ROOTS & BRANCHES

We’ve spent the last couple of “Roots & Branches” columns talking about some of the massive changes in the genealogy world since I first taught a continuing ed class on family history in 1991.

One of the things that hasn’t changed – though it’s no longer the first thing that most people do as a result of Internet access to so much genealogical information – is doing a self-assessment of “what you know and think you know” about your family, as well as inventorying home documents.

Early in my own genealogical journey, I asked my mother about the trunks in our attic (one or another family member had occupied our house for nearly a century). She recounted to who each of the trunks belonged, but captioned this by saying “there’s nothing you’ll find that will help you with genealogy.”

Well, of course I was undaunted by that remark and honed-in on my paternal grandmother’s trunk. And what was the “nothing” I found? Oh, only a family Bible with data from the family of this grandmother’s own maternal grandmother.

Likewise, I became schools in the realization that not everything that you “think you know” turns out to be true, likely because of misinformation or misinterpretation.

One of the stories my mother told me a number of times was that the great-grandparents who raised her, Wellington and Emma Machmer, were of different religious denominations at what was then Bern Union Church. Wellington was Reformed and Emma was Lutheran. In deference to this, their sons were baptized Reformed and daughters were baptized Lutheran, and that story was that Emma wanted all the children to be of one fait as adults, so they had all the children confirmed Reformed.

It was a nice story, but when I looked for documentary evidence, I found the baptisms in the separate Reformed and Lutheran church registers followed no such pattern. And a confirmation photograph (in another trunk in the attic!) of the Machmers’ twin daughters showed that they, at least, were confirmed Lutheran, again debunking the pattern that legend had told.

When I first wrote this curriculum, genealogists were taught that “primary sources” (like those church registers, family Bibles and such) were superior to “secondary sources” {(lie county biographical histories and family legends).

In vogue now is a more sophisticated view, led by prominent genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills, whose books Evidence! and Evidence Explained are the bibles of sourcing and citation for genealogy.

Sources are now original, derivative or authored; they may contain a combination of primary, secondary or undetermined information; which in turns provides evidence that is direct, indirect or negative. Analyzing the sources, information and evidence in a written summary produces genealogical proof.

But despite updates in how we refer to documentary sources and evidence, the virtual or physical “source” of much information remains a certain type of institution that we’ll dig into in the next “Roots & Branches” column.

It’s called a library.