ROOTS & BRANCHES

As this “Roots & Branches” series comparing the genealogy basics from a quarter century ago with today continues, it’s time to wax a bit nostalgic about one of my first entrees into serious genealogical research.

My mother’s mother, Luella Emma Frederick, was born illegitimate, though thankfully she was given her reputed father’s surname.

When I started working seriously on my genealogy, this threatened to leave a full eighth of my chart unfilled.

So, after my mother gained a clue from a still-living contemporary of her mother that her father’s family were butchers in the city of Reading, we headed to the Historical Society of Berks County’s library to look at its cache of Reading city directories.

Without too much difficulty, we found a family named Frederick in the 1901 directory (this was the year of Luella’s birth) with a son named Harry who seemed to be just the right age to be the father.

Only one problem – the man who had given mom the initial lead was pretty specific about what corner of which block this butcher shop was supposed to be.

The Frederick family we found was a goodly number of blocks away.

But then it dawned upon us that the man’s memory would not have been from when Luella was born, but rather around 1910.

So we kept plodding through the city directories and sure enough – by 1910, the Frederick family had moved operations to a spot that exactly fitted the man’s memory.

At the time, the historical society (which now goes simply by Berks History) was one of only two places that a large collection of these city directories could be found.

So, when I did that genealogy course curriculum in 1991, research in libraries – public, historical and genealogical – required a full class session.

Libraries are still important today, though through the Internet, so many of their resources are now available from our desktops, including things like city directories, so we may use the library without researching in it.

And that can be a shame because the expertise of librarians and staff can save loads of time in the genealogy experience … they know their collections, they know their areas – which can make a big difference.

Included in talking about library research were the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Family History Library (in Salt Lake City, Utah) and its local Family History Centers, to where until recently microfilms from the huge collection in Utah could be rented.

But that change now is a result of the Mormons’ FamilySearch.org drive digitize that microfilm collection, expected to be completed by 2019.

When I was fashioning that genealogy course in 1991, the next session focused on another “go to” (figuratively and – then mostly! – literally) resource: county courthouses. Next week’s “Roots & Branches” will update that focus.