Elaine Hill Sunde, 1960
Some of you have noticed that my email address is “ancestralsleuth.” I think it is more tasteful than the family historian whose ID is “stalkingdeadpeople.”
Seriously, I’ve been pursuing genealogy for at least 20 years. It was initially motivated by simple nosiness. My mother and her sisters would occasionally drop their voices so I couldn’t hear the tales being told. I would catch something about Uncle Herbert and a floozie. Then they would shoo me from the room. As an adult I decided to learn the story (and did) and by then I was addicted to ancestral sleuthing.
Over time I’ve developed some tools and practices which help me get back in time and, sometimes, deeper into the lives of my ancestors. A good genealogy database is installed on my computer and an array of websites and digital libraries have become mainstays. I’ve cultivated some good consultants whose trees include some of my branches.
Best of all, I’ve traveled to as many locations as possible where my family lived. In doing so, I’ve followed the American migration from east to west; Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maryland led to Ohio, Wisconsin. Nebraska, Wyoming and, yes, to Kansas. Not only have I learned geography but I also feel like I’ve “lived” a lot of history through them. I had grandfathers in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War; two of the three survived. One ancestor was the first elected governor of Wyoming. Another invented and manufactured the Yale lock. A third was the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts and wrote “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem.” Countless others settled in little towns across the country, farmed and raised children, leaving only traces of themselves – which I’m pleased to find in land plat books, church bulletins, and old newspapers.
But this isn’t just data. It’s the re-discovery of people and moments in time that mattered and that now live again in my mind. One afternoon I stood at a small grave site in Newfane, Vermont, where my 4th great grandparents buried two young sons and an infant daughter. I realized that I was standing in exactly the spot they would have stood, reading the names and the final engraved words on the stone:
“Thus we are bereaved.” This was my family. I wept for those babies and their parents.
