Saratoga News

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Carol Haws, co-director of the Regional Family History Center, rolls out a 10-generation history of her family.

Salt Lake Connection

Modern technology brings genealogical histories close to home

By Sandy Sims

Who knows what characters lurk in a person's ancestral past? Not long ago, finding out was an exotic luxury for the few, the dedicated--and the Latter-day Saints. Then along came the captivating television miniseries Roots, and everyone began to wonder about their ancestors. Today, thanks to the open-to-anyone policy of the Family History Centers at nearby Churches of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more and more people are scouring through old records with the dedication of private eyes. They are piecing together a family epoch that connects a chain of real characters in time and place, each character a part of the living person's legacy.

In former days, a person on a genealogical search trekked all the way to Salt Lake City to the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There they sifted through the repository of records that the church has been compiling since 1894. With the invention of microfilm--a process of filming documents in greatly reduced size--in 1938 and now with computers, anyone, including the residents of Los Gatos and Saratoga, can do their sleuthing close to home.

It's a case of necessity being the mother of invention; these centers have come about because of an important need for members of the church. Carol Haws, retired head of dance in the theater arts department at San Jose State University, is co-director with her husband, Ervin, of the Regional Family History Center in Santa Clara. She explains that the church has a "deep and abiding faith that all members of a family can be together for eternity." Latter-day Saints are taught that they have a religious obligation to trace their own genealogies and bring their ancestors into the church. To do this they must accurately name the family member and then submit that name to the church according to a family covenant.

The centers are open to everyone. "In fact," Haws says, "75 percent of the people using the Family History Centers are non-members." People come for many reasons. Once a real live private detective in a trench coat and hat (it was raining that day) showed up at the Santa Clara Center looking for marriage records. No matter, volunteers there will help anyone. However, the tedious work is for the person doing the search. "A man came in one day," Haws says, "and said, 'I hear you Mormons can find out about my grandfather.' When he realized he had to search through the records, he left muttering other things about 'you Mormons.' "

Latter-day Saints are often called Mormons, which is actually a misnomer. Mormon was the prophet who revealed the sacred Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith in 1830 in Fayette, N.Y. The followers are called Latter-day Saints.

In search of their lost ancestors, Latter-day Saints continue to amass records. Some 35 or 40 teams of photographers are out photographing records in cities, villages, churches and government offices worldwide. Russia has even opened her documents for filming. "Once I had a soul-'wammering' experience," Haws said, "when I realized that three small pieces of microfiche I was holding in my hand contained 400 years of history for one little tiny village in England. These were the entire birth, death and marriage records of that village, and the total cost for the report was $1.20." For every set of records they photograph, they leave behind a microfilm
copy to preserve the record for that organization. All original microfilm is stored in
a vault in the mountains of Salt Lake City.

Searching for your family members "becomes a fabulously intriguing detective story," Haws says, "because you have to figure different ways to find records of people, and you have to work backwards," searching carefully through marriage, birth, death, church and probate records, census reports, land records, even old family Bibles and other obscure sources.

Through a careful search, she learned that one member of her family, who mysteriously died young, had committed suicide in a jail. She found out that an aunt was not buried where everyone thought she was buried, and she learned, picking her way through the handwritten notes of a German minister, that one of her great-grandfathers had come to the U.S. because he was given the choice of either that or the death penalty for a crime he committed. When she went to Flanders Field in France to see an uncle's grave among those who'd died in WWI, she could not find his gravestone. Instead, she found his name engraved in a lovely monument at Chateau Thierry, just outside Paris. There she learned that he'd died in a train explosion.

"I try to be quiet, but when I find a name I usually let out a yelp," says Karen Parrish, owner for 20 years of The Jeweler's Bench in Los Gatos and former Family History Consultant at the Los Gatos Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Rose Avenue.

Parrish, who does extensive research for other families as well as her own, says she's "amazed at how much is out there." She knew nothing about her family history, but has learned they were early immigrants, mostly farmers. Some in North Carolina were also poets, and a book of their poems is stored at Salt Lake. Parrish sent for a microfilm of the book and learned that this group kept a still at the back of the house. Another relative, after diving into a river to save someone, punctured his ear drums and became deaf but went on to sire nine children and be a successful farmer.

More immediate and alarming information became evident through Parrish's search. She noticed that several women had died of the same disease. When she checked it out, she found it was breast cancer, "but they didn't used to call it breast cancer then," Parrish explained. Because she passed this information on to her mother and her aunt, they were able to detect their breast cancer early and successfully treat it.

"This [genealogy] has added a new dimension to my life," Saratoga resident and church member Gail Judd says. "You become interested in history through this process of connecting with your family." After finding out that her family came over from Ireland during the potato famine, she now reads books on that period of history. She says, "This stuff gets hold of you, and you want to know more."

One family piecing together their genealogy found that the trail of births, deaths, and marriages followed the path of the difficult beginnings of the Latter-day Saints as they were banished and violently thrown out of region after region in the United States.

Sometimes, as Judd found out, the connections you make are with living relatives. She gathered some family information and sent it to Salt Lake City to be entered in the ancestral file (a file available to anyone to review or add to). Then a relative from Canada who connected with Judd's work wrote to her. "As a result, we have become close friends," Judd says. She also connected with family members in England and stayed with them during a visit there. "They took me all around to the little parish churches, and I even stood in the old church where my grandfather was baptized."

Depending on where a person's ancestors hailed from, the sleuthing can be easy or rough going. For example, Scotland's church records are meticulous and now microfilmed in their entirety. England has the Doomsday Book, which is the 1086 census ordered by William the Conqueror when he wanted to know whom he ruled. (A facsimile was on view recently at the federal archives in San Bruno.) However, ongoing records weren't kept until the time of Henry VIII. Japan, for a period of several thousand years, only documented the educated citizens, and for a time India's records only reflected those who made a religious pilgrimage and dutifully reported it to the scribe of their same caste. Early settlers in Australia are well-documented because many of them were criminals banished there as punishment.

"One of the main places to begin a search is the census," Haws says. But even there, a person will run into problems depending on the year of the census. The U.S. began taking a census in 1790 and has done one every 10 years since. The first six censuses only wanted to know who the head of household was--and the number of females and slaves and animals, etc., in the household. In 1850, they added that they wanted to know the name of everyone sleeping in that household that night. By 1900 they were asking how many could read and write, how many living children, and how many of them belonged to a particular mother and their relation to the head of the household. Today, the census asks things like how many bedrooms and baths. "There is a move to stop taking the census, and for genealogists, that would be a disaster," Haws says.

"To begin [a search]," Haws says, "you need to gather as much information at home and from living relatives as you can." She also recommends community education classes as a good place to start. Then the best place to go is the Regional Family History Center at 875 Quince Ave. in Santa Clara because it's open during regular hours, and volunteers are always there to help. A new person can receive an introduction to how to use the materials. Once the person understands the process, then Haws can arrange to meet him or her at the church in Saratoga at 19100 Allendale Ave., which is equipped with two computers and a complete set of CDs with data from Salt Lake City. There they work on their own. Marilu Shar is the current family history consultant and person to contact at the Los Gatos church at 15985 Rose Ave.

What originally started as a quest for the Latter-day Saints is becoming a service to the world. With the work they are doing in conjunction with government organizations to gather and organize records, and with the Internet an ever-improving technology, it won't be long before we'll be able to ask our computers, "Where were my ancestors living in the year 1776?"

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