Drew Smith, co-host of the Genealogy Guys podcast that I talked about in my first post, always asks his interviewees to tell their Genealogical Origin Story. How does a mild-mannered average citizen become a minutia-obsessed, microfilm-reading, cemetery-scouring genealogical superhero? I like this idea. I’m stealing this idea.

You know how I decided to start blogging. But how did I get into genealogy in the first place? Here is my Origin Story.

Like most of us, I had several reasons for wanting to explore my family history. Both of my parents are only children, which leaves me with no aunts, uncles or first cousins and a strong desire for the kind of family connections I just wasn’t born to. Also, my mother is a Kenton, and I’d always wanted to know if we were related to bandleader Stan Kenton (we are) or mountain man Simon Kenton (that jury’s still out). But most of the blame for my first steps down the road of family history research rests squarely on the shoulders of one woman.

Meet Gladys Agnes Houseal, my paternal grandmother. Wife of Ed Moore of my last post. Impish little girl sitting on that stool in my banner collage. Keeper of family stories.

My grandmother was born a Houseal and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the 20-plus years I’ve been pursuing genealogy, it’s that Houseals love family stories.  Over and over again, when I find and connect with distant Houseal cousins, I hear the same stories that my grandmother told me when I was growing up. Do I know that there was only ever one family of Houseals in America, so if you meet one, you’re definitely related? Yes, I’ve known that since I was five. Have I heard about cousin Lou Houseal who had his head cut off by a plane propeller under . . . suspicious . . . circumstances? Yes I have, and I so want to know the truth about that one!

Louis Houseal, whose death by propeller may or may not have been an accident…

My grandmother’s stories didn’t just lean to the Houseal side. I heard about Great Grandfather Galheber – he’s up there in the banner too, holding a baby –  who was born on the boat coming to America and who had red hair like me, and a bright red mustache. (“In his coffin!” she always said. “I can still see him lying there with all that red hair!”) Then there was Grandmother Reed, who had a farm in Delaware that everyone loved to visit. And we absolutely can’t forget Stacey Doran, our Revolutionary War patriot ancestor who crossed the Delaware with Washington and whose cuff buttons had been handed down all the way to my great uncle Ed. I wish I had a dollar for every time I was reminded that I was eligible to join the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Grandmother and Grandfather Reed, down on the farm

But in the end, my grandmother’s stories always came back to the Houseals. And there were visual aids! Henry Houseal’s Bible from the 1860s, with births and deaths written in his own hand. The Houseal family vase, handed down from mother to daughter or granddaughter for generations. Treasured family recipes for corn pudding and cornmeal mush fried up with maple syrup. These things were like precious treasures to me. Rare connections to the distant past.

But the thing is, even as a kid I knew that not all of my grandmother’s stories could be true. We were Pennsylvania Dutch, she liked to say, come directly from Holland to Maytown in Lancaster County. Reformed and Brethren and Dunkards, farmers all. Even as a nine-year-old I knew what most of you are thinking right now. The Pennsylvania Dutch weren’t from Holland at all. They were from Germany. And that Houseal vase? I could do that math. Houseal was Gladys’s paternal surname. There were plenty of families that vase could be associated with, but if it really was handed down from mother to daughter, the Houseal family wasn’t one of them.

The “Houseal” Vase – now museum-waxed to my Southern California breakfront

So I grew up surrounded by awesome family stories, but I never knew which ones were true. And I couldn’t ask my grandmother. Because Gladys was always right. About everything. I know, I know, she looks so sweet in that photo up there. Do not be deceived. It was her world and we all just lived in it. Try to tell her that the Pennsylvania Dutch were Germans? Anyone who knew her would laugh at the very idea. I could have pulled out an encyclopedia and shown her, there in black and white, and her only response would have been to lament the fact that Funk & Wagnall’s couldn’t manage to employ decent fact checkers to get these things right. I do not exaggerate. Ask anyone.

If there were holes in our family stories, she was not the person to fill them in.

Was there only ever one family of Houseals? Did we have a patriot ancestor? Were we Dutch or were we Pennsylvania Dutch? (I admit my grandmother’s otherwise inexplicable love of scrapple was a dead giveaway on that one.) These were the burning questions of my youth.

All I’ll say is . . . it’s not a coincidence that the first five letters are SCRAP

Those mysteries jostled around in my brain for decades. Then one day somewhere in the 1990s, I was in an office store, back when office stores had racks of cheap CDROMs offering this or that shareware collection for a couple of bucks each. And as I browsed for interesting games or utilities, I came across something called Family Origins. A genealogy application for your computer. With pretty forms all ready to fill in and guides for starting your research. The questions of my childhood came flooding back to me. I paid my four dollars, took the disc home, stuck it in my 386 (!) and the rest is history.

Family Origins eventually became RootsMagic, the genealogy software I still use. And my grandmother, luckily for me, lived to be 92, more than a decade into my pursuit of genealogy. I was able to share all kinds of amazing discoveries with her. We even figured out who that vase really belonged to. But I never told her about the Pennsylvania Dutch. She went to her grave believing the Houseals came from Holland. Don’t look at me that way. If you’d known her, you wouldn’t have told her either.