About 15 years ago, I took a genealogy road trip through Northern and Western New York. It was an opportunity to conduct interviews and visit cemeteries, town archives, and county historical associations.
Highlights included seeing the farmhouse built by a maternal third great-grandfather, and visiting a cemetery with my father to find the graves of various paternal ancestors.
There was another memorable moment at the Clinton County Historical Association in Plattsburgh, New York. In the archives there, I found a large, handwritten family tree showing the extended family of the same third-great grandfather who built that red brick farmhouse:
When I first opened the diagram, an electric thrill went through me. There were names, dates, and places of origin I had never seen before.
According to an annotation in the corner, it was created by a distant cousin, probably in the 1940s judging by the dates at the bottom of the family tree. Likely, her descendants had donated it to the local historical association, which had faithfully fulfilled its mission to preserve this important document. Staff encouraged me to take a photo to bring home for a more detailed examination.
We had a similar experience a week later at the Niagara County Historical Association, where my father and I found parish lists, newspaper archives, and a cemetery plot list that showed where ancestors were buried.
The role of local genealogy societies and history groups
What these local associations provided is not unusual. In towns, cities, and regions all over the world, there are organizations like this which support genealogy and local history and community life. Run by dedicated volunteers on shoestring budgets, or by professional nonprofit or government historians, they bring together the history and people of the local area.
If the local archives or history museums are hard to visit, it’s possible to turn to digital resources that some groups share online, such as this index of memorial inscriptions from the Aberdeen and North-East Scotland Family History Society:
In recent months, these online databases and indexes are under threat by Ancestry, which has been caught scraping and republishing genealogy data without permission in order to feed its relentless quest for more paid subscribers. Ancestry’s behavior harms local societies and museums, which may lose new members and donations as Ancestry takes over the search results for local genealogy data.
It’s important to visit and support local archives and repositories in whatever way you can. Visit the exhibits and archives. Share what you found with friends and relatives. Become a member of the local history museum or genealogy group. They are responsible for preserving local community history and genealogy resources. It is they - rather than for-profit firms like Ancestry - that need our support.
