Genealogy, A Respectful Adventure   
   
    My  first smattering  of interest in genealogy came back when  the miniseries, Roots, started stirring up the guilty sediment in America's family pots.  Like a lot of people, I began to think bit about the past, but only a bit.  In the pre-computer age,  people pursuing genealogy seemed a lot like those people who prowled the fields with butterfly nets. They just weren't the people next door.  With the passage of time, and the accumulation of wisdom, with its tell tail hallmarks of gray hair, relaxing flesh and wrinkles, that changed.  We all knew how smart we were.  Now, we all had the world's knowledge at our fingertips to help us prove it.  We could tap into it in the privacy of our own homes, and go forth and dazzle our friends with all our newfound trivia.  No longer would our aching bones be faced with long days traipsing through strange cemeteries.  We could reach back and touch someone using a mouse.
    The internet still has a long way to go in this area, but a surprising amount of information has already been posted on it.  The amount of help available is impressive.  One site alone, www.cyndis.list  is reputed to have enough links to send you off in 100,000 directions.  Some records are available online.  On one site, the Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild has posted over 7,000 passenger lists. You may be able to read the family group's names, ages and occupations and other information form the manifest of the ship on which they arrived in the U.S.   These lists are typed up by volunteers who read the handwritten  pages preserved on government microfilms.  I have done two, which are on this site already, and I just finished a third, with 1,044 passengers, including my grandmother's family. It will appear in volume 8.
      The stories you can find would make a thousand movies.  They would describe people traveling with small children for four to six weeks in crowded spaces with poor food and even poorer sanitation, no refrigeration,  sleeping on floors that never stop moving.  In the event of storms, they moved a lot.  On my grandmother's ship in 1883, a ten year old boy died of meningitis and was buried at sea. No one knows how many ships were wrecked.  One source I  read said that during a single year in the mid 19th century, over 250 ships were lost.  Some of the articles which follow will detail some of the conditions these people faced.  The dangers facing these people were generally known. For them to risk so much, they had to be well motivated. Wars, famine, disease,  economic deprivation and religious persecution were some reasons.  They were a life or death alternative to emigration.  The Irish Potato Famine which influenced my ancestors  was one of these conditions, but not the only one.  Some information on it will follow.  Author Leon Uris, in his great novel on Ireland, "Trinity," wrote that when you visited a cemetery in Ireland, you could tell which families had relatives in America.  They were the graves with headstones. There was a term used to describe some of the ships which transported some Irish--"Coffin Ships."  Many of these ships lost a third of their passengers.  There is an island  in Canada's St. Laurence River called Grosse Isle which was the site where thousands of immigrants were quarantined and buried.  
     In transcribing passenger lists for posting on the net I was struck by the fact that the total records of these immigrants were reduced to a few words and numbers on a single line of a ship manifest--a passenger number, name, age, occupation, birthplace, national origin, destination, class of travel--not much more.  No mention is made of what they experienced during the trip-- seasickness, the food they ate, degree of sanitation, privacy or lack of it, the weather experienced, their fears.  All that these people endured during the most fearful, momentous, life-altering period of their lives was reduced to a few words on a single line on a document.
    Genealogy gives people a chance to gain some insight into the lives of human beings who lived, loved and died beyond the reach of human memory.  They have been reduced by time to words on papers in dusty file cabinets.  Genealogy enables these people to come alive again in the minds of people who have a reason for caring, people who have the same genes in their bodies, and  who may even bear a resemblance to the serious faces in old fading photographs.  This fast moving world, pushing us forward at a dizzying pace with its rapid doubling of human knowledge, is trying its best to relegate our people into the dustbins of history. We shouldn't let it.  Our ancestors are worth a second look.

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