Hobby Brings Family Trees Into Full Flower

Blame it on the Girl Scouts.

More than 20 years ago, Doug Miller was asked to guide his daughter’s Girl Scout troop through a badge called Your Family History.

The result was that Miller tumbled to the sometimes obsessive pleasures of genealogy (his daughter Lynn sewed on her badge and showed no further interest in the subject).

His curiosity piqued, Miller sought out the closest archive of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Since Mormons document their ancestry to ensure the salvation of departed family members, they are the genealogical gold standard, maintaining archives that put entire national governments to shame.

Miller, who lives in Santa Clarita, knew that his grandfather, David R. Miller, had been in Millbrook, Mich., around 1850. With the help of a Mormon librarian, Miller ordered the appropriate census from Salt Lake City. When it arrived, there were the names of his grandfather’s parents--John and Eliza Miller.

“It was just so exciting,” recalls Miller, who now heads the Southern California Genealogical Society. “I had goose bumps.”

With a membership of some 1,300 seekers of their roots, the society maintains the Family Research Library in Burbank. On Saturday, the society, now in its 36th year, will offer guided tours of the library, “one of the largest nonchurch, non-government genealogical libraries in the United States,” Miller says.

The open house runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 417 Irving Drive in Burbank. Call (818) 843-7247 or check your Thomas Bros. Finding it can be tricky.

“We’re one of the best-kept secrets in genealogical circles,” says Miller, who adds that new visitors are routinely surprised to find such extensive resources for researching their families in north Burbank.

Financed by the society and staffed by volunteers, the library contains more than 30,000 books, maps, CDs and microforms that can help individuals fill in the branches on their family trees.

The society has special groups for members interested in French-Canadian and Irish material and also for those interested in the burgeoning use of computers to trace family members (Miller’s mother is of French-Canadian ancestry).

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Six or seven computer programs are popular among those who want to use the Internet to trace their families from generation to generation. The Internet, where searching for family is almost as popular as cruising eBay, has even created a genealogical superstar, a 36-year-old Washington state woman named Cynthia Lynne Howells. Her Web site--www.cyndislist.com--gets 75,000 hits per day from people eager to use such features as the more than 63,000 links to other relevant sites.

Although the Internet is making more and more data available to would-be genealogists, it has its limitations, Miller says. Often information pops up during Internet searches that hasn’t been vetted and sometimes no sources are given, making the material hard to verify.

He was recently researching his wife’s family on the Internet and discovered that she was related to Thomas Standish, said to be the son of Miles Standish of Mayflower fame. But when he double-checked the information in the library, he found no evidence that Standish had a son named Thomas, much to his wife’s disappointment.

Being able to document your family tree, not just filling in the blanks, is the hallmark of a good genealogist: “There is no truth without proof,” Miller says. “As genealogists, we live by that.”

The library has seating at large tables for more than 70 visitors. Half a dozen computers are available to access data on CDs, although the society has not yet found the funds to provide Internet access. You can get information on getting started and books and other materials for sale. There is also a program of speakers on everything from how to write your family’s story to finding reliable genealogical information on the Internet. And volunteers are happy to assist the neophyte family historian.

The society would like to expand such ethnic offerings as its relatively small sections on Jewish and Armenian families, Miller says. As part of its outreach program, it now hosts the meetings of the local Genealogical Society of Hispanic Americans and houses its collection.

According to Miller, people come into the library for many reasons, from simple curiosity to a concern about genetic diseases.

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Elizabeth Marcheschi of Valencia was a recent visitor. Despite the Italian surname she acquired when she married, Marcheschi is of Cornish extraction, and she was surprised and delighted to discover that the library has an extensive section devoted to Cornwall, England, donated by Dick and June Ross.

“It’s a wonderful thing,” Marcheschi says of the library, where she has been able to find “bits and pieces” about Cornish ancestors as far back as the 1200s.

Gail Ferris of Burbank has just begun searching for her family’s past. She became interested in genealogy after a friend discovered an old newspaper in an antique dresser and began researching the names that had once made news.

Ferris knows her family is from Ohio and that her father is of Hungarian extraction. She hopes to surprise her mother with a fleshed-out portrait of the family when she turns 75 this December.

“I wanted to do something for my mother,” says Ferris, who visits the library about once a week. “Then it started to be an obsession for me. I’d be bored stiff if I didn’t have this to do.”

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Spotlight appears every Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.