The Floating Middle on “Who Do You Think You Are?”

Posted on August 7, 2013 by Treelines

Last night’s episode presented one of the most morally complicated life stories the show has ever presented. Chelsea Handler always knew her grandfather served in the German army during World War II, but was he once a true Nazi? Starting with only her grandmother’s German memoir which she cannot read and a German booklet with a swastika and her grandfather’s name on the cover, she travels to Germany to uncover what was her grandfather’s true participation in the Nazi regime.

More than most of the show’s celebrity participants, as she is presented with translations of these records and new records detailing her grandfather’s life, Chelsea scrutinizes and re-scrutinizes each dry detail to guess at what her grandfather’s true motivations and ideology were at the time. She learns that with an imperfect understanding of what was happening around them, both her grandfather and grandmother supported an evil regime — at least initially.

Chelsea's grandmother's memoir

What do you think about how she reconciles the loving man she knew with the complicated morality of his history?

Heartbreak and Healing on “Who Do You Think You Are?”

Posted on July 31, 2013 by Treelines

Last night’s episode of “Who Do You Think You Are?” had most viewers bawling by the end. Christina Applegate’s father never knew his mother, believing she had died young under brutal circumstances. The truth was much more complicated and poignant. By the end of the episode, a seventy year-old man finally knew where he came from.

Like many genealogical journeys, the answer to the original question exploded into a zillion more questions. This episode, more than most, left me feeling unsettled and desperate to know more:

Why was Robert told such a dreadful story about how his mother died? Was he really told she was dead 6 years before she actually died?
Why did Robert believe he was older than he was?
Why did Lavina’s sister, Delilah, die so young, and did she leave children?
When did Lavina marry Walton, and was that when Robert stopped living with her?
What other records can trace the family’s “descent” during the Depression?
Why did Lavina become an alcoholic? Did it run in the family? Was she that affected by the downturn in her family’s circumstances?
How did Paul & Lavina’s backgrounds compare? Would they have considered themselves social equals?
Who is the half-brother mentioned in Lavina’s obit, and does he have descendants who remember family events from the 30s/40s/50s?
Why was Lavina’s mother buried separately from her husband and daughters?
Most of all, why was Michael Constant’s name on the cemetery records for the Shaw family?!

Who Do You Think You Are? is back!

Posted on July 24, 2013 by Treelines

How much have we missed Who Do You Think You Are? since the last season ended last spring! This season is off to a great start with Kelly Clarkson re-tracing the life of her three times great-grandfather, whose service to this country is remarkable. No better way to recap this episode than Treelines-style!

Easier Collaboration with our New Homepage

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Treelines

Have you checked out the new Treelines homepage? If so, hopefully you’ve noticed we’ve moved your family groups and your family’s stories front-and-center to make it easier than ever for you to work together with your family!

Updated homepage From the moment you return to Treelines, with just one click you can view your family’s latest stories, work on your own, and invite your family to help you out.

We hope all of these changes make it even easier and more fun for you & your family to work together on assembling your family’s history!

Treelines Featured by New York Genealogical & Biographical Society

Posted on July 16, 2013 by Tammy Hepps

When the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society, the most authoritative source for research on New York families and families with New York connections, wanted to tell its members about the emerging focus on family storytelling within genealogy, they asked me to write the cover story for their most recent issue of their magazine, The New York Researcher. With their permission, my article is reprinted below. The printed version also included a nice call-out about Treelines, for which I am quite grateful. I have enjoyed getting to know this society tremendously and recommend anyone with New York roots to check out their offerings.

***

What do physics and genealogy have in common? Besides a preoccupation with certainty, in my family they’re a sure way to get most of the dinner table to tune out the conversation. The physics chatter is nearly always the fault of my father, but talk of genealogy – or “dead people,” as my mother dismisses it – comes from mostly from me, and it is equally unwelcome.

I know I’m not the only one whose family thinks she’s nuts for her obsession with “dead people.” Part of the problem was of my own making: the more I got into genealogy, the less I talked like a “normal” person, and the more I spoke with the jargon of a specialist. I presented elaborate trees and historical records and expected my family not only to understand what I was showing them, but also to share my excitement for what they depicted. Have you made this mistake, too, talking and writing like a genealogist to non-genealogists? How often do people presenting you with charts about arcane subjects capture your attention? And yet we persist in making the tree the centerpiece of how we share our work. The tree organizes our family history, but it doesn’t make meaning. It’s the stories that do.

In the context of family history, the story is the interweaving of genealogical evidence and interpretation, historical context and creative extrapolation. It takes us beyond our role as researchers looking for the who-what-where-when and demands answers to the why and how questions that make sense of the real lives these real people led. Yes, it might cross a line from certainty to speculation, but the more we can put the flesh on the bones of our ancestors, the more we can make our work relevant to family members who are looking for a personal connection to the past. Tell them a story about an ancestor whose life they can relate to, and you’ll find suddenly they’ll start engaging with you about their family legacy. And what is the worth of all our efforts if we can’t pass them along?

That’s the central point of this story-oriented approach. It isn’t about changing the way we research or replacing the traditional research process. It’s about changing how we communicate about our findings.

What it comes down to is finding ways to reveal the vibrant people behind the dry records they leave behind. We know how to look at evidence to draw conclusions and pose new questions. But to do our research – not to mention our ancestors – justice, we need to move beyond the bare facts of a person’s life into the fullness of their life journey. Curating the piles of research we accumulate, not to mention reading between and around this evidence for the narrative glue, is its own skill. The results may not be appropriate for an academic journal, but that’s not the point. It’s about the most human of impulses – putting yourself in the shoes of your ancestor to imagine their world and how they experienced the important events of their lives.

Fanny around the time of her wedding, 5 years after her immigration

The first time I worked this way was when I was researching my maternal grandmother’s mother, Fanny Skversky. Matching the tree my grandmother dictated to me with the surprising number of available records was a satisfying process for me, but needless to say, my family’s eyes glazed over at the resulting trove of documents and charts.

The only reason why I made the story breakthrough at all was that I became obsessed with the unusual chronology of Fanny’s immigration from Russia. She, her mother, and five siblings arrived together in Liverpool in early August 1905. Mid-August mother and siblings departed, leaving Fanny behind for three and a half months until she sailed in late November. Why was a fifteen year-old girl left alone in a foreign country? I just could not let go of the mystery implicit in the ship manifests. I started asking different questions of the records – not just those that might lead to discovery, but also those that gave me broader context – and found answers in histories about the wave of Russian-Jewish immigrants who came to South Philadelphia in the early 1900s. Eventually a granddaughter of one of Fanny’s sisters told me that she had heard that her grandmother fell ill and was not allowed to accompany the rest of the family to Philadelphia. Wrong ancestor, but mystery solved!

When I returned to my family after this second round of work, I had something very different to share: a story. It had a setting – all that I had learned about turn-of-the-century life in the Pale of Settlement and the Jewish Quarter of Philadelphia. It had characters – perhaps not the actual people my ancestors were, but composite sketches from their community. It had a plot, which began with the pogroms (anti-Semitic mob attacks) they fled, heightened drama with the three-and-a-half year separation of Fanny’s father while he worked in Philadelphia to afford to bring his family over, the climactic separation of Fanny from her family in Liverpool, and the happy conclusion when she made the crossing just before winter set in. Fanny’s ship manifest noted that her mother met her at the dock. “Mother called”: now I had my whole family imagining all the heartbreak and relief captured in those two simple words written over a century ago.

Even my sister, once the most genealogically disaffected of everyone, admitted I had her hooked. She pointed out that as a child she had enjoyed reading historical fiction of this sort. Finally I had made our family history as engaging as those stories – with the added empathy of explaining her own family, and thus herself. In this way she is not an anomaly. 84% of American adults say they have an interest in their family history, but only about 1% are doing what we would categorize as genealogy. The rest are reading historical fiction, looking at old family photographs, telling stories around the dinner table, visiting museums, and watching historical movies. Our family is not as disinterested as we assume.

As humans we have a primitive need to make sense of the world – most fundamentally, where we came from and why we are who we are. That’s why my father spends all his time reading physics books. And while I don’t know how to make my family care about what happened in the fractional seconds after the Big Bang, I do know that if I put as much effort into how I pass along my genealogical discoveries as I do in making them, I can connect to their latent interest. Day in, day out, sharing and listening to stories is what we do as humans, and we genealogists are uncovering some of the most personally affecting stories our families might ever hear. It’s up to us to carry our work across the divide and meet them where they are.

First Generation Stories

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Treelines

First Generation Stories

Many of us genealogists focus on rediscovering how our ancestors left their homelands decades or centuries ago. But immigration is not an experience confined to the past.

This week we’re kicking off a project to collect stories by recent immigrants and their children. From these stories we can infer the emotions and transitions our ancestors went through.

Add an immigration story If you are first generation in your country, there’s no more important story you can record for your family to help them appreciate their identity and opportunities. And we’d encourage you to share your story publicly on Treelines to enrich all of our understanding about what it means to be an immigrant — just select the “First Generation Stories” project when you publish your story.

Here’s the story of Lev, who was 11 when his family left the Soviet Union without a clear next direction.

Collaboration is Here!

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Treelines

Collaboration is here! The #1 most requested feature for Treelines is collaboration. We hear often from folks like the two brothers we met at RootsTech who were just two of eight siblings scattered across the country, each with different family photographs and stories that they all want to put together for posterity.

Well, the day has come: Treelines is now a fully collaborative platform! You and your family can start working together on Treelines to build your family tree and tell family stories.

To work with family members on your tree: At the bottom of the “My Stories” page (reachable by clicking on your username at the top-right of any page), you’ll see a list of your trees on Treelines. Click on one of them to get to the new “Tree Team” page.

You’ll see at the top of the page a box where you can your family members using their email addresses to work on your tree. You can control the permissions for each user, whether you want them just to be able to browse the tree & write stories about the people in the tree, or whether you want them to have the full ability to add and update the people in your tree. (Don’t worry — we won’t let your family mess with your beautiful tree unless you specifically let them!)

Tree team page

The “Tree Team” page also includes a fully browse-able and editable version of your tree. And best of all, it will display the growing collection of stories you and your relatives share about your family. Over time this page should become a real treasure-trove of your collected family history.

Add collaborators

To work with family members on a story: Go to any one of your stories in progress. In the right column, you’ll see a new link for you to add collaborators to your story. Clicking on this link will bring up the new form for you to invite story members to write family stories with you. Don’t worry — you’re still the only person who can decide when you’re ready to publish your story and whether you want to share it publicly or privately.

Maybe you have a story you want to write, but your cousins need to add pictures from each of their family albums? Perhaps you and your siblings have unique memories about your grandmother you want to put in one place? Now you can all work together in the Treelines storybuilder.

As an example, here’s a story our founder & her father wrote together about a favorite ancestor of theirs — if only they could prove he is an ancestor!

We’re really excited about these new features, and we can’t wait to see the amazing ways you and your start working together to preserve the best stories of your family’s history on Treelines.

Connecting Across Families and Communities

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Tammy Hepps

Lara’s Western PA family in 1922

I’m excited to present this week’s featured user, Lara Diamond, because finding her through Treelines was my first “Treelines moment,” or connection with an unrelated genealogist whose similar family background means that her stories add context to complement mine. She’s a longtime genealogist, though a new genealogy blogger, and we had fun diving into each other’s family history. Here are some highlights from our conversation:

Tammy: When we first got to talking we discovered we have a lot in common. We’re about the same age, both researching our Jewish ancestors who came here from Hungary and Ukraine, and our Hungarian ancestors even settled in neighboring small towns around Pittsburgh. But what really struck me when I first read your two stories was that we must really be on the same genealogical wavelength to have chosen the same stories to tell first — the stories of how our ancestors immigrated here. What was it for you about these stories that you gravitated to them first?

Isadore Joshowitz during WWII

Lara: As I’m recording names & dates, I always wonder about the people behind the data. Particularly for those parts of my family that came in the early 1900s, it must have been a huge leap of faith. During a time when trans-Atlantic phone calls couldn’t have been imagined, let alone FaceTime or even email, they left behind family members and the only lives they ever knew to go to America. And despite moving to a country with a new language and culture, they and their descendents thrived.

Tammy: One of the reasons why I focus on my family’s immigration stories is that transition of becoming American — all those little adaptions, either intentional or subconscious, that help them to cope and fit in. I wonder if they realized how quickly and completely they would change.

Lara: It’s actually interesting to see how they adapted in some ways, but other things stayed very much the same. I have some ancestors who became very American and others who recreated the best of what they had in Europe while enjoying the safety and freedom that was part of being American.

Tammy: From the two stories you’ve shared so far, your American family is moving between small towns and cities. How do you think small-town life shaped your family’s sense of themselves as new Americans?

Lara: My mom’s maternal grandparents went to McKeesport (he sold fruit from a truck), and her paternal grandparents went to Pittsburgh (he was in the cigar business). My grandparents’ marriage was considered a “mixed” marriage–a Russian Jew from Pittsburgh married a Hungarian Jew from McKeesport!

On my father’s side, my grandparents were Holocaust survivors who moved to a not-so-nice part of Baltimore. They started their own grocery business with the help of relatives already in Baltimore and eventually ended up in a nicer area. My grandfather’s grandfather had immigrated to America earlier, and he lived on a farm in a very rural part of Maryland (Annapolis Junction). He took the train into Baltimore daily to sell eggs from the farm and attend a synagogue. Eventually he moved to Baltimore where he could be near the larger Jewish community.

Tammy: I guess this means my father’s parents’ marriage was also “mixed” — Hungarian Jew from Homestead marrying Russian Jew from Pittsburgh — though both were American-born, so perhaps it impacted them less.

That grandfather was quite a cigar smoker — perhaps he was a customer of your Pittsburgh forebears! Which brings me to the main question I have for you, which is what anecdotes survive in your family about life in McKeesport? To me, this is the the “Treelines moment” — connecting with someone you might not have known otherwise to compare stories about similar, though unrelated families in similar circumstances.

Lara: My grandmother often told the story of when her father was paid by someone with a chicken. This was in the middle of the Depression, so the family seldom had meat. My grandmother was sent by her mother to take the chicken by streetcar to the butcher. My grandmother had the chicken in a covered basket and got on the streetcar–only to see some kids from school. She was so embarrassed to be carrying a chicken, so she pushed its head back into the basket and hoped no one saw. It pushed its head out. She pushed it back in. After a couple of iterations, she was relieved that the chicken had been taught its lesson, and the other kids didn’t seem to have noticed. But when she got to the butcher, she discovered that she’d actually killed the chicken by teaching it the lesson a bit too strongly!

At this point we started exchanging juicy family stories that were a bit more sensitive, but we concluded our conversation talking about Treelines itself.

Tammy: So, more important than the connection that we found through your family stories, how did your family enjoy reading them?

Suttleman family reunion, 2011

Lara: Treelines is a great way to share family stories I’ve discovered through my research with family members who aren’t as excited as I am by the research process. When I sent out links to my Treelines stories, I got effusive and excited replies from relatives who never really cared about seeing an ancestor’s boat record. Treelines’ way of showing them the whole story reached them in a way that dry documents couldn’t. I love reading other users’ Treelines contributions to find others with similar family stories–as well as those with entirely different backgrounds.

I’ve started to document my research process on a blog, which forces me to examine where I am on various lines and revisit gaps to see if I can fill them. There is so much you can learn about ancestors through old documents. Once a story is complete (or as complete as I can make it), it’s a perfect point to pull it together on Treelines.

Science and Faith in One Family Tree

Posted on June 16, 2013 by Tammy Hepps

A great-grandson grows up wondering about his great-grandmother’s birth parents. Fortunately he is a leading expert on genetic genealogy!

Blaine Bettinger, The Genetic Genealogist With two decades of traditional genealogy experience and a PhD in biochemistry with a concentration in genetics, Blaine Bettinger is a leading speaker and writer on the intersection of traditional genealogical techniques and modern genetic research. His blog, The Genetic Genealogist, is a great resource for anyone who wants to keep up with the latest developments on the subject.

Blaine joined Treelines early on to share the story of his Civil War forebear Remiro Spicer’s miraculous survival. He enjoyed using Treelines because it let him “share family history, legend, or stories with relatives in a meaningful way without bogging them down in too many names, dates, and places. This brings life to stories, and piques the interest of family members who may not otherwise be interested. Most genealogists would probably agree, if you can find a way to get them hooked, they’re hooked forever!” That’s what we’re hoping for, too!

You first got interested in family history when you were in middle school. What got you hooked?

We were asked to fill out a family tree as a homework assignment for English class, and I called my grandmother to inquire about her side of the family. That phone call, I realize now, changed the entire course of my life.

My grandmother was a fount of knowledge about my father’s family, and I kept taking notes as she described family members well beyond the reaches of the simple assigned chart. I still have that family tree, and it’s one of my prized possessions.

Essentially, I’ve spent the 25 years since that assignment trying to fill out that family tree (and hopefully will spend many, many more!).

Was your interest in genetics inspired by your interest in family history?

Much like my interest in family history, I stumbled into my love of genetics. While I’d studied and enjoyed genetics as an undergrad, it wasn’t until my graduate work that I truly focused on genetics. Even then, I never considered combining my love of family history and my love of genetics until about 2003 when I learned about a very early genetic genealogy test offered by a company that is no longer in business. I continued with different types of tests then started blogging at The Genetic Genealogist in 2007 to encourage others to explore testing.

A number of people searching for Andersonville, the Battle of the Wilderness, the 1914 reunion, or even Remiro Spicer himself have found your story. Why did you want to share this part of your family history publicly on Treelines?

Of all the stories I’ve uncovered I think Remiro’s is one of the most compelling, and it was a story that I wanted to share with others. He endured some truly terrible things, but after the Civil War ended he married and raised a family that now has innumerable descendants. Unfortunately I’ll never know how much the war haunted him throughout his long life, but he was clearly able to overcome it.

I was struck by the reunion Remiro attended fifty years after he was imprisoned in Andersonville. Have you been to Providence Spring or any of the Civil War sites that figured in Remiro’s life? Is there anything planned for the families for the 150th anniversary next spring?

I’ve been to the Wilderness battlefield in Virginia where Remiro was taken prisoner, and it was a surreal experience knowing that such terrible things happened in such a beautiful place. I’ve also been to Gettysburg where Remiro was badly injured and nearly met his end.

Although I’ve never been to Providence Spring, I do hope to visit someday. I don’t know if anything has been planned for the 150th anniversary, but what a great event that would be. It would be fun to track down descendents of the individuals who were at the 50th reunion 100 years ago!

How are you getting yours sons interested in their family history?

Getting the next generation interested in genealogy is extremely important, and there’s been great conversation in the community about this topic lately.

However, since my sons are so young (both under 10), I’m still starting slowly. For example, I sometimes talk about stories or ancestors that I think they would be most interested in. A few times we’ve gone “cemetery hunting,” where we hunt for a stone or name within a cemetery. I usually make a day of it, combining the cemetery hunt with fun activities so they don’t get too tired or bored.

I know there’s a very good chance that one or both of them simply won’t be interested in genealogy or family history. I think many genealogists are the exception in their family, rather than the norm. But as long as they have a healthy appreciation for where they come from and how they got where they are, I’ll be satisfied with that.

Read about the two miracles that saved Remiro’s life in A Civil War Hero, A Father, An Ancestor.

Jamboree in Review

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Treelines

Tammy demo’ing the site… just before announcing the “Getting Started Stories” contest!

It was a long trek last week from Treelines headquarters in New York City to the Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree in LA, but it was more than worth it to connect with some of our current users and make a ton of new friends. We loved hearing about all of your family stories and ways Treelines can help you share them better. Thanks especially to those of you who attended one of Tammy’s two demos!

Most exciting of all was finally getting to announce our “Getting Started Stories” contest. We were gratified that so many of you were equally excited to hear about it!

Thanks to friends new & old for helping to spread the word about Treelines:

We were included in Denise Levenick’s list of people and sites helping to reduce the genealogy generation gap.
Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings spent some time on Treelines and advised, “There are some wonderful stories already posted on Treelines – read some of them.”
Liz Haigney Lynch of The Ancestral Archaeologist wrote that we’re “…a system of sharing family stories and pictures that seemed to be pulling in a lot of what I’ve noticed in the way my kids read and write and share online — visual interest and flexibility in how much and what you write being biggies.”
The wonderful Elyse Doerflinger of Elyse’s Genealogy Blog wrote, “Treelines is possibly my new favorite genealogy website…not only do I love the concept of a site helps you tell your family stories, I love that Treelines makes it easy to do!”
Thanks also to Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter, Moultrie Creek Gazette, and others for helping to spread the word about our contest!

Our next conference won’t be until FGS in August. We’re going to have an even bigger announcement then… stay tuned!