I was born and raised in Indiana. It's the only home I've ever known. From my first steps in my parents' living room to my first steps across the football field at my college graduation, Indiana has been home. I have information on hundreds of people who I can connect back to me, I'm overcome with awe when I think about everything that had to have happened for time to reach me, sitting here, typing it up on my computer.. For me and my journey, it all started with a snap decision.
I was just eleven years old when I first picked up genealogy as a hobby. It was that time of year when 4-H project registration was in full-swing and at this point I knew that cake decorating was definitely not my forte. It was that final moment when my mom was making sure I picked everything I wanted to do. I glanced down the list, pointed to "Genealogy" and asked what it was. I can't remember what description my mom gave me but it was enough for me to shrug my shoulders and check the yes box.
From there, it became my favorite puzzle. I was addicted to finding the next links in the chains that led up to me. Not only that, but it was also finding the proof that these people were related to me. I wanted the birth and death certificates, the census records, and the draft cards. I wanted photos of all the graves, and maps that show where to find it. Lists of every variation of the last name I was researching found in the records I was finding were kept on sticky notes in my big, bulky binder. I was contacting relatives I'd barely known of trying to get information and at some periods spending every weekend in the Genealogy Center at the library. I am blessed enough to live in Fort Wayne, which is home to one of the most renown genealogy centers in the world. Often, I'm the youngest person in there even now at 22.
One of the best parts about becoming my family's historian was the relationships I was able to form as a direct result. It brought me closer to my grandparents who previously had taken up genealogy as a hobby to the point of paying somebody to do some research over seas. I was able to form a bond with my parent's aunts and uncles and their children whom I probably would not have contacted otherwise.
But, like in most things, it isn't always rosy.
The biggest roadblocks I've experienced in my research have all come from one side of my family, my paternal grandfather's side. And they all started immediately as my journey began, as the only information I had went back to my great-grandparents and I didn't have much to go on. They immigrated from Austria, or Yugoslavia, or Croatia depending on what document I was looking at and what year it was. It wasn't until ten years after I began my research that my grandpa had found an long-forgotten obituary for my great-great grandfather that I started to make headway on one side of that road block.
It was folded and stuck between the pages of a visitor's guide to Yugoslavia. That obituary ended up being a gold mine for me. Not only did he have his and his wife's names, but it also listed all of their children and their spouses. So, I had more than the roots of the tree; I also had some extra branches. I entered them in on Ancestry.com and something amazing happened. Only one name picked up a match, not a document match as I would normally have preferred but at that point, I would've taken anything. My three times great uncle, Franjo, was mentioned in just one other family tree. I messaged the owner of the tree and soon was in regular communication with an entire side of my family that we had not been in contact with since 1954 after a following out occurred over a will. 62 years passed with no communication, both of us having ran into the same problem of lack of information, and suddenly we were both blessed with a wealth of new knowledge. Most of them resided in a part of Canada that is so close I could drive to it from my great aunt and uncle's house, which is not too, too bad of a drive from me. Neither of us had any clue that the other side even so much as existed so close.
That seemed to get the ball rolling because about three months after that happened I also managed to make contact with a separate side of our family of which we actually did know of, just not on a personal level. At this point, I was excited, giddy even, and nervous that I had just gone as far as I could feasibly get in such a short amount of time. But as luck would have it, it was only the beginning. As these leads began so slow, a woman somewhere in the world decided to get back in to genealogy. She added a long-dead great aunt who never had any children and once more a little leave sprouted in my tree. This, again, added dozens of new branches to my tree. Not only that, but we were able to team up and fit together some puzzle pieces that would have taken much longer on our own if we could have worked it out at all.
You see, we both knew that there was a second sister to this long-dead great aunt. What I knew was that someone had mentioned the name "Olga" to my grandfather, who was from a place called "Appleton." This woman has a photo of a woman named Olga, from Wisconsin who was somehow related but she suspected from the other side of her family. Good news, guys: there is an Appleton, Wisconsin and right now me and my grandfather's second cousin are both searching records to try and connect an Olga to there. This is something I would never be doing with someone I would never had known had I not decided that I rather enjoyed finding evidence of my ancestors existing in this life.
It's an incredibly humbling experience to see through documents the things my ancestors did that led up to me. If my great-great grandparents hadn't moved to America, if they hadn't settled in Pennsylvania where my great-grandfather met his wife, if my grandpa had not moved to Indiana for school, I would not be here today. I feel that I am also able to appreciate more the struggles they went through to make it in this country, and I constantly want to know more. Genealogy is important to me because it allows to me see where my family is been and how my ancestors shaped the people I know and love today.
