Snooping

As indicated in my last post, finding information on my mother's biological parents was a surprise and delight.  Now I know where they are buried.  Perhaps next year I will go and pay my respects.

On my father's side, my great-grandparents
William and Mary had nine children, with
eight still living at the 1900 census.

We Americans delight in claiming "world's largest" status for everything, e.g., "world's largest manufacturer of dental floss!"  So, not surprisingly, Ancestry.com, based in Provo, UT, is the "world's largest for-profit genealogy company." The closely-held firm provides access to nearly 13 billion records and currently has over 2 million paying subscribers.  I'm one of those millions.

The company was started in 1990 by two Brigham Young University graduates who sold copies of Latter Day Saints publications on disk from the back seat of their car.  (I'm surprised that the program development work wasn't done in a garage.  In recent years the role of the garage in American business has assumed near-mythical standing!)

Genealogical research looms large in the theology of the LDS Church.  It's not surprising, then, that the founders soon put together genealogy and digital publishing.  The company has grown over the years to include a cluster of related businesses, including one specifically focused on access to newspapers.  While most activity is in the U.S., Ancestry.com also provides access — for a fee — to records in Canada, Europe, Australia, and even China.  They also offer Family Tree Maker software.

I am a new kid on the genealogical research block.  However, as I have started putting together my Laycock Family Tree, a few things have become clear.  First, genealogical research is not a cheap hobby!  The basic Ancestry.com account costs $20 per month.  However, when you want to delve deeper than just census information (which is downright fascinating in its own right) you immediately run into a "pay wall."  In other words, if you want access to certain documents, such as marriage licenses, you have to upgrade.

My mother, Constance, and at long last,
her elusive biological parents.

That means that if I want to see the marriage license for Arthur Kew and Grace Louise Johnson — my newly discovered grandparents — I will have to grease an online palm.  Or travel to Pennsylvania to see the original document, assuming I could figure out where to look.  I've run into a similar stumbling block when looking at relatives on my father's side.

While I might be feeling tightwadish in the face of "upgrade now" ads, I recognize that Ancestry.com provides access to information that a person would otherwise spend many days or weeks, and a lot of money, tracking down.  So, in the end, this will probably prove a bargain.

My genealogical snooping has also reminded me of how small our world can be.  For example, last night at dinner my friend Joan, a Detroit-area organist and music teacher, spoke about a student who recently graduated from University of Detroit Jeusit High School, where he had spent several years studying Latin.  Almost certainly this young man studied Latin under my friend John, who has been teaching Latin at U of D Jesuit for a couple decades.

Hungarian novelist Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938) developed the idea of six degrees of separation in his short story Chains.  His idea is that every person in the world is just six steps away from every other person.  "Hints" provided by Ancestry.com underscore this.  "We have found a possible link with 3 other family trees," the program declares.  One such hint, identified by a "shaky leaf" icon, led me to the family tree constructed by my cousin in Wisconsin!  I didn't know she was working on the Laycock line.  And I've found lots of other tree-connecting linkages.  When you have a family of nine children, and they have all married and had kids, chances are that the landscape is littered with kin just six or fewer degrees distant! •••