Go There

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 Go There!

Generated by BingImageCreator AI 'April 19, 2024

How times have changed in family history research! Traveling to your family's homeplace or writing letters to genealogy or historical societies, courthouses, local libraries and archives used to be the first step in beginning family history if there were no published books or periodicals we could consult. 

Later, we had access to microfilm, which required traveling to where that microfilm was. Now, our first step is often to see what's online at Ancestry.com, other pay sites, and free sites such as FamilySearch.org. But as we know, no matter how fast these services add new databases, only a small percentage of records are or will ever be online. 


Why Travel?

Beyond records, though, why should we travel to gather our family history?

Two reasons: everywhere is different, and only by going there can we experience that. Reading about the history, geology and social forces that shaped the community is one excellent way to understand why your family came there, or left there, but the map is not the reality. There is nothing like being surrounded by the place and the people; so go there!

The other reason to go is people! Some of your living relatives live elsewhere, and there is no substitute to visiting them, asking for their stories and recording them if that's OK, and traveling locally with them to old home places, graves of relatives, schools they attended, and other important local sites. 

If you have researched all the way down to the living generation, then you can ask questions about knotty mysteries, ask to see family photos, Bibles and other old records your relative may have, ask permission to photograph, then listen to the stories and memories your relative might have about them. Record those stories if possible. 

What do the rising generation want to hear? Stories! So get those stories. 


Ted Cowan in Yarrow Kirk, Yarrow Feus, Selkirshire, Scotland 2008

Valorie

In my own life, my father Ted Cowan was the reason my sister and I traveled to Scotland with him. He did not give us much warning; just enough time to ensure that we all had up-to-date passports, arrange for a rental car and places to stay outside Edinburgh, and hurriedly buff up some research about our Cowan ancestors, who left Selkirkshire, Scotland for Upper Canada in 1832. 

We knew the little village, Yarrow Feus, and were able to visit the same church that our Cowans had attended, meet the minister and a local expert. The pastor was nice enough to send me some more information after our return, which I thought was lovely! And the local expert took us to her house for tea and told us stories for a few hours. How I wish I had recorded that conversation!

Sheep corral, Yarrow to Ettick


The day we drove over the hill from the Yarrow Valley into Ettrickbridge where my dad's great-grandfather Walter Scott Cowan had worked as a shepherd-boy, we had to stop the car to let a flock of sheep cross the road. We were impatient for lunch, until I reminded us of that shepherd-boy. That's when we opened the windows, listened to the sheep, and reveled in the moment. We made it over the hill in time for lunch, too!




Linda Blais

Here is a short snippet of Linda's post in July, 2019, illustrating the peril of poor planning and the exhilaration of making finds anyway:

"We planned to visit both the Grainger and Hawkins county archives in the same day. When we arrived at the Grainger County [Tennessee] archive, it was all locked up. Not a soul to be found. We drove around the building and finally got out to look at the sign with their hours. Guess what, they were not open on the second Wednesday of the month, and that was the day we came. My heart sank, but there was nothing we could do but go on to visit the next county archive, which was open.... Anyway, lesson learned! Check those archives with every other week or only open certain days carefully against your itinerary.  Sadly, I have never been able to go back to visit that county archive!

Courtesy Andrew Lorien

"It was also in Tennessee that we had a wonderful experience ... at the Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City, Tennessee, investigating the large Baptist history archive in their Stephens-Burnett Memorial Library. The archivist pulled out a stack of discarded books from their basement and gave them to me. They were by Glen Toomey, the author I was researching who had written histories of many of the churches that Sarah's husband and [his] brother, Isaac Barton [the object of Linda's research on this trip], had helped to start. What a treasure to bring back with me!"

The moral of this story, is: GO!


Have YOU a research trip planned? Tell us about it! How about one you've taken in the past - please share stories and photos with us here in the SKCGS Blog. m.strickland@skcgs.org

Subscribe to blog posts here. 



Valorie Zimmerman



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