In the midst of the holiday season, my family history is never far from my thoughts. Perhaps it’s the time spent planning family get-togethers as well as the remembrances of holidays in the past. Whatever the reason, my family and its history are an integral part of my holiday plans.

I spent this Thanksgiving in St. Marys, Georgia, with my brother and with first cousins from my mother’s side of the family, spouses and significant others. Now that we are the “older generation,” a somewhat scary notion for all of us, we all seem to recognize our own mortality and the need to record the important details about our families. Once again, I’m concerned about doing too much of the ‘genealogy thing’ and possibly turning off some of the relatives. However, this time I prepared in advance for the four days we all spent together and the payoff was enormous.

In "Along Those Lines . . ." this week, I’d like to share my pre-planning with you in the hope that you, too, may get some ideas to perhaps turn your own family gathering into a gathering of genealogical and historical information.

What Do I Take?
When I considered the possibilities of meeting all this family at the home of my first cousin, Penny, I had to make decisions about what to take and what methods I would use to gather information.

I e-mailed with Penny in advance to ask that she let me take a look through the family photographs in her possession. I told her I planned to bring my laptop computer and scanner to capture images. Sure enough, Penny had put a box of family photographs and letters on the cedar chest in our room. Wow! I could hardly wait!

My genealogy database is installed on my laptop computer and I had made time to make sure that I’d exported both a current GEDCOM file and all the digitized photos from my desktop computer to the laptop. Everything was current and in synch.

I broke my cardinal rule about never taking originals with me on a research trip. I took the binders with the documents and photos for the common surnames of HOLDER, WEATHERLY, BALL, and SWORDS, along with a few other collateral lines’ information.

Needless to say, my digital camera and extra batteries came along and got a real workout. The digital voice recorder also got some use.

Setting the Scene
We arrived before some of the other folks and began scoping out a good place to set up everything I had brought. Cousin Penny’s home is lovely and very spacious. Like most families, we spent lots of time around the kitchen table. However, the house has a huge ‘great room’ with sofas, easy chairs, and tables. I commandeered one of two card tables and used it to set up my laptop and scanner to one side of the room. I turned on the computer, opened the genealogy database, and it remained on for the rest of the weekend.

Each of the binders of the families’ documentary materials and photographs are quite large. I set one on the coffee table, one on each end table by the sofas, and on other tables. The HOLDER binder was on the coffee table and this is the family that seems to be of most interest to all of us. I opened that binder to the materials about our great-grandfather, Greenberry HOLDER. This was to be a catalyst for discussion.

Gathering at the Family Gathering
As the cousins came into the great room, their attention was drawn to both the binders and to the computer. I believe everyone looked through each polypropylene sheet protector in each binder during the weekend. As a question came up about one relative or another, I looked up the information in the database. That brought more attention to the contents there, and my Cousin Marty actually sat down one evening to correct dates of his entries and to add information about his family. Boy, isn’t that getting someone involved?

We spent several hours together going through the photographs that Penny had pulled for me. Almost every picture brought comments or explanations about the people, place, time, and circumstances. Fortunately for me/us, Penny had spent time with her mother reviewing and labeling the older pictures before her mother’s death. Some of these identifications are invaluable because they now help me identify some people in heretofore unlabeled pictures! You can imagine how elated I was.

There were even photographs of relatives whose images I’d never seen before but whose names and stories I knew. For example, in my column of 18 November, “Tracing Great-Uncle ‘Dutch,’ I mentioned his wife, the former Essie Eunice Buffington. Among the photos was a cabinet card portrait of her and, in addition, pictures of both of their children. As I shared the story of my investigation of Great-uncle ‘Dutch’ and Great-aunt Essie to California, we all looked at the photos and could relate to these people as having been real relatives.

That spurred my cousins to start asking about other of our great-aunts and –uncles they knew little about and to share personal remembrances about those they had known well. Being the youngest of this older generation, I listened carefully to every story and ran the little tape recorder to capture as many as possible. These are the details that bring these people back to life. They also provide the hearsay clues that, in some cases, will point me to other documentary evidence research.

Making New Memories
This Thanksgiving provided those of us who were there -- five of the seven cousins -- to become closer, share memories of the past, and to make some great new memories for ourselves. We shared recipes, stories, photographs, took new pictures, dined on the waterfront in St. Marys, did a little walking, and a couple of us even squeezed in a visit to a very historic cemetery there dating back to the late 1600s.

We’ve already agreed that we will meet as a group at least twice a year at someone’s home or in some family place. Since we have ancestral ties to Rome, Georgia, I am sure that it will be one of our sites. However, we’re already planning a springtime reunion in Atlanta that will include one of our first cousins once removed, an eighty-year-old man who has been doing research on our maternal grandfather’s line for many years.

Get Ready
The remaining holidays of the season are still ahead of us. With some advance preparation and some strategic planning, you also can do some information gathering at your family gatherings. Even the non-talkative family members may well add a little of their own information when the conversations get going.

All in all, I had a wonderful chance to spend time with my brother and my cousins. We all learned a lot more about our ancestral families and this helped solidify the bonds between us. I wouldn’t have traded this opportunity for anything.

By the way, my Cousin Penny gave me all of the older family photographs to add to our family archive. She’s also on a quest in her house for a doll that belonged to one of our great-aunts. I feel the “genealogy happy dance” coming on again!

Happy Gathering!
George

Join George and eleven other genealogical speakers on Genealogy Cruise 2006, hosted by Fly Away Travel. The seven-night Caribbean cruise departs on 29 October 2006 on Royal Caribbean Line’s luxurious new Mariner of the Seas from Port Canaveral, Florida, for stops in the Bahamas, St. Thomas, and St. Maarten. The at-sea days will be filled with more than 70 genealogy presentations. For more details on this great cruise, please visit www.genealogycruise2006.com.

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