Back in the late 80's and early 90's my sister-in-law, Eileen and I decided to research our families history. She worked on her family and helped me work on mine. I think she decided to do it because she was marrying into our family and she and Robbie were getting ready to start a family of their own. I decided to tag along.
We started out by digging up what little information was available at the SFA library. Although SFA has a good library, it wasn't a genealogy library and that was what we needed. For you kids, this was before Al Gore invented the Internet. We started out by getting death records of people for whom we knew death dates and places. To get this information, you had to write to the local county clerk sending a SASE (again for those of you who aren't that familiar with snail mail that stands for Self Addressed Stamped Envelope) and a check, usually for $10 or $15, sometimes more or less with the full name, date of death and any other information you might have and then wait. Sometimes we waited a week before a death certificate came in the mail and sometimes it was 6 weeks. But when a death certificate showed up, it was like Christmas morning at 225 E. Spradley! Death certificates contained a real date of birth and location. It was like gold.
Once we had that, the next job was to send off to the county clerk where they were born and get a birth certificate. That gave us their parents names and their dates of birth! If a death certificate in the mail was like Christmas morning then a birth certificate in the mail was like Christmas, birthday, Easter, Thanksgiving and the last day of school all rolled into one! You could practically hear angles sing when we got a birth record.
And then we discovered the Clayton Library in Houston. The Clayton is to genealogy what Bill Gates is to computers. It is like Mecca if you are into finding out who and where you come from. When we first started going there it was in an old house in the old museum district in Houston. It is a great area. You had to get there really early to be sure and get a parking place. Eileen and I were young at the time and didn't have a lot of spending money. What little money we had went to cover death, marriage and birth records of long dead relatives. Well... that and beer at Cotton Eyed Joe's on Thursday nights. But Eileen's beer budget dropped rather dramatically when she became pregnant.
When we would go to Houston to research we would both plan out what we wanted to look for during our visit. Then we would get up bright and early on the morning we were going and drive down getting there right when the library opened. We ate breakfast on the way, usually something we brought from home since all of our money was being saved for gas and vital records. We always packed a small ice chest to carry. It would contain Cokes, sandwiches, snacks and the all important Ding Dongs. We never researched without a good supply of Ding Dongs waiting in the car. At lunchtime, we would leave all of our stuff spread out on our work table and go out to the car for a picnic. After our first visit or two, a new Clayton Library had been built at the same location to replace the old house that it was previously housed in. When that place was built it was amazing! Everything was state of the art. No old time microfiche readers for us, no sir! These were brand new microfiche readers!
What I learned over all that time was that my mom's family who had been in America for many generations was very easy to research. There were all kinds of trails to follow. You could always find a random Hamilton, Overstreet or Kendrick on an old census somewhere. My dad's father's family might have been even easier to research than that since they had been in Houston for many generations. There was more history than anyone really wants to know on the Meyers and Perrin's. Eileen eventually found an old relative of ours that no one even knew existed who was a Perrin and lived in Mt. Pleasant. Her name was Clemmie and Robbie, Eileen, Matthew and I went to visit her one day when Matt was a toddler. She told us all about the research that she had done and what she knew of our family. She gave us old photos of our great, great grandparents and then took us to the private cemetery where many of our ancestors were buried which was out in the woods somewhere near Mt. Pleasant. Somewhere around here, I think I still have photos of little Matt crawling around near headstones as we talked with Clemmie. Matt is now an adult and married.
What we never learned was anything about my dad's mother's family. Grandma Meyers and her family all came over from Czechoslovakia before she was 10. Beyond that we really never knew anything. I wrote to the Czechoslovakian embassy at one point asking how I could get information and telling them what I knew. I received a response saying that since it was still under communist rule that the information I was requesting could not be disbursed by the government. It would be necessary for me to find out where she was from in Czechoslovakia and send money, specifically $100 to start with, to a priest in that area to do the research for me. They would be able to do the research through church records. Well, at the time $100 may as well have been $10,000 because I didn't have either amount of money to spare. So, I never went any further on her family.
Last weekend, I was at my parents house and my dad mentioned that one of his sisters is going to be in Prague next year and had asked him what, if anything, we had ever found out about Grandma's family. She was hoping to make a visit to her hometown if she had time. I told my parents that since it is no longer under communist rule, we might be able to dig some information up out of Czechoslovakia now and maybe this would warrant a trip to Houston and the beloved Clayton Library. This really started getting me excited. Yesterday I pulled my old genealogy stuff out and found a copy of the letter I had written to the embassy all those years ago containing the information we had about Grandma's parents.
So, I got on Ancestry.com and signed up for a 14 day free trial membership and found out that they did not all come to America at once. My great grandfather actually came over a year earlier and started settling in Houston county. Then my great grandmother and the kids came over the following year on a different boat. My grandmother always insisted that she was NOT Bohemian. She said that Bohemian's were gypsies and she was Czechoslovakian. Well, it turns out that on the ships registry next to her name, her mother's name, and that of each of her siblings they were from Bohemia. Last night I Googled maps and history of the area at the time and until WWI, all of that area was called Bohemia but there were almost constant struggles and at about the time they left the country Czechoslovakian had once again become the official language replacing the hated German language. They had previously been ruled by the Austrian monarchy and were becoming an independent state. So, it makes sense that her family would want to be called Czechoslovakian's since that was what the new republic was to be called.
Anyway, with all of this information and whatever else I can find in the next few days, I think that I will soon be ready to make a trip to Houston and the Clayton Library. I am really looking forward to doing the research and I think my parents will enjoy going as well. Eileen is currently in Jamaica and I doubt that she has time to make the trip with us since her summer is already so full. But we won't go until I have had a chance to invite her. You never know when a box of Ding Dong's might turn up in an ice chest.
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