Growing Your Family Tree

By EMILY MITCHELL

Growing up in eastern Tennessee, Alice Wilkinson liked nothing better than listening to her grandmother talk about the family's past. Little did she imagine that this childhood fascination would lead to a 17-year quest for her roots and the discovery that she is related to Revolutionary War soldiers as well as fighters on both sides in the Civil War, and that she shares ancestors with former pro quarterback Terry Bradshaw, Senator Strom Thurmond and Elvis Presley. "All of a sudden I have connections to all this American history," marvels the 62-year-old retired schoolteacher. Looking at the boxes of deeds, wills, marriage and birth certificates going back 11 generations that fill her Houston apartment, she says, "Once you start doing something very simple, the bug bites."

Millions of other Americans are getting bitten as well and, like Wilkinson, are poring over courthouse documents, library books and archives in search of their heritage. A 1995 study by Maritz Marketing Research found that 45% of adults in the U.S. declared they were at least somewhat interested in genealogy, and of those ages 45 to 64, half were actively pursuing it in some way.

Behind the heritage hoopla is the newfound ease with which family connections can be traced, often with the aid of computers. Millions of federal records can be found in Washington's National Archives and Records Administration and its 13 regional branches. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, contains billions of names, with thousands more added each month by 75 research teams microfilming records all over the world. In 2000, visitors to Ellis Island will have computer access to all passenger lists of ships bringing immigrants to New York Harbor from 1890 through 1924. State and local archives are expanding and collecting information about the latest wave of immigrants. The Denver Public Library takes pride in its wealth of Hispanic genealogical material, and, says director James Jeffrey, "because of our Western History Collection, we have a lot of information about Asians who migrated to Hawaii and then to the mainland. But we are searching for other sources."

Another reason for the explosion is the need baby boomers have to look back and understand where they've come from. This is especially so in light of the fragmentation of families. Genealogical pursuit, says Ralph Crandall, director of Boston's New England Historic Genealogical Society, "is an attempt to reconstitute the family, at least symbolically." Shirley Wilcox, president of the National Genealogical Society in Arlington, Va., acknowledges that "computers and the Internet are also responsible for fueling interest." Masses of material can be organized more efficiently with software programs such as Family Tree Maker, the Master Genealogist, Ultimate Family Tree, Family Origins and Personal Ancestral File.

With all the programs and websites, the digging nowadays should be a breeze. But is it? "Computers have made the process easier and more accessible to more people," says David Rencher of the Family History Library, but, he points out, they can also perpetuate mistakes, since "it's also impossible to call back information." Cautions archivist Connie Potter of the National Archives: "What with websites, e-mails, faxes and cell phones, people think they are going to find information right away once it's on a computer system. They're not. It's a complex, time-consuming process. You start with one fact, and it can take forever to verify."

Indeed, playing family-history detective takes time, patience and effort. Helen Shaw, 48, of Chicago started with only the family Bible and a grandfather's scrapbook. They led her to a quiet cemetery in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. "It turns out," she says, "that I'm related to about three-fourths of the people buried there." Now a professional genealogist, Shaw photocopied local census records and created a 500-page manuscript documenting the entwined relationships of the cemetery's roughly 2,500 people. Phyllis Heiss, 76, of Boca Raton, Fla., tracked her family back 15 generations across five centuries and estimates that her still incomplete family database has the names of 11,000 relatives. Heiss, who has taught genealogy classes at the Family History Center in Boca Raton for more than 10 years, has traveled through the South and to Europe, and had her own history come alive when she talked to someone who remembered a great-grandfather in Missouri, a circuit-riding Baptist minister who, she says, "wore a tall silk hat and a swallowtail coat and taught hellfire and brimstone."

While research can take months or even years, a hunter sometimes gets lucky. During renovation at Chicago's private Newberry Library, curator David Thackery, 45, found a rolled-up family tree of the descendants of Richard Lippincott, who arrived on these shores around 1640. Several years later, tracing his own family, Thackery discovered he had Lippincott ancestors on that very same tree. "You can spend five years on one link and get nowhere," he says, "but when you get that one name, you may be able to take it back several generations in a single day." Margot Williams, 50, a minister of education for St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Bethesda, Md., is of African-American, Cherokee, Seminole and Saponi descent. During her first visits to the National Archives, she pored over an 1880 census to find some of her black ancestors. She was getting discouraged after 2 1/2 hours, until, she recalls, "lo and behold, I began to find family members. Once the 'Aha!' factor and the 'Oh, wow!' factor take over, you don't mind the hunt at all."

African Americans find their roots all over the world. Antonia Cottrell Martin, a co-founder of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society in Washington, is a fourth-generation descendant of pioneers who drove cattle to California during the Gold Rush. She advises using a variety of documents, explaining that "a South Carolina Dutch slave owner's documents can help locate black cousins in the Netherlands. Census records might find a Chinese ancestor in Mississippi or one born in Canada, Madagascar, New Zealand or, of course, the Caribbean." Finding the right name provides many clues. To students in his genealogy classes at Chicago State University, Tony Burroughs says that "in many instances, a former slave did not use the name of the former slave owner." He suggests locating records, such as ex-slave narratives or military pension rolls, in which a onetime slave may have stated a former owner's name. In genealogy, he says, "we have to walk in the footsteps of our ancestors."

That journey often stirs painful memories. Before 1943, six decades of restrictions barred Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. The few allowed in were interrogated at length, and their detailed case files offer invaluable though sometimes heartbreaking information. Says San Francisco's Albert Cheng, who is president of the Chinese Culture Foundation: "The exclusion acts devastated our families, but they provide the only record here." Miraculously, Cheng, 49, has located five of his family's 32-volume genealogy books, the traditional records kept by village elders, and has used them to reconstruct 3,000 years of familial past.

Sadly, many family documents disappeared during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, and it had long been believed that the records of Europe's Jews were destroyed during the Holocaust. That myth has been shattered, says Estelle Guzik, director of the New York Jewish Genealogical Society, adding that "a significant number of records remain, and people are uncovering them daily." After talking to relatives and tracking down as much about her family as she could in the U.S., Guzik traveled to Poland, and, against all odds, found in the small village of Korczyn the 1884 tombstone of her great-great-grandfather.

Her family, like everyone's, is unique. But just as all families are different, they are alike in that the path to the past more often than not leads far from home and makes many unexpected turns. Whatever directions it takes, the rewards are great. There's the thrill of the chase, the delight of discovery and always that one mysterious, elusive ancestor somewhere back there just waiting to be found.

--With reporting by Melissa August and Chandrani Ghosh/Washington, Curtis Black/Chicago, Deborah Fowler/Houston, Timothy Roche/Pensacola and Megan Rutherford/New York, with other bureaus

With reporting by Melissa August and Chandrani Ghosh/Washington, Curtis Black/Chicago, Deborah Fowler/Houston, Timothy Roche/Pensacola and Megan Rutherford/New York, with other bureaus