In the Beginning

 

The New Year is the start of #52Ancestors in #52Weeks, prompts provided by Amy Johnson Crow. My goal is to write at least two blog posts a month from the prompts. So here goes.

 The first prompt for the year is In The Beginning. I thought I would start at the beginning of my genealogical research. I started my research in early 1977. I was home with two toddlers, bored and looking for a challenge. I had been a history major in college and was still very interested in history. (I had only graduated a couple of years before.) One day, I saw a class offered through the local community education program. The class was Genealogy Basics, taught at a local school in the evenings. So I signed up. 

The instructor was a man named Mr. Ingalls (and yes, I believe he said he was related to THAT Mr. Ingalls). If I recall, he was a member of the local LDS Church. He talked about basic research principles, handed out various forms, and, for three or four nights, walked us through all the steps we needed to get started. 

So, you might ask - how exactly do you remember when that class was offered? While I was sitting in a class, learning about genealogical research, everyone else in the country was sitting at home watching ROOTS on TV. I missed the genealogical event that got so many others started on their journeys. Instead, I got a good grounding in genealogical basics. 

So off I went on my own journey. I started working both on my family and my husband’s family. I sent out questionnaires to some relatives (we were at least 400 miles away from the closest relatives, and long-distance phone calls weren’t a thing back then.) I went to the local LDS center, filling out those little forms to order microfilm. I think the first film I ordered cost $1.25. Eventually, that cost went up to somewhere around $3.50. Then I’d sit back and wait for those films to come in. Of course, I’d also check through the microfilm drawer to see if someone else had ordered a film of interest. 

I made frequent trips over to St. Paul to the Minnesota Historical Society. While I had no Minnesota people to research, they had a great French-Canadian collection, and my husband’s maternal side was French Canadian. I subscribed to Everton’s Genealogical Helper and read through each issue, learning about various things and checking all the inquiries included from people all over. I wrote many letters to county clerks requesting copies of records, sent off those checks for $5 or $10, and anxiously awaited the return mail. I built lots of files, trying out various filing systems, labeling systems, etc. 

And then life got in the way, and for the next 20 years or so, I only worked on my genealogy in spits and spurts. I finally picked it up in earnest again about 15+ years ago, and it’s taken over my life. While I prefer modern-day digital records and organization, starting out the “old-fashioned” way gave me an excellent grounding in genealogical methods. 

And it all started, in the beginning, with Mr. Ingalls.