The Harder Stories When the Records Tell You Something You Didn't Expect Most people begin genealogy research hoping to find connection, a famous ancestor, a homeland, a story that explains something about who they are. Sometimes that's exactly what they find. And sometimes the records tell a different story entirely. In twenty-six years of research, I have uncovered a great many things that families didn't know. Some of them were joyful, many were moving, and some stopped people in their tracks. Discoveries that rewrote what they thought they knew about themselves, their parents, their grandparents. This is that post, the one about what happens when the research doesn't go where anyone expected. I want to be honest here, because I think it matters: unexpected discoveries are more common than most people realize. The past was complicated, people made difficult choices under difficult circumstances, secrets were kept, sometimes out of shame, sometimes out of love, someti...

Behind the Research It Started With a School Project: How I Fell Into Family History  26 years and counting Twenty-six years ago, my daughter came home from school with a homework assignment: draw a family tree going back two generations. It seemed simple enough. It wasn't. And I have never really stopped looking since. The project was straightforward on its face. Names of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. Fill in the boxes. Hand it in. But when my daughter set the sheet in front of me, I realized I couldn't fill it in. I had so many gaps. My father's side was almost entirely a blank.  We had names, a few of them, but dates, and places, the connecting tissue of a family's story? Nothing. I didn't know my father's side well enough to put pen to paper.  My daughter's father's side was non-existent, but this is a whole different story for a later post!  I could have written in what little we knew and left the rest empty. Instead, something in me re...