bennison@clt.DEC (Victor Bennison - DTN 381-2156) (12/16/85)
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Re: Doing genealogy by looking through phone books.
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Okay, okay, there are always counterexamples. There is always the one
person who wins the lottery whose success will always stir others to
continue buying lottery tickets. My point is that it is a low probability
approach. I've met scores of Bennisons, including an ancient genealogist
who HAS written to just about every Bennison in the country, and I have
never been able to connect to any of them. I run a newsletter for people
researching the uncommon name Loop. I have 45 subscribers, most of whom
are seriously researching the name, and I cannot yet connect to any of
them. Those are the most uncommon of the hundreds of surnames I've found
in my family tree.
You can spend your time doing whatever amuses you. But if you have limited
amount of time to spend on genealogy and want to maximize your chances
of success given that you have only that amount of time to spend, then
searching for contemporaries with the same surname is not what I would
recommend as an approach. I view phone book genealogy as a last ditch
effort, after my other research options have come up dry. And, of course,
I would never use it for any but the most uncommon surnames. The
experienced genealogist plays the odds. I certainly hope that no one out
there gets discouraged and gives up after only trying the phone book
approach.
If you want to hear a success story: After collecting all that my parents
and grandparents could remember about the family tree, I went down to the
Newberry Library in Chicago. Within 20 minutes I had one line of my family
traced back into the 1600's in colonial America. Fortunately, most of my
lines have not proved that easy, or I might have lost interest long ago.
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As a person gets deeper into genealogy, he or she tends to make the following
transitions:
1. From researching the surname given to them at birth, to researching
all the surnames in their tree.
2. From researching only direct ancestors, to researching the complete
families of ancestors.
3. From using pedigree charts, to using family group sheets.
4. From trying to go as far back on some line as possible, to trying to
fill in the more recent generations.
5. From wanting to know names and dates, to wanting to know details of
the ancestors' lives and personalities.
6. (And sometimes) from doing genealogy (all my direct ancestors) to
doing family history (all the descendents of an ancestor).
Genealogy is a wonderful hobby. It's enormously educational, it fosters
a stronger sense of family, it's engrossing in its many mysteries, it helps
you to know yourself and your society.
Vick Bennison
...decvax!decwrl!rhea!tools!bennison
(603) 881-2156