Family History: A box of secrets

Every family historian has at least one story or event on which hours have been spent, trying to unravel the truth.

What would happen if there were a knock on the door, you opened it and a box was delivered into your hands. Inside, you would find documents, photographs (labeled!), journals and other records.

What would you like to see in that box?

For me, that’s an easy answer. One of the last family members to arrive in the US from Belarus brought with him a 300-year-old family history. The few people who saw it described it as a sort of book, compiled of different kinds of papers, different calligraphies, many different languages, all bound together.

When the family member died in Florida in the 1950s, his daughters were already living far away in different states. Everything in the house was thrown out, including the priceless family tree, compiled by many generations. As far as we know this was the only copy; very few people had seen it.

I’ve spent more than 25 years trying to reproduce some of what might have been in those documents. We’ll never be able to complete it all. Well, not until someone invents a viable time travel machine.

Those papers would reveal when, why and how the family moved to different countries; where they settled, their occupations, the names of generations and – I hope – much more about our ancestors.

That’s what I’d like to see in that box.

I would hope that information on my maternal great-grandmother’s mother would be in there, as well. What was her first name? Why did no one ever speak about her? What was her maiden name? What is the truth about her disappearance, for that’s what happened. Her daughters never spoke about her, or at least never told their own children. When I started asking questions, the answers were always the same, “We don’t know.”

That’s what I’d like to see in that box.

I’d like to see the unraveled information on my mother’s paternal grandmother. What’s her connection to Bialystok, Poland, where everyone claimed she was from, and how did she wind up in Suchastow, Galicia (today, Ukraine). What about her likely two marriages, and her last husband’s three marriages? Would the box reveal which of the children were hers, his or theirs? Even with some amazing resources online for then-Austria-Hungary in the mid to late 1800s, the records are still murky.

That’s what I’d hope to see in the box.

Going back to Catalunya, Spain, I’d hope the notarial land records were in the box for our probable ancestor, listed in a 1358 document. He was a wine-maker, so where was his vineyard? What else is there about his family? I’d hope that we’d be able to add to the handful of index and document appearances of our rare surname in a very small geographic area.

That’s what I’d really like to find in that box.

What would you like to see in the box that you might receive?

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