Interview Your Parents and Grandparents Before You Lose Their Memories
Editor’s Note: Among Joe’s closing pieces of advice for anyone starting family tree research is one born of regret: interview the people who are still alive. Joe did not take a serious interest in his ancestors until his parents and all of his aunts and uncles were gone, and with them went the chance to ask simple questions that now require research, or that no research can answer. His counsel is to ask living relatives while you can, especially if you have a collection of old photographs, and to recruit other family members to help put names to the faces you don’t recognize. Asking cousins of his own generation, he found, was no substitute for asking parents or grandparents.
Transcript
Speakers: WJB — William J. Bowe; JH — Joseph Hart. Transcribed from the recording; punctuation added and obvious mis-hearings corrected.
JH: The other thing is, if you’re interested in starting family tree research, is to interview the people that are still alive. My mistake — or I’m not going to say a mistake, but I was unfortunate that I didn’t really get an interest until my parents had died, all of my aunts and uncles had died. And I lost the ability to ask some simple questions of some older family members and get the answers. Now it requires research, and sometimes it might be something that you can’t find in research. So don’t hesitate to interview and ask questions of living family members, especially if you have a collection of old photos. Recruit other family members to help you identify people that you don’t recognize, because there’s going to be a lot of people that you won’t recognize, which was my experience, and I didn’t have anybody to ask. So, well — and people that I did ask, because they were maybe in the Canavan line, I thought they’re maybe one generation older than I am. But that didn’t turn out to be a very good substitute for asking parents or grandparents.
