{"id":25140,"date":"2016-08-18T00:01:12","date_gmt":"2016-08-18T07:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=25140"},"modified":"2016-08-18T00:01:12","modified_gmt":"2016-08-18T07:01:12","slug":"long-lost-dead-ancestors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/long-lost-dead-ancestors\/","title":{"rendered":"My Long-Lost Dead Ancestors — I Found Them in a Parking Lot"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>
The 1600 block of Minneapolis’s Seventh Avenue South, where my long-lost dead ancestors once lived, is now a parking lot fronted by high rises. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Barbara Falconer Newhall<\/em><\/p>\n

Yes, you can locate\u00a0your long-gone ancestors. You can pin them down to an exact place. Locating ancestors is not quite as easy as googling your high school boyfriend. But it’s fun, and only\u00a0a tiny bit more challenging\u00a0than the Tuesday New York Times crossword puzzle.<\/p>\n

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been digitally trailing some\u00a0of my\u00a0long-lost dead ancestors as they migrated from New York state to the pioneering \u00a0shores of Lake Michigan. Their odyssey began at Racine, Wisconsin, in 1845, moved on to Michilimackinac in northern Michigan, and settled finally in the upper reaches of the Mississippi in a town called Red Wing. From there, their descendants moved on to places like Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit and, in my case, California.<\/p>\n

A Parking Lot in Minnesota<\/h5>\n

Last month I took a trip to Minneapolis\u00a0to visit the 1600 block of its Seventh Avenue South. My research had revealed that my great-great grandfather, a postal clerk,\u00a0was<\/p>\n

\"Did<\/a>
A nearby block of Seventh Avenue South — did my great-grandmother and her parents live in a house like these? Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

living there with his family in 1880. Sad to say, my ancestors’ house was long gone, replaced by a high rise apartment building and a parking lot. Not far away, just across the Metro Blue Line light rail\u00a0tracks, was an establishment identifying\u00a0itself mysteriously as The House of Balls\u00a0and generally not open for business until midnight.<\/p>\n

It used to be you had to traipse around the country to track down your long-lost dead ancestors and their earthly locations. You had to travel\u00a0to cemeteries, county\u00a0courthouses, and your fourth cousin’s attic. You had conversations with Mormons, who would patiently\u00a0guide you through their church’s extensive genealogy archives.<\/p>\n

Meet Your Long-Lost Dead Ancestors Without Ever Leaving Home<\/h5>\n

Today you can do your search\u00a0at home in your slippers and sweats in\u00a0just a couple of days. Just go to Ancestry.com (for a couple hundred bucks a year) and FamilySearch.org (free, compliments of the Mormons, who put in a lot of time researching their ancestries with the goal of baptizing their own dead relatives\u00a0in a temple ceremony<\/a>).<\/p>\n

I went on line on a Friday morning and was stunned to realize how quickly I could locate four generations of ancestors by name and residence. By Saturday noon I had identified\u00a0the birth dates and locations of my mother’s mothers all the way\u00a0back to my Dutch great-great-great-grandmother.<\/p>\n

The last time I tried researching my ancestors, it had been\u00a0my paternal line. This\u00a0was before digitized public records became available, and before everybody had a laptop and\u00a0easy access to the Internet. Back then — it was in the 1980s — I spent a\u00a0couple<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The mysterious House of Balls, also on Seventh Avenue South. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

of\u00a0afternoons at the Church of Latter-day Saints family history center in Oakland, California, tracing my father’s prohibitionist\/feminist\/abolitionist grandmother back to upper New York state. When I found one of her relatives\u00a0in the poor house, I\u00a0did the prudent thing: I gave\u00a0up genealogy and took up\u00a0rock gardening.<\/p>\n

There’s more about that Dutch great-great-great grandmother to be learned. For years, family lore\u00a0has had it that she was “half Indian.” Which had long led me to conclude that she was part of the Prairie Island Indian Community near Red Wing.\u00a0But if she was born in Holland, as census after census made clear, then she was definitely not a Native American. Too bad for my childhood passion\u00a0— shared by my cousin Jeanie —\u00a0for\u00a0traipsing barefoot through the Michigan\u00a0woodlands, chewing sassafras leaves and pretending I was a for-real\u00a0Indian.<\/p>\n

But what about that “half Indian” family myth? If my three times great-grandmother\u00a0wasn’t really a Native American Indian, then what kind of “Indian”\u00a0was she? Hunches cheerfully entertained.<\/p>\n

More about those northern woodlands at “Eagle Top — A Wild Place Tamed.”<\/a>\u00a0Also at “Wrestling with God on the Shores of Lake Michigan.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"Light<\/a>
The Metro Blue Line light rail tracks dissect the old Seventh Avenue South. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

Yes, you can locate\u00a0your long-gone ancestors. You can pin them down to an exact place. Sometimes it’s a parking lot. Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25303,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[1757,1758,1759,34,1760,1761,444,1762,573,55,82,1763],"class_list":["post-25140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-my-changing-family","tag-ancestors","tag-ancestry","tag-ancestry-com","tag-dont-miss","tag-familysearch-com","tag-grandma-harlow","tag-minneapolis","tag-mormons","tag-mothers","tag-family-stories","tag-on-the-funny-side","tag-red-wing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}