Thursday, January 6, 2011

Family Stories

One challenge I’ve encountered with genealogy research is making my ancestors more than just names and dates on a family tree. The problem is aside from oral history, I really don’t know of any other ways that family stories are passed down through the ages. I’ve heard stories of people finding that their relatives are famous, influential, wealthy, etc (there’s even a group called the International Blacksheep Society of Genealogists who apparently regal each other with stories on being related to not-so-nice people in history). I can’t for the life of me figure out how they know this.

Waiting for public record requests (which takes upwards of 6 weeks per record) leaves a lot of downtime to explore the ins and outs of your family history. This has led me to wonder who my ancestors were, what they liked, disliked, did for fun, and other random tidbits. For all I know and suspect, this information is lost forever but I really want to know how some people know so much about their great-great grandfather’s grass cutting techniques while I rejoiced at just finding out my great-great’s name. I’ve done a few newspaper archive searches to test the water but to no avail. I only know of the few stories that were told to me and they really only extend back to my grandfather’s generation.

The best stories are those my dad told me about my grandfather John Koehler’s time in the Korean War. My grandfather was a radio repairman during the war with somewhat of a hot temper. According to my dad, my grandfather was promoted and then summarily demoted several times for fighting with people. My favorite was a story about one time my grandfather beat the living hell out of guy who, in a state of shell-shock, tried to hide in my grandfather’s work-tent and knocked over all the equipment he had just fixed. There’s another story about my grandfather receiving a Bronze Star for taking the reins of gun placement and beating back an enemy advance after the person manning the station was killed. I can't confirm this, however, since a huge problem with the Korean War records I’ve found on Ancestry and on Cyndi’s List is that they only have the casualty lists online. There isn’t anything about links to record requests for those who came home alive.

Now I would love to know if these stories are real but I have not had luck in getting responses to my FOIA requests for my grandfather’s Korean War records and I haven’t found any sites with good leads yet for that information. That is why I have decided to enroll in a non-credit genealogy class through Portland Community College. It’s my hope that I’ll be able to learn a little bit more about how professional researchers don’t’ just look for names in public records but look for the the people behind the names on a piece of paper. I’d also love some input on how to look for non-casualty Korean War records. Wish me luck!
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