptions written in old German script in the parish registers in the hopes of finding missing pieces of information on family members. I have also spent many hours traipsing around cemeteries looking for family members and always remembering that I am here because of them. "
       
Diane Culhane digging up some family roots
     "It's time consuming work but it's fun ," admits Diane Culhane . " It's like reading a novel, a history and a mystery," she tells me during out interview in her home. "It's all those things. It answers the question of why people are the way they are. You better understand your own family . If  they know their immigrant roots, you have more compassion for immigrants today."  She and husband Paul , a retired political science teacher at Northern Illinois University, 
live in a home built in the 1850's built by a Civil War veteran. The Culhane couple still find old coins and artifacts when they dig in  the yard. "History is everywhere! "  exclaims Diane. 
"I've  Enjoyed the Hunt ! "
            " I've enjoyed the hunt," says  Joyce Hennessy , as she shows me one of 23 large notebooks containing 6,000 names of ancestors she's hunted down through the years. Joyce is 80 and is a Eucharistic minister at St. Mary's Catholic church in Buffalo Grove. She and her husband Tom have 6 children, 12 grandchildren, and 5  great-grandchildren. "I love the work, " she says. "It's kind of cool to see the continuity. " She started her family tree  to learn more about  her father's family "even though my folks were married 55 years. "   She believes that  her family roots date back to the Civil War, the War of 1812, and possibly the Revolutionary War. She would love to become a member of Daughters of the American Revolution but she needs a "paper trail" to document this.  "It's harder to find a paper trail for one's American side than the European side. " 
 Joyce has an eye on a DNA test kit (available at Ancestry.com for $99)  and feels she "might wind up with some Native American blood.  "  She chuckles and adds, "That would be really cool. "   ( Joyce  also hunted down a "lost" cousin " of  this reporter. )
            When will her "hunt" end ?  "Never, " she replied resolutely . " Because every time you find something it always leads to  more. "

The Story Tellers
Adapted from Tom Dunn ( http://www.onceuponatime.outlawpoetry.com/2011/01/05/tom-dunn-the-   storytellers/ )

       In each family there is one who seems called to find the ancestors: to put flesh on their bones and make them live again, to tell the family story and to feel that somehow they know and approve.
       Doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts, but breathing life into all who have gone before. We are the story tellers of the tribe. All tribes have one. We have been called, as it were, by our genes. Those who have gone before cry out to us: Tell our story. So we do.
       In finding them, we somehow find ourselves. How many graves have I stood before and cried? I have lost count. How many times have I told the ancestors we have survived and you would be proud of us? I do not know. How many times have I walked up to a grave and felt there was love there for me? I cannot say.
       It goes beyond just documenting facts. It goes to who I am and why I do the things I do. It goes to pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish, and how they contributed to what we are today. It goes to respecting their hardships and losses, their never giving in or giving up, their resoluteness to go on and build a life for their family.
       It goes to deep pride that they fought to make and keep us a Nation. It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing it for us. That we might be who we are. That we might remember them. So we do. With love and caring and scribing each fact of their existence, because we are them and they are us.
       So I tell the story of my family. It is up to the ones called in the next generation to take their place in the long line of family storytellers. That is why I do my family genealogy, and that is what calls those young and old to step up and put flesh on the bones.

            Any rude surprises hanging in her family tree ?  Joyce smiles as she confesses that   one of her ancestor who lived in our Wild West  married a sister of one the notorious  Younger brothers  outlaws. "And, of course," she adds , "you find the usual baby who came a little sooner that the nine  months. "
            Annette, upon finding her mother's marriage record in a diocese in Passau, Germany , read that her great-grandmother had been married in February and had to ask  herself: Who gets married in that part of Germany—it's way up in the hills and with bad weather ? She than looked at records of  children and learned that her great-grandmother's first baby had actually been  born in April.  Then , as  Joyce did, Annette  laughed .  " My grandmother used to say: ' The first one can come any time, the rest all take nine months. ' "   Nevertheless,  Annette says that as a wife and mother, she  has been well influenced from learning how her ancestor  "families clung together and supported one another. "
A church record and prayer card are very
helpful for family tree charting 
            Diane learned that you  can't blame one's DNA on the bad stuff  that our ancestors do.   Three of her distant Irish cousins "turned to lives of crime" while three of their related cousins became either  Chicago policemen or firemen.  She believes  it's all right to include facts like this in a family tree because "that's part of the whole story." This particular bit of history  "shows me  the importance of having a mother who will tell her children ' you will  be home for dinner or you'll answer to me. ' "  
            According to research of  Rebecca Taylor, a specialist in molecular biology whose article  " Shut Up, and Be Grateful for Your Life "  appeared in  the Dec. 14-27, 2014 edition of the "National Catholic Register " newspaper ( http://www.ncregister.com/ ),  The more children know about their family history, the stronger their "sense of control over their lives and the higher their self-esteem."
Family Trees Strengthen Their  Faith in God
            Everyone whom this reporter interviewed  indicated how learning about their ancestors  somehow strengthen their  faith in God. For Diane it was Thomas,  the younger brother  of her great-grandmother ,who was killed  in 1856 when he accidentally died at his father's mill.   "Her  faith was battered but unbroken  ,"  she says,  " because a few months later my great-grandmother, though still grieving, gave birth to another son and named him Thomas. "  And during a "genealogical " trip to Ireland , Diane says she   sensed the presence of the Holy Spirit when she looked up into a narrow , rocky cove inhabited by doves whose eating habits kept the fields clean for a nearby monastery.
She describes how she learned the virtue of "hope" from her great- grandfather Edward, 

 who left County Mayo to begin work in 1880's  in Chicago.  " His  wife and their parents , 

meanwhile, kept the farm going and the children safe. When the last of  my great-great-

grandparents died in 1903, Kitty , my great-grandmother,  sold most of the family's 

possessions and bought boat tickets for herself and her  youngest children . 

Love,  she says, she learned from her grandmother's  ( on her mother's side   )   faith in her

 husband who immigrated to Chicago and needed a job upon arrival.  His wife suggested he 

apply for a blacksmith opening at the Peoples' Gas Company, which he thought was  

ridiculous advice.   " But Grandma knew he was smart and hard-working and could figure 

out how to make or fix anything. Grandma was right, and Grandpa worked for Peoples' Gas 

for almost 40 years and sent his sons to college. "  
          
Joyce Hennessy : "I felt so connected "
  Joyce related her experience of visiting a cemetery in Ireland on a day the Irish honor like our Memorial Day.  " I just felt so connected,  especially when I looked at the time difference; it was 3:30 p.m. there and 9:30 in Buffalo  Grove, and I realized people were going to Mass the same time we were in Ireland.  "  In that moment, she says,   she had a sense  of being in the " Body of Christ " .
            A long Catholic heritage in Annette's  family tree prompts her to say, "Catholicism   has been filtered down to me.  My children have grown up seeing my mother and grandmother as very strong Catholics." She describes what it was like for her ancestors growing up in Bavaria : "It was relatively untouched by Protestantism . To this day, it  is almost 99% Catholic. There were customs associated with every season of the church year and often with the feast days of different saints like St. Nicholas, St. Martin, St. Barbara and St. Sylvester. So,  I grew up with these Bavarian Catholic traditions .
            " My paternal grandmother Catherine Strohmeyer Schmid has been a real inspiration to me, " she continued. "Although she died many years before I was born and I never knew her, the stories I have heard of her have been amazing. She raised a family of 16 children with no modern conveniences , yet she was always at daily Mass. She carefully passed on her Catholic faith to all her children. Her daughter Irene became Sr. Mary Concelia, OSF  [ order of St. Francis ]  who served more than 40 years in and around the Chicago area. Of all the relatives that I have met through this search process, Catherine is clearly the person that I wish that I had a chance to meet and get to know before she died , before I  was born.  But  I admire her from a distance because she left  home and family and came to this country and started a new life , which was hard and without any of the domestic amenities we have today like indoor plumbing  and electricity ".
            Annette is most proud of her grandparents who, on her father's side, sailed to America in 1890 and settled in the  northern Wisconsin town of Park Falls. He mother 's family left Bavaria in  the 1920's  and settled in Chicago. " They all worked hard at making a new life here after leaving behind their families in Bavaria. I am grateful that they did  because I was able to grow up in this country and have what I have."
Enter the  Family Tree Expert at the Public Library
            Perhaps no one is more in love  with family trees than the 67-year-old author and retiree  who sits  at his volunteer's  desk every Friday afternoon at  the genealogy room of the  Arlington Heights Public Library.  Stephen Szabados  (http://WWW.steveszabados.com/ ) has authored several books about family trees ( all available on Amazon.com ) , including " Find Your Family History: Steps to Get Started" ( which I  highly recommend ). 
            "All my life I had an overpowering desire to find out where my ancestors came from, to learn more about them," he says.  His ancestors led  "simple lives" in Poland and struggled to emigrate to America to build a better life.  Their lives have motivated him to "do better."  Stephen, a former project manager in the retail industry  ,  lives in nearby Palatine with his wife and attends  St. Teresa's   Catholic Church there. He has a master'  degree in business administration from Northern Illinois University and has labored on family trees for 15 years. 
            People, most of them seniors, come to Stephen for help in selecting one or more of the
Genealogist Stephen Szabados helping a couple find
ancestors at the Arlington Heights Public Library 
8,000 genealogy books and data records near him .  Some records date back to the 16th Century.  He, too, believes family tree stuff is an addiction. " But  once you get into it, you can spend as much time with it as you want, " he says.  " The real challenge is to capture all the oral history, all that stories that have been passed down and to obtain this from  the people before they  die.  I wish I had my grandfather here today to verify all that I have found. " He advises everyone to add personal touches, such as finding out if "your immigrant grandfather got on a train or a boat?...Make your family tree come alive."

Some Family Tree Tips from Stephen Szabados ( abridged )

1. Know for whom you are doing this.
2. Focus on the research , not the narrative . Record it.
3. For your readers, write  summaries of family members .
4. As your research grows, organize  it in a ring-binder
5. Put it all together  into one large document with a table of contents .


     If you want to start working on your family tree, Joyce has this advice: " I found it best to take a class at a library or with an  high school  adult education  course.  There is so much out there that you have to learn where it is. You need patience." Annette advises:  " First of all, if you have an interest, don't ever hesitate. Then keep plugging away at it. Sometimes, it takes a little time to find the little nuggets you need.  Some funeral prayer cards are gold mines of information."
Are We 'One Body ' ?
          As  I continued to hear these four people express their passion for their family trees, I vaguely sensed another dimension to this passion not yet expressed. I sensed it in Joyce's comments  about feeling "so connected" as she stood in that  Irish cemetery, aware that in that same moment her fellow Catholics were also going to Mass  in Buffalo Grove—and likely in other countries .  And later I sensed it when Diane told me about one of her four visits to Ireland : One of her cousins , upon meeting her for the first time, kept hugging her and
Diane Culhane at the grave of her great-great
grandparents in west Galway, Ireland...
exclaiming, " You're the first one to come back !"    The cousin then pointed to  a nearby tree and , with moistened eyes, said:  " When your grandmother was a little girl, she was the first one to climb that tree. "
            This same sense teased when, shortly before I wrote this report,  a family friend   emailed me to say she had  located
...and the tree her grandmother
"would have climbed  ."
a "third" cousin of mine in Poland named  Kazik. With the help of " Google Translate" (
http://WWW.translate.google.com/ )  ,  Kazik and I exchanged several emails with family photographs and heart-felt  words as if we had  known each other since childhood.  
On the website " Family Tree Builder ,"  (http://WWW.ideas.4brad.com ) ,  the author , using scholarly language and mathematics,  postulates that "everybody is your 16th cousin."  But , he says,  while one may be linked to a  true family member as far back as 2,ooo years, this linkage beyond that can only be expressed , or shown, by mathematic equations.
            Another statistic I came across ( http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2011/ How Many People… )  excites one's  imagination. Carl Haub, senior visiting scholar at the Population Reference Bureau, presents a cogent argument as to the number of people who have ever lived on earth: since 2011, he reports, 107,602, 707, 791 humans have lived or been born since  8,000 B.C.
            I talked with Stephen Szabados about the television program " Finding Your  Roots" ( http://www.pbs.org/wnet/finding-your-roots/) .
Annette Winter discovered a second cousin who served
in the German army in World War II as was killed. 
I had watched the episode where the moderator, Henry Louis Gate, Jr., a professor at Harvard University ,  documented  his own family tree.  Gates, an Afro-American,  traced some of his ancestry to a small community and was  surprised to see that some of  his  "kinfolk"  is Caucasian!  At the end of the episode, he expressed  amazement over "how we are all linked to just about everybody. I continue to be amazed at how connected members of the human family are. "   
            My interviewees might likely want to expand this analogy and cite what is widely cited in much of Christian theology, that a Christian has a role,  a function in this one body to which all true Christian belong, alive and dead—with Jesus Christ as the head . accepted in  Christendom . We being many are one bread, one body ; for we all partake of the one bread. ( 1 Corinthians 10:17 ).
            Regardless, Annette, Diane, Joyce, and Stephen will surely tell you that , whether their family tree is made of spirit or kinship or both, it can be a delightful blessing for whomever digs for its roots.

THE END
All comments are welcome.
© 2015 Robert R. Schwarz


         








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