Genealogy Blends Past and Present for Teens

With an archivist for a mother, Emily Reid has grown up immersed in other people’s histories. She traipsed through cemeteries at 3, and learned to look up other people’s birth and death certificates on microfilm as soon as she could read.

It wasn’t until she came across the name William Fuqua, though, that history came alive for her. Assigned as a high school freshman to research her family tree, Emily discovered that she was related to Fuqua, a French Huguenot farmer.

“That’s all the fire I needed to want to know more,” recalls Emily, now a high school senior in the Nashville, Tenn., area. With help from her mother and an attic full of old papers and books, Emily was launched on a search for her roots that continues today.

Adolescence is the ideal time to start researching family history, according to genealogists and schoolteachers. Genealogy allows the teenager rebelling against his parents to stay connected to extended family. It provides answers, however fragmentary, to the young person beginning to question who she is and why she matters.

“History isn’t just about the past. It’s about what makes you you,” says Samantha Dorsey, a high school senior in Arlington, Va., who is descended from families in France and Russia. “I’m the kind of person who needs an outline to follow. Without history, I’d just be living for the here and now.”

Emily recalls how excited she was to discover that one ancestor, Revolutionary War soldier Samuel Cochran, survived Valley Forge with George Washington.

“To know that one of my ancestors was stubborn enough to live through that helps me know why I’m so stubborn,” she laughs. “It gives me a sense of pride, lets me know what I can handle. As a teenager, that helps me a lot.”

There are numerous resources for teenagers wanting to explore their genealogy, including two tools that kids adore: the Internet for research and the video camera for recording oral histories.

Folklorist William Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, suggests kids log on to the NEH-supported Web site, https://www.myhistory.org, to see how they might start.

Curt Witcher, who until recently chaired the history section of the American Library Assn., says teachers in middle and high schools increasingly are incorporating genealogy into their lesson plans. They’ve learned that writing family histories hones students’ skills in evaluative research and factual writing.

“The facts don’t always line up like soldiers straight in a row,” Witcher says. Family stories resemble mysteries--another dimension that young people appreciate.

Still, teenagers aren’t exactly beating down Witcher’s door at the Allen County, Ind., library in search of their ancestors. Nor are they flooding the National Genealogical Society in Arlington each year with entries for its annual youth award.

They do face obstacles that older sleuths do not: County, state and national archives may be closed to them, and privacy laws prohibit access to certain records less than 100 years old.

Sharon Boatwright, a retired teacher who specializes in genealogy for children, notes that a 14-year-old wanting to gather information on her grandparents would have more difficulty than Boatwright would at age 60. And gathering records can be expensive, with birth, marriage, death and social security documents costing $25 or more.

Students may feel anxious about exploring the unknowns of their family line, Boatwright says. A child may not know who her father is, be adopted or live with a stepparent.

Teachers can make it easier by not requiring both sides of the family on a family tree and by not restricting entries to husbands, wives and bloodlines.

“Genealogists like everything nice and neat in a box,” says Boatwright. “They’re going to have to give it up and let kids record what they want to record, as long as everything is labeled accurately.”

Boatwright often began by asking her students to compile a family scrapbook of photos and possessions, conversations with older living relatives, deeds and titles--which were then shared with the class.