| A
road trip in search of your ancestors can mean traveling
back to places once familiar, or often discovering the
unfamiliar. Come along on a road trip from Florida to
Canada as Anne Sponholtz visits some popular tourist
destinations, finds some ancestors she didn't know she
had, and offers some advice for others searching for
family roots on the road. |
If you have a notion to check out places where
you or your ancestors once lived, or you want to discover
your ancestral roots, you can sit in an easy chair with
a laptop on your lap, travel the Information Superhighway,
and discover almost anything you want to know. But I've
never been keen about sitting in an easy chair for too long
a stretch, especially when there's an excuse for a road
trip.
When my husband and I decided to embark on
a road trip to discover more about our family trees, the
itinerary included some "just for fun" stops along
the way. Traveling from Florida to Canada, those stops included
Washington, D.C.; New York City; Lake
George, N.Y.; and Cornwall and Montreal, in Canada.
These stops were like flipping through a deck of cards and
turning up aces every time. They were terrific places, each
unique in what it brought to the road trip.
But the real fun was visiting the little towns
and villages where family members once lived and worked.
Our ancestors had the same love affair with small towns
as my husband and I do, so when we pulled out of the driveway
in north Florida, we were anxious to see what small-town
America had in store for us. We were not disappointed.
After my husband stumbled across notes on his
ancestors gathered by a family member, I entered the information
into a genealogy
software database, where I have kept records on my own
family for years. Such software is a great way to organize
your family history even if, like me, you are more of a
hobbyist than a full-fledged genealogist.
This scant information led us to Homerville,
in Clinch
County, Georgia, where my husband made a discovery about
the ancestors he had learned about only a few weeks earlier.
Homerville is a down-home kind of place where Southern accents
are thick and okra is the vegetable of choice. Southern
hospitality abounds here, as we found at our first stop
-- at the courthouse. A historical
marker outside the courthouse listed my husband's great-,
great-, great-grandfather, Benjamin Cornelius, as the county's
first tax receiver. It was time to snap a picture. But the
real treasure of that stop turned out to be the folks inside
the courthouse, who shared a book with us that had more
information about my husband's ancestors and helped us find
some local cemeteries.
One of those cemeteries, once on the family's
homestead, was located in the middle of a vast stretch of
woods now owned by Rayonier, a timber company. We figured
we would never find it, so we scratched it off our list.
But on our way to another cemetery, we passed a Rayonier
office and stopped in. The rangers there not only got out
maps but also led us to the cemetery - a trip down narrow
dirt roads, through soft sand and around dozens of twists
and turns. Now you can't beat that for Southern hospitality!
Walking through the woods with our escorts, we soon discovered,
beneath a giant oak tree, the grave site of my husband's
great-, great-, great-grandmother, Sarah Cornelius, wife
of the tax receiver. We learned she was born in 1808 and
died in 1845, at the age of 37, leaving behind five young
children for Benjamin, who never remarried, to raise - more
information to add to our family history database.
On the next leg of our trip, our son joined
us. We headed north, stopping at our "just for fun"
destinations, along with other stops in Trenton,
N.J., and in New York state at Albany, Ballston Spa,
Glens Falls, Hudson Falls, Malone, Brushton and Massena
- mostly small towns, where my side of the family once lived
and some are buried. I often visited these towns and villages
as a youngster, and claim Ballston Spa as my birthplace.
But I was a youngster a long time ago, so it was a treat
to go back to these places.
We visited the city where my parents met and
the cathedral where they were married in 1944. I took pictures
of houses my ancestors built and where generations of my
family lived. I walked down the hilly sidewalk where as
a child I roller skated into the arms of my grandfather.
I stood in the yard of my first home where I once romped
and played with my pet rabbit. We visited cemeteries, lots
of cemeteries, where I gathered information to add to the
family tree, and even learned the names of my paternal great-grandparents.
It was a priceless road trip.
On a sad note, shortly after returning home,
the house built nearly 150 years ago by my great-, great-grandfather
in Brushton, N.Y., where four generations of my family had
lived, burned to the ground, claiming the lives of its present-day
owners.
Tips for genealogy road trips
1. Pack your camera and take pictures of family
grave markers and other important finds. Don't rely on your
memory.
2. Take along a notebook to record directions
to cemeteries and family landmarks, to mark locations of
family plots and markers, and to keep other notes.
3. Bring a good pair of walking shoes, as you
never know when you might be tromping through places difficult
to maneuver.
4. Stop at courthouses,
churches, historical
markers, libraries, museums and historical
societies - all can yield unexpected discoveries.
5. Plan ahead. If you are taking a long trip,
a timetable for each stop is vital. Before you go, gather
as much information as possible. You don't want to get lost
in a cemetery searching for an ancestor's marker when you
have another hundred miles to drive before dinner.
My best advice: Don't put off taking such a
trip. You will never regret going in search of your family.
Anne
Sponholtz
October 3, 2008
