About a decade ago, there was a commercial on television that kept running over and over in regard to searching for ancestors online and how easy it was to do so. That commercial was Ancestry.com. In the time period since, Ancestry continues to run commercials and advertisements of their service that has now included DNA testing and matching. But this is not entirely where the personal interest started.

The interest began when a younger relative presented a book that included a grandfather of yours truly. This book highlighted his attempts to vote in rural Mississippi and his efforts to do the same for others as a member of a notable group, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). This started the idea to gather more information about him that was, more or less, not as previously considered of personal interest on this end. The first searching efforts started at Family Search. Finding details about that grandfather and the grandmother became more intriguing with each finding. This expanded in asking the last surviving grandmother questions about her own family tree. Helpful information was given even if some names and locations were challenging to find. Regardless, after some months, an account was created with Ancestry on a free trial. After that point, the real discovery began.

Through Ancestry, I was able to find both sides of most of the great-grandparents and great-great grandparents with enough of the ease that was portrayed in those commercials. This also unlocked a ton of mystery about the family tree (maybe far more than expected or needed to know about). With this, the ball kept rolling with new discoveries from other members with their own trees to continue on the journey to add new distant aunts, uncles and cousins. As of the time of this writing, the number has far surpassed 6,000 people. It is still stunning to find that many people that is part of a whole line of genealogy, and that’s just the ones of knowledge. There’s so many more that have yet to be found.

A lot of the direct predecessors have had specific highlights: from being military in notable domestic wars to being in the ministry to education and landowning. Given the tree is an African-American tree, there’s only so far one can go back due to certain practices that happened during previous periods. Despite this, from the Civil War up to the current time, it is still beyond belief that records of this sort have been preserved, digitized and accessible in this matter for someone such as yours truly to acquire. Believe me when it is said that it is not taken for granted as this provides the stories to write my own right now. There are some agreements and disagreements on practices, ideologies and others from that previous time period compared to today. But, at the least, those ancestors had their own hope for the future to be better than it was before them even when their present time was neither informative nor equal or fair.

In the last five years, newspapers have played a significant role in more storytelling than any census or legal document ever could. Those articles (including obituaries) showcase the person and the people surrounding them. It has helped fill in those gaps that were missing and maintain a better idea of what these relatives, past and present, have been about. Some of these newspaper archives have even made it to the Library of Congress. That in itself is nothing short of amazing.

If I would have been told ten years ago that all of the information regarding the ancestry would be this intriguing enough to spend hours among hours researching, the idea would truly not have been thought of kindly. It would have actually been dismissed. There have been elder relatives who started that journey without the advanced tech and resources decades prior. The biggest benefit on my end is the ability to be as tech-savvy enough to access digital platforms to expand that search. Being an information major in college certainly helps a lot in that. In fact, the argument could be made that going through college as that major influenced the idea to start the ancestry research in the first place. Those skills helped develop better ways to search and obtain. As a result, the tree is better connected now than it was at the start.

Overall, the case has been made that genealogy can be a really compelling topic. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has shown this in his long-running show, “Finding Your Roots” on PBS. Celebrities have been discovering a lot about their heritage and have encouraged others to do the same if they can. One could see it is pretty apt advertising and promotion. It shows that it is big business. That said, there was no more need to be convinced that the stories are interesting enough to shape the present and the future as best as possible. In a time where the use of information can, unfortunately, be weaponized for personal or political gain, genealogy can be used to showcase pride or simply to educate at the minimum where one comes from.