Short answer:
To yammer giddily about all things genealogy.
Long answer:
Some of the most exciting things that have happened to me as a result of blogging have been genealogy encounters -- Google searches that bring me together with people who have fascinating stories to tell me about my family. As a Latter-day Saint I believe that while the Internet has many powerful positive uses, one of its main reasons for being is to facilitate family history research by reuniting fragments of stories. And of course in the process of introducing us to our dead it also re-unites the living, and both of these developments further the larger goal, which is to help us each see our place in the human drama and foster in us a compassion for our fellow humans. Families -- good, bad, and (most of them) in between -- are the most intimate and potent manifestation of the larger challenge God presents us with in making us citizens of the world: the challenge of being thrown together with a group of Others (some more other than others) in a dimension characterized by limited time and resources and vision, and managing to love them and hope good things for them in spite of knowing them very well. Mormons believe that this knowledge and compassion is to culminate in actual acts of proxy religious ordinance that lift each individual and then connect each to each other, beginning with our primary responsibility -- our immediate family -- and radiating from there, generation by generation, to everyone who ever lived. This means that in addition to the fascinating journey of historical discovery we are given the privilege of doing something concrete to thank those who came before us for their worthy sacrifices and also to offer our forgiveness for any pain that they might have passed down to us through the generations. We get to be thankers and demi-saviors all at once. We get to catch glimpses of who they were in this life and play a small but crucial role in determining whom they can become in the next.
I’m sure that even those not of my faith can appreciate how psychologically satisfying this is, as doctrines go, both for those who can envision no happy existence without their families and for those whose experiences with family were marred by discord, neglect, cruelty, despair. It places family at the center of eternal sociality, and offers the means by which the imperfections in families (not just in individuals) can be purged.
But whatever our motivations for wanting to know ancestors’ stories, there remains the research. The delightful, maddening research.
I will attempt to make most posts appealing to a general audience -- more narrative than technical. Some postings will be about my research on my own family and I may include more dry details in those as one of my primary hopes is that Google searches on specific names and dates will bring distant family members to my blog so we can collaborate in our research. I will also post about research I’m doing for or with non-family members and anything from the realm of the dead that I think might be of interest. I’m not going to hold myself to any strict format -- the only constant will be my desire to get non-addicts addicted and current addicts overdosed.
Thus creating more dead people for me to chase.
Welcome to the chase, all you not-yet-dead folks! And please -- if you decide to go and die on us, be sure to leave a decent paper trail so we can track you down again with minimal agony.
Thank you for your cooperation.
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Well done, Marie!
ReplyDeleteCarvel
Marie, thanks for posting this. I read your original from 2007. This really is a puzzling family. I suppose you have already heard of the family legends linking us to a twin conch shell and two brothers of the Asael Smith family. It is intrigueing but doesn't seem to hold any water. I'm not sure you are heading down the right path though with Sarah Alice Van Cleaf Smith though. The birth dates on your blog indicate that she was born about 8 months after Polly. It is interesting that she has 4 names but none of the other children do. It seems that the more likely scenario is adoption. Polly died as a baby and her mother was capable of nursing a child about the time Sarah was born. Joseph and Emma Smith adopted the Murdock twins when their own died. These children maintained the name of Murdock and joined it with Smith thus acquiring a 4th name. This same pattern has occured in others of my own ancestors. It seems more likely to me that Sarah was the daughter in a VanCleaf family whose mother passed away when she was a baby. The normal course followed at the time was to have another family take the baby in and raise it as their own. If I were researching this I would look closely at VanCleaf families whose mothers died about the time Sarah was born and then look for Smiths who were their neighbors.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous comments above are mine. My name is Steve Layton and my email is stevenlayton64@yahoo.com. I couldn't get my URL to take on your blog so I sent under anonymous. I descend from the first son Thomas Sasson Smith. Another possibility to consider is that Sarah could have been born into the Smith family, married and widowed young, thus taking her married name into a second marriage.
ReplyDeleteHi Steve -- Thanks for the comment! I'm going to respond to this on the posting about Jeremiah Smith so that others from our family who find my blog searching for this family will be sure to know about this exchange and your comments....
ReplyDeleteOh, and here's the link to that other posting (the one about Jeremiah Smith):
ReplyDeletehttp://idigthedead.blogspot.com/2010/02/jeremiah-smith-mystery-part-1.html