Finding the roots

The book was old, but not as old as the woman whose name jumped out at me as I flipped through the pages. The name? Phoebe Crabbe. More than a half century ago, Katherine Comstock, Phoebe’s neighbor, wrote, "Another kindly soul who made an impression of unusual vigor and sterling worth [on me] was Mrs. David [Phoebe] Crabbe who lived to be 103."

Seeing that name startled me because Phoebe was my great-great grandmother who was born in 1797 in Fairfield County, Conn. I had never heard her name until recently when my parents gave me a carnival-glass bowl and butter mold that once belonged to her.

Now here was Phoebe’s long-ago neighbor, a woman who as a little girl had probably knocked on my great-great-grandmother’s door, maybe interrupted her as she patted butter into that same mold, talked with her, and then years later told about it in a book that I randomly picked up and read 50-some years after it was published. What luck, you might say, that I found a reference to my Yankee ancestor whose descendants came to live in the Virginia counties of Roanoke, Botetourt and Tazewell!

Luck did have something to do with it, but so did opportunity. I stumbled across the book while sitting on the floor in front of shelves of books devoted to Fairfield County. Surrounding them were books about all the other counties in Connecticut and about families who had lived and died there since colonial times. Those shelves must have held every book written about Connecticut’s history and its people. There was as much or more about every other county and state in the United States and about other countries, territories and possessions.

Much more information exists on microfilm and microfiche, which preserve fragile paper trails that humans used to record their goings and comings since record keeping began. Imagining the amount of information in the library was mind boggling — as if you were trying to see to the edge of the universe.

This remarkable repository of the record of man is the Family History Library, an imposing stone building owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. It attracts more than 2,000 daily visitors, people who come to search through databases, genealogies, out-of-print and rare books, and tons of bible, church, tax, census, ship, military and land records.

Most of these people are there because they have caught the genealogy bug — they want to know who their ancestors were and where they came from. I was fascinated with their intensity to find relevant information and put it into a coherent pattern. They take research classes taught throughout the day. Many bring their laptops loaded with software into which they scan pages from books and microfilm images that they snap with digital cameras.

There is no idle chitchat. The sounds one hears are the clicking of computer keyboards, the whirring of a microfilm reader as someone rewinds the tape, the humming of copiers, the clacking of printers, the opening and shutting of elevator doors as they move from one floor to the next in their quest to solve the mystery of their past.

Most travel hundreds of miles to sift through the mountains of information — they have to use their time efficiently. One Blacksburg man was there for two weeks. Two women came together, driving 22 hours from Missouri, to stay three days. When they return, they will find more information, for every month the library films 35,000 pages of records and adds more books and ancestry lines.

Watching these serious genealogists, I knew I could not match their passion for the popular hobby. I was content to find Phoebe’s name in an old book, my great-great-great grandparent’s marriage record and to learn that Thomas Jefferson surveyed a distant ancestor’s land.

I confess that I thought of genealogy as the passion of older women. Saturday, that group represented a minority. Once I counted 14 men and six women working at computer stations on the main floor. I counted again later and found an even split. I tried this several more times and realized the number of women never exceeded the amount of men. Researchers came in all ages, too, from young children with parents, to teenagers, all the way up to the graying crowd.

There’s an interesting diagram on one of the library’s walls. It acts as a teaser really, for it begins with Mayflower pilgrim John Howland and traces his line up to modern times, ending with former Presidents George Bush (and his son, of course), Gerald Ford, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Now, that’s a dream lineage.