Heather Murphy | Mindfulness in Family History and Genealogy

Stories in Our Roots

Mindfulness in Family History and Genealogy

Episode 7 • 15:49

SPEAKERS Heather Murphy

00:03 Welcome to the Stories in Our Roots podcast. I'm your host Heather Murphy. In this podcast, we dive deep into how knowing the stories of our ancestors can make a difference in our lives. Today, discovering our family history is more than a hobby. It is a way to connect deeply with ourselves, those we love, and the world around us.

00:26 This is Heather Murphy, and welcome to episode seven of Stories in Our Roots. I first want to start off by saying thank you to all of you who have listened to episodes this first month, it really has been great. Because of you we have doubled the number of listeners from the first episode of the beginning of the month to the episode four weeks later. And that is phenomenal. So thank you so much for listening, for sharing, for sending me messages, and writing reviews. That has just gone a long way this first month as I venture into this new undertaking.

01:06 It has been so great to interview these women and have conversations with them about how they have been impacted by family history. Because family history is not just collecting names and dates like it has been for centuries. It's not about tying us to people who have power or influence or property. It's so much more than that. And I'm so glad to see a trend in the genealogy industry that is moving that direction.

01:39 One of the experiences that led to this podcast was teaching a group of people how to encourage others to research their family history. I opened the conversation for a few minutes to have these people share certain experiences that were part of their own journey. We had time for three people to share and every single one of them talked about the stories that they were able to find, the stories that went along with photographs, the stories that they found in newspapers. Not one of them said that they were so glad they were able to find 987 people in their searching. That's not what today's family history researcher needs out of their genealogy. There's so much more.

02:26 And I think all of the interviews this month, and as we move forward, that's what it's showing. It's showing that the stories that we find, when we come to know these people, it benefits our lives now, much more so than just collecting names and dates. There's been so many good moments and things said in these first five interviews, that it's kind of hard to narrow down what to reflect on in this week's episode. But I think I'll start with just that concept of reflecting.

03:02 Let's imagine a certain stereotypical genealogy researcher. Typically this person is older, they are probably retired. And now they've decided to research their family history. And so they spend hours and hours researching and they gather all the data. They make this nice chart to put up on their wall or a hard bound book with gold lettering to stick on their shelves with all the data about their family. And all the pedigrees and descendancy charts of the offspring of a certain person or the ancestry of another working their way backward. All about just those names and dates and relationships. Sure, they'll stop and they'll tell the stories of the most famous of the people in the tree. And perhaps that might even have been the agenda to start with was who can we find that is of some standing and stature in the world that we can claim ownership of that maybe we can raise ourselves a little bit higher because we're related to this person.

04:15 Now, this is stereotypical. I know this isn't everyone. But a lot of that thinking pervades into the genealogy culture. Genealogy is about power and connection, but oftentimes it's only to those people who were influential in some sort of political way in their society. It wasn't connecting to the farmers and the miners and the enslaved people. But genealogy is changing. Over the last couple decades, a term family history has started to make its way into the industry, because it's not just about tracing that genealogy tracing that pedigree. It's about finding out the history of your family.

05:05 I loved Katherine's analogy of a slot machine when it comes to genealogy research. If you did not listen to her episode, I suggest you go back and listen to that. But I love this analogy. Someone sits down at a slot machine, and they put in the quarter, and they pull a lever, and they put in a quarter, and they pull the lever. Just mindless repetition, action, resulting action, over and over and over. And with the miracle of the Internet, and things like hinting at all the major genealogy websites, we fall into that same pattern. We sit down at our computer, we pull up our favorite account, and we sit there and we go through the hints. Click,yes, that's my ancestor, attach, click. attach, click, attach. And then when you get up from that research, most of the time, you have absolutely no idea what you actually accomplished. You just know that you sat in that chair for the better part of the afternoon and quote, unquote, did family history.

06:22 But what did you actually benefit? When you saw those marriage licenses and you attached them to your tree did you actually go look at the images? Did you see who married them? If it was a justice of the peace, or minister from a certain church? Did you look at the people who were witnesses? Do you know how they're related? Why did those people serve as witnesses? Oh, you can see that the last name of the witness is the same as the last name of the minister. Who's the other witness? How are they related? Is the minister even related too? Sometimes that happens. I've seen records where the brother ministered in the marriage of a sibling. But no, we click and attach, we click and attach, we click and attach. We miss the story.

07:18 This episode is brought to you by my premium service Stories in Your Roots. Many people wander the internet hoping to come across information that will tell their family story. And while technology has made records more accessible than ever, wandering, the internet will not provide the answers you are looking for. You need to know what questions to ask where to look for the answers and what to do with the information once you find it. To learn more about how you can have a family history coach help you maximize your discoveries go to heathermurphygenealogy.com/coaching.

07:55 Now I have my moments just like the rest of you, where I collect data. And I see the pile of information grow. And if your goal is just to collect data, then that's fine and well. You've accomplished that. But the thing is that you're missing more out of that information.

08:17 I gave a presentation at RootsTech last year about research logs and plans. I emphasized how important it is to make a plan of what you want to accomplish. Choose a specific thing that you want to learn make a plan of how you're going to learn that information. And then when you find that document that you've been looking for sit with it and you take out all the information and you write up this half a page to a page summary, depending on the document, of what you can learn just from that one document. What can you learn? And then what questions do you have? Does it make questions come up? Do you wonder who someone is? Do you have information that's conflicting? You sit with that document and you learn everything that it has to tell you and everything that it inspires you to be curious about.

09:16 There was one particular piece of feedback that said, well, that sure does seem like it'll take longer than working in FamilySearch. And my thought to myself was yes, of course it is going to take longer, because we're not just clicking and attaching. We're not in a race to see how many documents we can attach to a person and move on. We're there to look at each piece of information and learn what it has to tell us about the people we're searching, about the people we're trying to get to know. What were their lives like? What were their motivations? But if I just click and attach a document to a tree, and say, Yep, that's my person I miss out on all of that.

10:08 In Episode Four, Melissa shared how she had a certain ancestor come to mind. And she knew a little about him, she knew who he was and a little bit about his life. But with this feeling that she had, she followed up on it, and she called her grandmother and talked to her and learned more about this person. And then, at first, she thought that that was enough, that that feeling that she had inside of her that she needed to know this person kind of went away. But then it came back, just as it had before. And so she decided to do her own research to find out more about that person. And she searched and she learned, and she came to know that ancestor in a way that she had never done before with any of her ancestors. It wasn't until she did that, that that ancestor was able to help her in the way that he did. She needed to know him, before he could help her.

11:09 I am a big advocate for mindfulness in genealogy, for taking time to be almost meditative, as you research your family, the complete opposite of the slot machine scenario. I suggest that when you sit down to do your research, that you do some deep breathing, to clear your mind. That you set an intention for what it is that you're going to research at that time and then you focus on, what is it, where do you need to go, that is going to help you achieve your goal. Maybe it's finding out a certain person, or maybe it's learning about what it was like to be an immigrant in 1850. Catherine explained about what she knew about her ancestors that immigrated in the 1850s. You could tell from her interview, from the way she talked about the experiences that her ancestors had, she didn't just have their immigration date. She went and she thought about what did that actually mean? What was it like to have the experience of immigrating from Germany or England in the 1850s to the United States? She allowed herself to consider what it might feel like to be that person.

12:36 During each research session move with purpose and intent. Where exactly do you need to go to find the answers that you want? Oftentimes, when we sit down to the computer, we might think that we're having fun when we're clicking on all these links, and yet generates the data. But sometimes, does that also kind of create a sense of anxiety or of confusion? Because you're just wandering around the internet trying to find something but you haven't even established exactly what you're looking for? Set that intention. What is it that you're looking for? Move with purpose. Make a record of your journey for that day. Where have you gone? What have you looked at? And then at the end of every session, take some time to reflect on what you've learned. Were you successful in finding the information that you wanted? Did you learn new things that you weren't expecting to learn? Do you have new questions that you want to find the answers to? How did you feel as you read through the documents? Did you have any feelings that came up?

13:44 Be mindful of the entire experience. Become a gather of family. Come to know your ancestors as much as you could if you were sitting across from them. Get to know your ancestors don't just collect their vital statistics. Anybody that you run into on the street, when you go up and say hello, say you're at a party, or a networking event, and you start talking to them, "Hello, my name is Heather Murphy. What's yours? What's your birth date, your marriage date? And I guess you don't have a death date yet." And then move on to the next person? Absolutely not. We don't care just about people's vital statistics now. But why do we only care about that when we're researching our ancestors? When we get that minimum amount of information, you're only looking for more documents because you want to get a generation back. That's not what family history is about. That's what compiling a genealogy chart is. But that's not what family history is.

14:47 So this week, as you take time to research your family's history, I invite you to do with intention and purpose. What is it exactly that you want to know? And sit with that intention and follow it. And don't let those shiny objects distract you from what you really want. It's so easy to get distracted in this life and that's the same way with genealogy. But stay focused, and see how you feel afterwards, as you take a different approach, a more mindful approach, to researching your family history.

15:22 Thank you for joining me today for Stories in Our Roots. Please help this podcast grow by subscribing, leaving a review, and sharing it with your friends. If you have feedback, or would like to recommend someone to share their story, head to storiesinourroots.com and fill out the form. Thanks again for listening and I look forward to being with you again next week.