Every genealogist has a dream about finding the proverbial trunk in the attic that is chock full of genealogical treasures: photo albums, family Bibles, newspaper clippings, vital records, and so on. I can proudly say that I am one of the fortunate few who have, more or less, made such a discovery. Perhaps it’s more proper to say that my Mom made the discovery in the upstairs of my Grandad’s house after he passed away in 1991. She and my aunt sorted through it to some degree, then Mom took the trunk (more properly a metal footlocker) and put it in my old bedroom at her house for safe keeping.
I was back in Ohio for a week when my Grandpa Otto passed away in January 2005 when Mom asked if I’d help her go through some old family things. She hauled out the trunk and we proceeded to sift through its contents. The greatest gem of all was a handwritten family history which went back as far as my 4th great-grandfather Thomas. The second greatest gem was a labeled picture of my 3rd great-grandfather Thomas and his wife. Other treasures included my great-grandmother Creighton’s Bible (filled with obituaries of family members) and pictures of my great grandparents Huffman and Creighton. I made scans of the written family history and most of the family photos we found (nearly all of them unlabeled) to take back with me to Oregon.
As a teenager I had done some genealogical work. I took genealogy as a 4-H project one year, and my research had me thumbing through dusty ledgers at the county courthouse, hoping to find the names of great-grandparents’ parents and thus adding another generation to my family tree chart. To this day I still have my cryptic, chicken-scratched notes on high school notebook paper and the family tree chart which was the culmination of the 4-H project.
I drifted away from genealogy shortly thereafter, though my interest in family history never went away. Finding my great-grandmother Huffman’s handwritten family history of her Thomas ancestors re-whetted my desire to push back the murky veil of generations past and discover forgotten branches of my family tree. My research had never taken me as far back as these Thomases, nor the Wiseley line they married into. I had once again been bitten by the genealogy bug and I’ve been off and running ever since.
After I got back home to Oregon I looked over my old high school notes to re-familiarize myself with the branches of my family tree and how they all connected. Then I got some genealogy software and started filling in boxes with names and dates. I immediately noted that computers, genealogy software and the Internet were a much more efficient way of doing genealogy than paging through dusty ledgers and drawing tree charts with a ruler. But there could be no replacing these ledgers, nor a much faded picture labeled in pencil nor a family history, hand written on scraps of typing paper. Were it not for these primary sources there would be very little information to post on the Internet or enter into the genealogy software.
When my folks drove out from Ohio the following summer I asked them to bring the trunk with them since Mom didn’t really want it and I knew my research would lead me to sift through it again, many times, more carefully. When I talked to my Dad on the phone shortly before their departure from Ohio he told me that he’d loaded “the trunk of dead relatives” into the back of the pick-up truck. The trunk had been christened, and it was forevermore referred to by its new, colorful moniker.
