My Experience with Researching My Family History

I cannot believe my sister and I have been working on the family history project for over eight years now. Our family history project is a little different that what most people mean when they talk about family history. My father was a reporter and photographer for the local newspaper. He walked with a cane, and was quite a character, so he was well known around town. Unfortunately, later in life he suffered from Alzheimer's. It was very tragic for a guy so full of life and memories of many national and local history events!

The last time my parents moved, my mother told my dad to pack up his home office in boxes. At that time, the disease was just beginning to creep up on him, so nobody thought much about until years later after he had been quite ill and finally bedridden before he died in 2001. That was when my sister and I undertook the job of going through these boxes. Now when most people hear this story they think maybe one or two boxes. No, this was two rooms full of boxes. Every once in awhile we would find a box labeled in my mother's handwriting "Michigan Press Women," and, low and behold, it would be full of Michigan Press Women files neatly organized. But not the ones my Dad had labeled "Important Family Stuff."

To begin with, both my parents were the oldest children in their own families, so they both had a number of important papers from their own parents, sometimes dating back into the late 19^th Century. Box after box would be filled with anything and everything, with no particular order. It could be pictures or documents from my grandparents' youth and childhood, from my Mom's or my Dad's family, from our family, from my sister's kids or from complete strangers that he had taken a picture of sometime during his career! Every single piece of paper had to be sorted one by one.

We set up our workshop in my Mom's basement. We put boxes on the old dining room table for my Mom's family, my Dad's family, and each one of my siblings, plus organizations that my Dad was active in, like the Camera Club and the Church. After a day's sorting (We tried to spend at least 2 days a month doing this) we usually had a stack of "We are not sure" that we would show to my Mom for further identification.

My sister is very good at remembering little details, like the wallpaper or curtains of a certain apartment or home my parents lived in in their early years, or when my brother got glasses, or who were the neighborhood kids at the time. I am the youngest, so I do not always remember those details, but my training in 20^th Century history sometimes have given me clues to what is going on in the photo that she has overlooked. For there is more to this extensive collection than just what concerns one extended family. My dad took so many pictures during his career as a newspaperman extending over half a century, they are also of historical interest o the communities in which we lived.

It is our overall goal to get these collections to the people who would most enjoy them, like friends and family, but also to larger collections where they might aid others doing similar research. So far we have been able to make donations to two research libraries. One is here in St. Joseph, Michigan - The Heritage Museum and Cultural Center. The other is in Mason county, just outside of Ludington, Michigan at the Historic White Pine Village. We have come a long way, with many slow days of sometimes tedious work. But then, there would be that special discovery of a picture we hadn't seen in ages - and it would make it all worthwhile!