Wonderful Genealogical/Historical Connection Found on the Internet

As we've been studying internet genealogy research this week, we've been sharing some wonderful discoveries we've found because of our research on the net. The internet is such a wonderful tool for family historians, especially in helping us research ancestors from other states, provinces, or countries as well as those closer to home. It also helps tremendously in our quest to tie our ancestors into the historical aspect of our heritage as shown in this layout by Laura Lou:


Internet Discovery

The journaling reads: "Through an ancestry site I located my grandfather’s draft registration from 1917. His employer was listed as “Detroit Cornice and Slate”. He was a roofer. A check on the Internet turned up a website for that company...still in business. I lifted a couple of photos from their history page and sent an inquiry to the address listed on another page. Several months later I received an email from the present owner, a grandson of the original for whom my grandfather worked. The present owner is “into” genealogy and offered to scan some of the pages from the old ledgers in my grandfather’s own handwriting. Grandfather had hired in as a comptroller and soon was a partner.
Wednesday, October 12, 1916, Grandfather had worked 9 hours a day for 7 days that week and took home the TOP amount of money, $58.33 and paid $2.00 for insurance."

Names, dates, and places alone don't let us *know* our ancestors. Great finds like this bring them to life for us! Laura Lou can see her grandfather's precise handwriting, know where he spent countless hours of his life, and begin to get a better idea of the kind of man he was through this discovery. She can imagine him coming home after a long day and imagine what he may have been thinking or feeling. She can even take it further and look at some of the newspapers of the times to see what he would come home to read in the evenings - the challenges facing our nation and our ordinary families in those days. She can look at the advertising in those newspapers to see what his $58 per week would buy him and his family, how they may have lived, and what hurdles they needed to overcome.

Even if you cannot find a single clue to a name or date for your ancestral tree, the internet offers plenty in showing you the historical setting in which your ancestors lived. It can even offer photos, sketches or drawings to use in your telling of the stories of your earlier family members. Stretch out through the world wide web and really get to know those whose blood flows in your own veins!