How We Got Here

For a nation that takes pride in its self-made men, its immigrant dreams, its fresh starts and forward progress, we are fixated on delving into the past. And through the marvels of modern technology, it has never been easier to browse family history from the comfort of your couch.

Enthusiasts like to say that genealogy is the fastest-growing hobby in the United States. (Or second-fastest, in some versions.¹) It’s also said, with a wink, that there’s only one thing searched more frequently on the web.

Tracking down family history used to mean typing out letters and sending them around the country, in hopes that some person or some municipality might have an answer. It meant traveling to courthouses in distant counties and walking through old family cemeteries.

After years of searching and social networking the old-fashioned way, genealogists were quick to realize the World Wide Web would change everything. These early-adopters congregated on rudimentary message boards, swapping facts and AOL email addresses.² Now amateurs browse through millions of scanned documents, upload family photos and collaborate on shared family trees. Thousands of servers hum around the clock so we can stare, bleary-eyed, as great-great-grandmother’s birth certificate appears on the screen.

Of the thousands of sites devoted to family history, none rival the size or influence of Ancestry.com. What started as a website launched in 1996 by a small publishing company is now an empire of family history sites boasting a collection of 11 billion records, 2.5 million subscribers and 40 million searches every day.

Ancestry.com considers itself a technology company focused on family history, Vice President of Development Eric Zimmerman says, and its job boards are filled with positions that didn’t exist a generation ago: database managers, software engineers, UX designers, archival digitization specialists.

The next frontier moves the search from old records to the science lab with affordable DNA testing, available from Ancestry.com for just $99.

“This is a really exciting time in genealogy,” Zimmerman says.

The number of people investigating their own histories has increased with the ease, but the reasons have not changed: Some people chase romantic notions of castles in Scotland or rumored ties to celebrities. Some are curious about the family stories they’ve heard over and over; others about the ones never told. For the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — a longtime leader in family history research — it’s driven by the belief that our ancestors are bonded to us forever and want us to find them.³

But the most immediate reason, the one that comes up more than any other, is a death in the family. Maybe a box of documents was found, or an album of photos. A question remains, and there is no one to ask.

At Eastern Washington Genealogical Society’s spring seminar, guest speaker Mike McKinnon is speaking to a full conference room about tips for better Google searching. The audience could be mistaken for a reunion of retired teachers, and they take notes on legal pads and smartphones as McKinnon shows the audience how to use search operators and how to avoid porn when you search a woman’s name in Google Images.⁴

And then he demonstrates how Google Street View lets him zoom to the small Irish town where some of his ancestors once lived, and walk around as if he were visiting.

“And I am now in Ireland,” he says.

Oh my goodness. A wave of gasps and murmurs fills the room.

Most of the society members were born long before computers became part of our everyday life — some can find themselves on the 1940 census, released last year — but much of what the society does now is directly related to digital: Classes are held in the library’s computer lab every month, small groups are based on preferred family tree software and presentations take on topics like adjusting to life without Google Reader. The society’s blog just got named one of Family Tree Magazine’s Top 40 Genealogy Blogs of 2013.

But they’ve been doing this a long time, and they know the Internet doesn’t have all the answers. Not yet, probably not ever.

Up on the third floor of the downtown library, the family history shelves hold thousands of volumes — city directories, land records, surname histories, multi-volume indexes — that belong to the society but have been housed at the library for decades. The society has accumulated some 5,600 items since it was founded in 1935, and some of the oldest books reflect the roots of early members who donated their personal collections.

Near the books, the only card catalog left in the library contains the work of Lee Patchen, who started indexing the collection in 1948. For years and years, he clipped out obituaries from the local papers and pasted each one on its own card with the name, the date and the paper. By the time he died in 1970, he had made about 200,000 cards.

“The Internet is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to resources,” says Miriam Robbins, who, in her 40s, is one of the younger members of the group. “There are so many things in repositories and archives that aren’t digitized or microfilmed, and never will be.”

Robbins teaches seminars and classes on using the Internet as a research tool, but she first got interested in genealogy before that was an option. Her grandmother was adopted and had found the names of her biological parents in some guardianship papers. Robbins researched the names, found the mother’s living relatives and was able to reunite her grandmother with them after more than half a century.

Robbins says she feels fortunate that she learned to research the old way, because now she sees two distinct groups: Older people who aren’t taking advantage of everything that’s on the web, and younger people who assume they can find everything there.

“There’s this disconnect between people who’ve been doing it the old way and people who are doing it the new way — and they need each other, they really do.”

My great-great-great grandmother Mollie R. Peach was 19 when she got married to Sevier Frost on Christmas Day 1869, in Barry County, Missouri. She was widowed at 31, with six young children and another on the way. 

The railroad was expanding south into Texas at that time, and by 1890 the family settled in Denison, Texas, a bustling hub where the MKT Railroad — called the “Katy” — intersected with the Red River. Denison was called “The Gateway to Texas” and “Katy’s Baby.” Its proud founders built an opera house, a handsome brick public school and, at five stories, the tallest skyscraper in all of Texas. Main Street wasn’t paved, but it was built wide to accommodate big plans.⁵

Mollie’s sons went to work for the railroad.

Her second son, Hardy Late Frost, fell for a Texan girl as pale and delicate as a porcelain doll. Her name was Ethel Groom, and she wasn’t yet 18 when they got married in 1895. The first grandson arrived the following year: baby Earl, named for his uncle Early.

Then times got harder. Ethel died without seeing the new century, the day after her only son’s third birthday. The boy was in the fifth grade at the city’s public school when the family received news that the railroad had claimed the first of Mollie’s sons. The brief newspaper account at the time said Hardy Late Frost “was killed in the yards at Mena, Ark., Wednesday night.” The train carried his body home.

The family put a notice in the paper a few weeks later: ⁶

“We wish to thank our friends and neighbors, and especially the O.R.C. lodges ⁷ at Mena, Ark., and Denison, Tex., for their kindness and many acts of sympathy during our great bereavement in the loss of our son and brother, H.L. Frost.

Mrs. M. R. Frost, Brothers and sisters and little son Earl.”

The first rule of genealogy for beginners: Use pencil. 

Out at the Spokane West Stake Center for the FamilySearch Symposium, genealogical society president Donna Potter Phillips begins the day of seminars with a lighthearted but cautionary tale about collecting heart-shaped rocks with her daughter. It’s easy to find a rock that looks sort of like a heart, she tells the group, and easy to convince yourself that it’s close enough — and that’s the moral.

“Make sure you gather into your bag only persons who are your ancestors,” she cautions. “No making them fit.”

Some of those who’ve watched amateur genealogy evolve are concerned that sites like Ancestry.com may be overplaying the ease of discovering true roots.⁸ The broad search and suggested connections make sure people find something, but not always the right thing.

Tracing family history may be easier than ever, but that doesn’t make it easy. Documents have mistakes, county names and boundaries change,⁹ and whole collections of records are lost. The vast majority of the 1890 census was destroyed in a 1921 fire at the Commerce Building in Washington, D.C., leaving a two-decade gap right during the Industrial Revolution time when Americans were on the move.¹⁰ At least 16 million military personnel records held in St. Louis, Mo. — including most of the Army records for both World Wars — were lost in a 1973 fire that blazed uncontrolled for almost an entire day.

And then our ancestors don’t always help, either. Three generations of Williams marry Elizabeths, or five cousins with the same name all grow up together in the same town. Our ancestors went by their initials, or their middle names, or spelled their own names differently at different times.¹¹ Divorced women were often recorded as widowed. Adult children guessed where their own parents were born. Imagine a census recorder stopping by a farmhouse in the 1800s — depending on who answers the door, the answers might be very different.

The reunion with ancestors is not always as we imagine. Once a woman from out of state stopped by the downtown library while visiting Spokane. Her family had always spoken of a relative who lived in a Spokane, a prominent early businesswoman, and she wanted to see if there were any truth in it. Sure enough, it turns out the relative was quite well-known — especially to police, as a rather successful brothel madam.

The facts of the past are not always kind ones. Our family trees bear slaves and slaveowners, cowards and criminals, murderers and victims. Our ancestors were praised for killing Indians, and disowned for getting divorced. Our families covered up homosexuality and mental illness, and the documents sometimes tell very different stories than our relatives do.

Often what you find is merely the bones — a birth date, a place, a cemetery record. It’s much harder to find the sinew of history — the whys, the hows, the connections that turn a few names and dates into a full life story.

It’s sometimes put this way: On a headstone you will find two dates, the beginning of the life and the end of it, with a dash in between. As the basic vital facts become easier to track down, more people are trying to understand the dash.

At the edge of the Eastern Washington University campus in Cheney, a state-of-the-art building holds the region’s history. 

On the first floor, the Eastern Branch of the Washington State Archives cares for the past. The sweet scent of old paper lingers in the cool, climate-controlled stacks, where heavy leather-bound volumes fill the beige shelves with original records of marriages, deeds and prison fines.

The second floor houses a less traditional repository — the nation’s first-ever state digital archives. The space feels halfway like a library and half like a tech startup loft, with standing desks for the programmers and a pingpong table outside the fireproof data vault. One room is full of archaic computers, cassette players and early Macs — partly as a functional hardware library in case an old file surfaces that’s not compatible with modern computers, and partly because it’s awesome. Network Administrator Harold Stoehr says that room is a tour-group favorite.

“People will run up to some old computer like it’s an old friend,” he says.

Farther back, lights blink and spinning discs act as the digital equivalent of archive assistants searching for materials in the stacks downstairs. An adjacent room contains an elaborate system for backup power, and multiple backups of the 55-terabyte database are kept in the reinforced, fireproof vault. The people of Washington can rest assured their data is prepared for the worst.

The digital archives were built from the traditional model, with lockers for researchers’ things and a reading area just like downstairs. But pretty much no one came by — aside from some EWU students who realized it was a quiet place to study for finals — and why would they when it’s all online?

The primary mission of the digital archives is to capture state and local records that are “born digital” — audio recordings, governors’ emails, snapshots of agencies’ websites. But through statewide projects to image and index historic records kept in the five regional archives, the website has also become a portal for searching a vast number of Washington documents.

“The demand is to have things online,” says Steve Excell, the state archivist in Olympia.

Occasionally they still get longhand letters, and some people still drive to the archives in Olympia to sift through original documents in the reading room, but most people don’t want to do that — they want to sit at home on a rainy weekend and poke around in the archives on their own time.

They started with the marriage records, because each one matters to two families.¹² The eastern branch finished so quickly that King County shipped over 700,000 marriage records, dating from 1855 to 1990, in a secured state archives truck. The original records were sent back just as carefully, but by then each one also existed as a digital file intended to live online forever.

They’ve since moved on to birth, death and naturalization records, though the pace slowed as the budget got tighter.¹³ The state archives staff is half of what it was five years ago.

And the mission of preserving public records is harder than ever before. Paper endures better than electronic records; we rely on computers for everything, but we still treat paper with more significance. Excell, the archivist, calls digital records “fragile.”

“When it went electronic,” he says, “we had to compete with the delete key.”

It’s said that my great-great-great-great-grandmother, Amelia Lonesome Patterson, had 24 children, though there is proof of only 17: Micajah, Elijah, William English, Thomas Simpson, Matthew, Nancy Ann, Mary Adeline, Elizabeth, Rhoda, Sevier, White, Snow, Winter, Young, Sarah and Hiram Joseph. Besides her own children, it’s said she was a midwife who helped bring every child in the county into the world.

Amelia and her husband, Elijah Frost, were both born on the frontier side of the mountains in eastern Tennessee in the years after the Indian Wars, when that land was still Cherokee territory. Elijah’s father, Micajah Frost, had come from Virginia with his father and brother after the Revolutionary War,¹⁴ and settled on a piece of land set between two ridges along Poplar Creek right about the time Tennessee became the 16th state of the union in 1796. It’s said they were the first white settlers in the area.

A few Frosts stayed put long enough to be buried in Tennessee, but most of the sons and grandsons kept moving west, pushing the frontier clear out to the Pacific Coast. One went by wagon, crossed the mountains six times, then settled outside Boise.¹⁵ One was shot and killed in the streets of a California town.¹⁶ Some fought in the Civil War, some homesteaded in Missouri and some left Oklahoma during the Great Depression.

The place where Micajah Frost laid claim to land is still called Frost Bottom, but no Frosts live there anymore.

What will happen to our Facebook pages? Will our grandchildren read our Twitter feeds? 

The criminals and the congressmen get their place in history books; the governor’s emails will be archived. But what about ordinary folks — the ones who get up each day, go to work, hug their families, pay their bills?

We say our lives have never been so documented, but what will endure? We don’t write letters. We’re not listed in phone books. Federal census questions now are purely statistical — it no longer will say where we were born, or where our parents were born, or what our occupations were.

In some ways digital records are more like oral history, says web historian Marc Weber — the files must be copied and updated regularly to keep them from disappearing. Unlike paper documents tucked away in attics or clay tablets buried in natural disasters, digital records will not survive by accident.

In 50 years, institutions will have a system for preserving digital records, Weber says. But we haven’t adapted yet, and we don’t know whether big companies like Google and Facebook will make a point to preserve the data we feed them. Our generation could leave behind an unprecedented record of everyday life, or we could see our digital lives abandoned and lost.

“It really could go either way,” Weber says.

In 1943, when Earl S. Frost died in the stairwell of the county courthouse, the courtyard on the north side of the building had not yet been filled in. On that September evening, light would still have been coming through the five tall windows at every stair landing. 

If you look closely, you can see the outlines where those windows still exist inside the wall. Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton and facilities manager Ron Oscarson, guardians of courthouse history, point it out as they guide me through the building.

I had called Dalton earlier that day with an admittedly odd request and sent her the two Spokesman-Review articles about my great-grandfather: the report from the morning after he died, and a short feature from a decade earlier that explains his job duties and pictures him sitting behind his desk.¹⁷

In her office within the Auditor’s Office on the second floor, she shows me reports from the early years, bound together in green volumes and stamped on the cover with “Not To Be Taken From County Auditor’s Office.” Dalton hopes to have the books imaged at some point, but for now they reside in a glass-fronted bookcase near the door to her office with every other annual report published since the 1890s.

The 1929 report is the first with his name listed — Jack Frost, Chief Accountant — and the last is 1942. I turn the pages and try to imagine the man whose life’s work is printed in these columns of numbers.

“You’re touching what he handled, what he touched,” Dalton tells me.

For a couple of years starting with the 1943 report there are occasional pencil marks beneath the published sums and figures — those corrections suggest he was a hard man to replace, she says.

In another book she turns to a floor plan of the building at that time, and points to the little typed label spelling out ACCOUNTING in one of the turret offices — the same turret office we are in now.

I look around at the curved wall and windows overlooking Broadway Avenue. Dalton and Oscarson point out the radiator in the newspaper photograph, and there it is below the window. They point out the hand-painted wainscoting in the photo, which still exists in an office down the hall.

Oscarson points out that there are only two things that separate us from history: time and space. And when you hold the same things they held, or sit in the same place they sat — it’s only time.

And then I walk down the stairs Earl S. Frost walked down, day after day, until his last.