Chasing Grandmama....

By Jeanne Adams

I've been chasing my husband's Swedish grandmother. Now doesn't that sound exciting?

Relax, people, she's been dead since the 1960s. I mean that "chase" thing metaphorically. You know. Genealogical chasing. I know, I know, it's one of those crazy things I do when I'm supposed to be doing important things like laundry, or paying bills, or taxes.

Hunting the dead. Pretty serious. The Internet has made this brain-frying pasttime a lot easier, but it's still frequently a puzzle. Take Grandma Adams, for instance. She imigrated from Sweden. Her name was Linda Carlson.

Yeah, you guessed it there were hundreds of Carlsons that came to the USA. Literally, hundreds. They came from all over Sweden. Lots and lots and lots of Carlsons. And Andersons. And Dahlstroms. And Olsons. And they named their children Gustave and Olaf and Linda and Emma.

Guess what? Those names I listed? They're all kin in some way to Gramma Carlson Adams. And did any of them leave any trace of who they were or where they were from? Ohhhhhh, no. They came here and got jobs and got married, but they changed their names to Roy, and John, and Elle.

So, it's kind of a puzzle. Truth be told, I actually like puzzles, which is why I do genealogy research. Of course, it's also why I frequently tear my hair out over the aformentioned research.

Ironically, when you get to the whole Adams side of thing? Pretty easy. Just head north on I-95 to Boston. Hang a left, go to Quincy, Massachusetts and pick a graveyard. Can't swing a dead...ancestor...without hitting an Adams relative. Lots of documentation. We genealogy buffs love that documentaiton stuff.

Of course, we have to give a nod of thanks to the Mormons too. They are wicked crazy about preserving genealogical data. They've almost single handedly worked to save all the Ellis Island records.

Problem is, they just store it. They don't authenticate it or check it. There are no genealogy police, at least I don't THINK there are.... (Of course, there supposedly are no fashion police either, but given my atavistic inability to wear white shoes after Labor Day, I believe they do exist.)

Ahem. But I digress.

Here's the problem. People go to Ancestry DOT com, they find their family tree and voila! they import hundreds of years of data, stuff other people have posted.

Geeee, isn't it great?

Not so much.

You see, they don't check the facts. (Remember Joe Friday? Just the Facts?) Well, there are a ton of entries in one of my family trees where people have added "facts." Problem is, those facts - usually extra children no one had ever found before! Wow! - aren't cross-checked. Like, did that kid's birthday fall before the mother turned sixty? What about the four kids on one family tree I just ran across that were born...(drum roll...wait for it...)after the mother was dead!

Miracle birth indeed.

Fact checking is important. Source documents are important. Really. Really. Important.

So, despite the temptation to accept that Lovisa Carlson who came on the ship Chrisitana out of Stockholm is Gramma, as several people have tried to suggest, I've resisted. I know better. I checked the dates. I checked the parents names (which, miraculously, I know!) So, nope. She's not the one.

Its hard to reisist in writing sometimes too. You know, they show stuff on TV - surely THOSE folks did their research right? They got the science right, surely? - or someone writes something in a book and other writers copy it because, well, surely THAT author did his research, right?

Seriously, now. You don't believe that, do you? When I was researching stuff for Dark and Deadly, I had to call my local arson investigator. After I convinced him I wasn't a psycho - hey, it wasn't easy, I was calling to ask him about bombs! - or a firebug, he gave me some interesting info. You can start a fire with a molotov cocktail, but you can't really blow something up. Not really.

Hmmmmm. Not at ALL what I expected. I mean, I'd seen the shots on the movies where someone throws the lit bottle full of gasoline and BLAMMO! Turns out, you get a big whammo, but its all show. Fire. No blammo.

And that bit where someone shoots at a car and it blows up? It so doesn't work that way. Really. You actually have to hit the battery to get that effect. Guess what? That means you actually have to know where the battery IS. I had to go look under the hood of my car to remember where it is on my car. Got another "guess what" for you. It isn't the same on every car.

So, if you wanna shoot one? You gotta know where the battery is on that make and model. Same thing with the gas tank, which, I've been told is just as hard or harder to hit than the battery.

So no blammo with a bullet unless you're really, really, really good and you have to know your cars.

Who knew?

But like the kids that get added to the Family Tree Maker and AncestryDOTcom lists after the poor woman's dead, if you don't check your sources, you get it wrong.

Of course, there's also the issue of getting it totally right, but no one believes it - ask me sometime about the helicopter in the beginning of Dark and Dangerous sometime! - which is a whole different blog. Snork.

One of these days come soon, I'm going to figure out the whole Gramma Adams riddle. The information, as the X-Files likes to say, is out there. I'm pretty good at research. I'm gonna find her. And her brothers and sisters. Allllll fifteen of them. Yep. And hey, they're dead, it's not like they're going anywhere! Haha! (Sorry, genealogical humor there. Oh, the other one is the bumper sticker: I brake for Graveyards, which I do)

So, what about you? Where do your people hail from?

Are they long time Americans (1600's for my family)?

Are they Swedish? Grins.

Or, are they Irish, Scotch, Indian, Latvian or Persian? Or something entirely different?

And have you ever caught a writer in a research mistake?

Grins....c'mon...spill!