I love time travel themes. Books like Diana Gabaldon’s six volume Outlander series and Michael Crichton’s Timeline (Ballantine, 2000), now also a movie of the same name, make me wish I could zip back in time to learn more about my mysterious brick wall ancestors. I’d be able to see them in action, maybe ask a few questions and learn more about their lives. Of course, it would be a matter of accepting the good with the bad. Not all of my ancestors were saints.

Since time travel isn’t a reality, it’s not possible to walk through a stone circle like Gabaldon’s characters to meet our ancestors in person. However, by searching records and studying everyday life it is possible to catch a glimpse of the real person behind the name on your family tree.

Photographs
“You see, but you do not observe” is a quote from A Scandal in Bohemia in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1890). I like to think that statement can be applied to family photographs. Each image depicts a person or persons, but how many of us take time to really examine a picture for genealogical clues. Where and when it was taken place your ancestors in historical context. What they are wearing might tell you about their social status or employment. Photographs are full of details that date the picture and provide clues about your family. Even the way the picture looks -- worn or perfect -- can tell you whether it was cherished by its owners.

In my small box of family photographs is a portrait of my paternal great grandfather, Harry Mansfield Wilson. It’s had a rough life. At some point a family member broke his picture into four pieces and then feeling remorseful, glued it back together on a shoe box lid. I wondered for years about the strength of feeling behind that action. Then I met my distant cousins. They told me Harry was a bit difficult. Stubborn and argumentative, he often disagreed with family members over this and that. Perhaps that explains the state of his portrait. No photographer’s name appears on the image, but his clothing tells me it was taken c. 1910 not too long before he died.

Directories
Another way to learn about your family is to track them in directories. These books come in a variety of formats: city directories that alphabetically list individuals by surname; house directories arranged by address; and business directories by business name. Each of these is useful for discovering information about your ancestors.

• In a city directory look for individuals of the same surname living at the identical address. They might be related to each other.
• Women sometimes appear with their husband’s names in parentheses.
• If an individual died in the year covered by the directory a death date could be included.
• Usual listings include a person’s name, occupation and whether they owned or boarded at an address. Some directories include the name of the employer.

You can search a large collection of city directories online through Ancestry.com. Public libraries, historical societies and state archives are good places to look for hard copies of these publications. Create a personal timeline of your ancestor’s directory entries to track their job and address changes.

Maps
Have you visited the town where your ancestor lived to see if their house is still standing? I once drove two hours to a little town looking for family evidence. All I found was a chain link fence where their house once stood, but the town historian told me about a map. While the house no longer existed, the map showed a small dot with their surname. It was proof they once lived there.

Hand drawn charts, printed town maps and large atlas volumes can tell you about the neighborhood in which your family once resided, and even details about the house construction. In addition to pinpointing where my ancestors lived the other dots and names gave me new data about the village in which they spent their lives.

Links to maps appear on Cyndislist and in the Library of Congress, American Memory Project. Keep current with the map offerings in the Ancestry Map Center by reading the Ancestry Daily News.

The Facts of Life
In some ways our ancestor’s lives resembled our own. They ate meals, worked for a living and paid taxes. In other ways, their lives were very different. You can learn about their daily pursuits by reading any of books in the Writer’s Digest Everyday Life series. Consult the Writer’s Digest website for a current list of titles. Intended for writers, these are fun for genealogists as well. A similar series, Everyday Life in America, also tell you how your ancestors really lived. Each one was written by a historian.

• Everyday Life in Early America, by David Freeman Hawke (Harper Collins, 1989)
• As Various as Their Land: The Everyday Lives of Eighteenth-Century Americans, by Stephanie Grauman Wolf (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).
• The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790-1840, by Jack Larkin (New York: Harper Perennial, 1989)
• The Expansion of Everyday Life, 1860-1876, by Daniel E. Sutherland (Fayetteville, Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press, 2000).
• Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915, by Thomas J. Schlereth (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992).
• The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915-1945, by Harvey Green (Fayetteville, Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press, 2000).

Reading one of these titles is bound to lead to you a new information source for your ancestors by helping you to think like them.

Whenever I get stuck I take out my family photos imploring them to “talk” to me about research avenues. Then I look at old maps seeking clues to the lives of these frustrating ancestors. If I don’t get any new ideas I’ll re-read one of the books listed above just in case I missed some detail the first time around. Of course I also review my research hoping I overlooked a clue. All of this keeps me busy while I wait for quantum physicists to develop time travel. I keep a list of questions handy for in case it becomes a reality. First on my list of ancestors to visit is Harry. I want to know if the family stories are true.

Check out Maureen’s blog on her website, www.photodetective.com to learn more about caring for your family photographs. E-mails received in response to any of Maureen’s columns may appear in future articles. You can reach her at mtaylor@taylorandstrong.com.

Copyright 2006, MyFamily.com.