A nine year-old girl loses a beloved aunt, but at the burial she catches sight of a name…

Almost thirty years later, Taneya Koonce is now an accomplished genealogist, with a particular focus on technology and historical newspapers befitting her professional expertise in information management and organization.  She blogs actively and volunteers extensively with the USGenWeb Project.

Taneya joined Treelines right after we won at RootsTech, and she wrote her first story the evening her invitation came.  “It was so very cool!” she wrote.  “At first, when I was faced with the task of writing a story I didn’t know what I would say. I do not consider myself a storyteller at all. But, I kept on and actually am quite proud of myself.”  And we’re proud that it was Treelines’ storybuilder that changed her mind! 🙂 We admire that in both of her stories, she used small details — the names of her ancestors — as the jumping-off point to ask deeper questions.

Adorable Taneya with her aunt

You were just 9 when you had your “first genealogy moment.”  What kinds of genealogy did you do when you were growing up?
Growing up, I actually did not do very many genealogy activities.  Besides having a general interest in those that came before me, I didn’t seek out genealogy.  Then, when I was in college, one summer (circa 1995) I decided I was going to interview both of my grandmothers to learn more about our families and their background. I don’t actually remember what prompted me to do it, but I am extremely glad that I did.  By the time I decided to actively pursue genealogy as a full-time hobby in 2005, both of my grandmothers were ill, suffering from Alzheimer’s.  Those days I’d spent with them 10 years earlier to record their stories made a huge difference.

As an adult you’ve become involved in just about every area of genealogy — technology, DNA, records, and lots of volunteering and writing and speaking.  (Wow!)  What inspired you to elevate genealogy from a childhood interest to your major hobby as an adult?

My inspiration to become super-involved in genealogy was quite gradual, but in so many ways, my genealogy interests overlap with my experiences and interests outside of genealogy.  I am naturally interested in technology, was a biology major in college, and was always interested in genetics, and I have professional experience in writing and presenting.  One reason genealogy has been such a perfect hobby for me is that it has allowed me to apply skills and interests I’ve already gained.

My extensive volunteer efforts with the USGenWeb came about because of the benefits I’d reaped from those who shared information on the USGenWeb sites before me, and so I had to “pay it forward,” and I’ve tremendously enjoyed helping others in their genealogy and family history searching.

One of the things I love about your stories is how you’ve gotten inspired by small details, even just the names of ancestors!  Any advice for other genealogists to similarly turn small clues into larger family insights, as you have?

I personally find those small clues to be great places to start, and it’s interesting how they will lead you from place to place.  In my volunteer work for the USGenWeb, I see so many people inquire with extremely broad questions on how to research their families, and my advice to them is always to start small; identify one or two things that you want to know about and then follow the clues out.

Perhaps it is also my professional training – as a librarian, we very early on learn theoretical models that apply to searching for information, and one I early on identified with was “pearl growing.”  Pearl growing search strategies begin with a specific known fact/item, and you successively build on it. So, my advice for others is to think about those “pearls” you have in your family history and search for information that can help you “cultivate” them.

You’ve been a geneablogger for some time, sharing your family stories and research on your own blog.  What made you want to share your stories on Treelines as well?
I started looking into Treelines after learning that you’d won the RootsTech 2013 Developer Award. Being as technically-inclined as I am, I love to play around with tools, so I signed up for an account.  I read some of the other stories on the site and decided to play around with my own story.  After going through that process, I definitely wanted to continue and do more. What I appreciate about the Treelines structure is the ability to present the story in a very visually appealing format and the segmentation into smaller “chunks” of information, combined with the photo integration and connection to family tree data.

Abraham Lincoln MacNair, Taneya’s great-grandfather

You wrote to us that you don’t consider yourself to be a storyteller, but you’ve shared two great stories already!  How did you overcome your reluctance?
It has really been the design interface of Treelines that has helped me overcome my reluctance. The format of the site makes it easy to create and share stories.  After I did my first story, I recalled so many tidbits that I’ve learned from my mother over the years about her family, and now I want to focus on working with her to capture them into Treelines stories.  We all have these “tidbits” that we can use and enhance them on Treelines. I am particularly looking forward to starting to share my Treelines stories with family members – it’s just so much more interesting visually than what they would get from my blog posts, so I believe it makes a great counterpart.

Read more about the names of Taneya’s family in her Treelines story, Seeking Christopher Columbus.

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After a lifetime of hard work as innkeepers, a couple prepares to retire to Florida. But life has different plans in store for them.

This was the family story that came up more than any other in Kathleen Tesluk‘s family, and as a genealogically-minded child, she was always attuned to such family lore.  When she was eleven, she conducted her first interview with her grandfather, as a high school student she started making research trips to county courthouses, and she’s been at it ever since.  She’s a board member of the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society and blogs about family stories and genealogy research tools at Voices from a Distant Past.

Katheleen’s been on Treelines since shortly after our launch at RootsTech.  She wrote us, “I am particularly intrigued because you are showing us something new:  how to take the ‘dry’ documents that we are researching and reveal the vibrant, living people they represent.”  From our conversations, it seems like Kathleen was doing that all along — Treelines just gave her a platform to share the results.

You’ve been working on your family history for many years. What about this story of the twins led you to make it the first story you shared on Treelines?

My grandmother was one of the twins, so I grew up hearing this story over and over again — it was such a part of their sense of identity. Telling this story on Treelines was a no-brainer, because the facts are so engrained in my memory of my grandmother and her sister.

Everyone who reads the story is struck by the part where you write that Jessie Lee prepared for death when she learned she was pregnant at 45 in 1919. It’s just one of those period details that captures the dramatic differences between our ancestors’ lives and our own. Any advice for other family historians looking to find those small bits of historical context for their own families?

The best advice I could give would be to scrutinize every detail of your stories — sometimes the punchline is hidden in plain sight. A family anecdote explains what I mean: Jessie Lee came from a long line of southerners. During the Civil War, successive Yankee raiding parties came through their farm and helped themselves to food and provisions until the family had nothing left but the honey in their beehives. A group of soldiers wanted to take that, too, but the only vessels they could find to take it in were the “honey pots”……. and my family has been laughing at them ever since. I told this story to a friend recently, and got a puzzled look in return. Then I realized that most people don’t know that “honey pot” was a euphemism for “chamber pot.” So, don’t take any story at face value; try to dig a little deeper to see if you can flesh out the details. Google is a godsend for discovering obscure facts!

Why did you want to share a story about your family publicly on the Treelines site?

I am driven by the idea that the more we know about our history, the easier it is for us to put our own lives in perspective. Stories help us see that our ancestors have experienced life’s trials and tribulations and ultimately survived — so we will, too. There was a wonderful article in the New York Times not too long ago describing how families that know their history are more resilient and psychologically healthy than those that do not. I think that sharing stories publicly can be reassuring because it provides more evidence of our common humanity.

With all of your experience doing traditional genealogy, what is it about stories that you find so compelling?

Stories add color to an otherwise black and white view of the past and adds a human dimension to the dry facts we uncover in our research. I will always be a traditional genealogist because things like factual accuracy, citations, and source analysis all matter to me. The truth is that stories are the means by which the past lives on to touch and inspire the next generation. Through stories, family members who are not genealogists suddenly understand why we are so obsessed with history.

Like all good stories, the end of your Treelines stories left me wanting to know what happened next???  How did Jessie Lee & Abel cope with becoming parents again at 45 and 60?

My grandmother, Kathleen Lynch, wrote: “With two babies to raise, Mother and Daddy decided that they couldn’t afford to get old and die any time soon!  They bought the Arcade Hotel in Springfield, Ohio, and we began a life of hotel living….”  Sometime before 1930, Abel and Jessie Lee left the hotel business, moved to Washington DC, and bought a farm in the country.  Their son, Julius, was employed in DC by the US Government, and I suspect they moved in order to be near him.  It wasn’t exactly oranges and grapefruit, but Abel worked the farm until his death in 1940. In 1944, Julius died of a heart attack at age 50, so Jessie Lee always called the twins her “blessings” because if they hadn’t come along, she would have had to live the last 20 years of her life alone.

Another great-grandfather of Kathleen’s was a real black sheep!  Read about him in her Treelines story, A crafty fellow.

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A long-lost grandfather who sends letters on aluminum foil and drives a psychedelic-painted school bus.  A tenacious granddaughter who feels responsible for healing the rifts in her family going all the way back to the Old Country.

A 14-year old’s quest to find her grandfatherIt would be stranger than fiction if it weren’t the true story of how genealogist Marla Raucher Osborn got started at age fourteen!  This former California lawyer now makes her home in Paris and travels frequently to Galicia to visit her family’s ancestral town of Rohatyn and research in local archives.  She writes and speaks extensively both in the U.S. and Europe about her work, especially to Polish and Ukrainian school children.

Treelines gave Marla a place to preserve the more personal aspects of her family history than her usual publications afford.  She wrote us, “Like sitting down with an old friend and talking – that is Treelines.”  She took a break from her busy schedule to share a bit more about herself with us:

You are the author of the most popular story on Treelines so far!  How you found your estranged grandfather made strangers cry.  What do you think it was about your story that people connected to?

There is a very basic and powerful human desire to be remembered; to project into the future: “I lived,” “I was here.” This, I believe, is the role of memory and therefore of story-telling. Through divorce and economic circumstances, a child was separated from his father; so successfully separated, that not a single photo remained for that child to cherish and pass on to his children. I inherited that void – that empty space – in the family memory. To be able to tell this story is to acknowledge that my grandfather lived and that he is remembered.

As the story of finding your grandfather concluded, it seemed by your arrival in Poland that you had caught the genealogy bug big-time.  Why does it matter so much to you to trace your family back and uncover the stories of their lives?

Like many Americans, I am a grandchild of immigrants. For many of us, there is a sense of having been cut off from from our roots. This is particularly powerful for Jewish Americans, but also for immigrant families who then re-settled in California: the move west was like a second emigration and a second window closing on the past. In trying to understand the historic circumstances and the underlying motivations for my grandparents’ moves (from Old World to New World to West Coast World) I learn more about my parents – and about myself. There is an emotional anchoring that comes from this knowledge, and for me, a contentedness that comes from finally becoming “connected.”

What was the experience like for you to share a story about your family publicly on the Treelines site?

While this was not my first “public” publication, I found writing this story quite different, because it was less record-focused and not specifically directed toward genealogists and researchers. For Treelines, I wanted to recount the path that led me to my grandfather as if it was an intimate conversation between close friends. So, I sought the right “voice” for the narrative and strove to humanize the research side so that the tale that unfolded wasn’t just a lineal recitation of facts through letter writing, archives, and the internet. It was important that the reader “ride” with me, first as a 14-year old child, then as a mature woman winding through the Przemysl Jewish cemetery. The story’s drama, I hope, comes from the unpredictability of its ending – me, thirty years after finding my grandfather, in the Polish town where his family once lived.

As one of our first writers, you clearly had a strong sense of what story you wanted to tell.  What advice would you give to new users of Treelines who are deciding what stories they want to tell?

Find the kernel – the central, moving, inspiration, emotional core – of your story, and focus on that when you write it. Every family tale has a kernel. It may take some massaging to tease it out, but it is there for you to find and develop. It is the kernel that touches the human heart and turns a personal, individual story into a human story.

Marla’s research in Poland continues in her Treelines story, 1920s Best of Friends.

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