Genealogists Enjoy Life in Past Lane in Laguna Niguel

The search for the past can require the patience of a gold miner, swirling and sifting the silt. Then, suddenly, there’s a glint of precious material.

Carmen Brussard’s hundreds of hours hunched over microfiche ultimately led to this stunning discovery: She and her husband, who met at a dance in Los Angeles 34 years ago, are not the first joint love story from their respective families. More than 300 years ago in Holland, an ancestor of the 67-year-old Laguna Hills woman married an ancestor of his.

Across the table from Brussard, Norvin Snook, 71, of Temecula is recovering from a mild shock. He could find no evidence that his grandparents ever married.

What brings Brussard and Snook to the same place, the genealogy room in a south Orange County federal building, is a treasure trove of centuries-old records offering them glimpses of a tantalizing past.

Home to census records from 1790 to 1920, plus thousands of copies of lawsuits, naturalization papers and military and other records dating from the Revolutionary War, the National Archives and Records Administration in Laguna Niguel is where Southern Californians go to find long-lost truths about their families.

Of the three such national archives in California, the nearest other full-service branch is in San Francisco. The Ronald Reagan library in Simi Valley offers a more limited selection.

The Laguna Niguel documents are sheltered within the concrete confines of the Chet Holifield Federal Building, familiarly known as the Ziggurat because of its resemblance to an Assyrian temple.

Inside, the genealogy room seems much like a library: standard-issue chairs, Formica-topped tables and a hush of studious silence. Yet the mood is curiously charged; it’s easy to tell the people here are on a hunt.

File cabinets packed with thousands of four-inch boxes of census reels run down the middle of the room. Only the whir of the ancient microfilm machines breaks the silence.

Lucky visitors are assigned motorized machines, while the less fortunate are doomed to scan miles of microfilm by turning a finger-cramping hand crank.

Obsessed With Past Lives

It takes an obsessed kind of person to scour the 1870 census, which is not alphabetized and is handwritten in script ranging from patrician to chicken scratch. But thousands of people do it; genealogy is the third most popular hobby in the nation, after stamp and coin collecting, and its popularity is booming.

Most of the visitors are elderly. Many spend several hours each week, teasing out the names and dates that ultimately lead them to tales of daring, scandal and romance--all in their own families.

They know which cousins are removed and which are not, and how the advent of the steam engine or the discovery of gold affected migration patterns nationwide.

While the census data are by far the most popular, also stored in a cavernous warehouse just off the genealogy room is a veritable city of brown and gray boxes that exude a mild, papery smell.

Here are documents the government must safeguard, including regional naturalization papers.

One special trove of documents is available to those researching Chinese residents. After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese people who wanted to leave the country had to furnish proof of both debts and capital in the United States and undergo an extensive interrogation by federal agents.

The result is that, 102 years after he sat before government officials, the life of Gin Wut, a 32-year-old from Santa Barbara making $30 a month as a cook in a boardinghouse, with a scar on his left temple, and who was owed $275 by a vegetable gardener, is available for study.

That might sound boring to most people, but to hobbyists building a family tree, it’s a treasure of information, unlike the more mundane data on marriages and ages found in the census records.

“Most people will never find any single document as good as this for their genealogy research,” said Paul Wormser, the branch archivist.

The big news in genealogy nationwide, however, is that another census soon will be available to the public--”soon” only in the world of genealogy. On April 1, 2002, the 1930 census will be opened for public viewing. For privacy reasons, federal law withholds census information for 72 years.

Scenting New Hope in a New Census

By genealogy standards, however, the coming of the new census might as well happen next Tuesday, so quickly does it approach. It will be the genealogical equivalent of pandemonium at the archives when everyone who hit a dead end with the 1920 census scents new hope in a fresh batch of 2,668 microfilm reels.

Within the next two months, Wormser hopes to have the genealogy room open on Saturdays s well as weekdays. Other plans are underway to handle the expected crush of visitors.

“It’s going to be war,” said professional genealogist Lloyd McDaniel of Costa Mesa. McDaniel, a retired engineer who installed the genealogy room computers and software, is one of about 25 volunteers at the genealogy room.

“We’ve already gone through it with the 1920 census, when people were coming out the door,” he said. Painstaking labor, however, will not deter a true researcher, McDaniel knows. After all, he has traced his own roots back to 13th century Scottish King Robert the Bruce.

Also, real genealogists know that the census is only a starting point. McDaniel, who also teaches a course at the archives on genealogy and the Internet, advises anyone seeking their ancestry to take what they learn from microfilm and to “walk the land.” Visit the places where ancestors lived and died.

“What I do is I look up who, when and where,” he said. “That is the skeleton, the bones of genealogy,” McDaniel said. “Then with that information, I’m hoping you’re going to go and flesh it out, that you’ll add the whys and the whats and find the stories that will be able to make these people come alive.”

A Trip to Ohio Cemeteries

Both Brussard and Snook have written books on their family histories--Brussard three, Snook one--and by coincidence they both are heading to Ohio in a few weeks to do some down home delving.

“I know it sounds crazy, but I really can’t wait to walk through the cemeteries,’ Brussard said. “I’ll also go to courthouses to look up some records.”

Snook will see if he can locate the elusive marriage license of his grandparents. “I’m sure there is one,” Brussard says, and then offers this hope: “Weren’t there preachers who rode a circuit back then, who married people and then moved on and records got all confused?”

Not at that time and not in that part of the country, Snook says firmly. Besides, all the licenses for the assorted aunts, uncles and cousins who lived in the area at that time are there on file. But he is not giving up hope. He has an old newspaper clipping announcing the couple’s 45th anniversary celebration, which indicates a strong likelihood that at some point there was a wedding.

Brussard’s goal is less focused. Her years of naming each leaf on the family tree have taught her that every time she thinks she has found a piece of the puzzle, the puzzle grows larger. With every new name come more children, more marriages, more research and more documents. Each connection yields dozens of others in a never ending helix of relatives.

“Really, what you come to see is that we’re all related,” she said.

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Treasure Trove

The National Archives and Records Administration in Laguna Niguel houses U.S. Census records from 1790 to 1920 as well as thousands of other documents used by genealogists.