It seems inevitable now that I should be the one to start
digging into the Murray family tree. My
curiosity in my family history was first sparked back in elementary
school. It must have been in about
third grade when I had to write my first “autobiography” for a class
assignment. It was an assignment that
would creep up again in seventh grade, and ninth grade, and my junior year of
college. Find out about your family,
where did they come from, what did they do, how does that relate to who you
are. Most of them were pretty simple
and straight forward – cover your parents, siblings, and grandparents and
you’re done. Aunts, uncles and cousins
were bonus material. Great-grandparents
and beyond were definite extra credit. I was never a student who had the burning urge to go above and beyond
the required assignment, so I essentially recycled the same information each
time just with more sophistication.
Still, those assignments did strike up an interest in
finding out more about my family history, but boy it would take a lot of
work. Then about 15 years ago, my
mother’s older brother, who had been doing considerable research on that side
of the family, organized a Muckle Family Reunion and that got me interested
more. I asked my uncle to copy me on
the emails he was sending to my mother and her siblings about what he found
out. That led to me receiving a lot of
emails that made my brain hurt – in large part due to the “generational math” I
had to keep doing since my uncle would reference new found family members in
relation to his generation. It was one
thing to remember that references to “Grandpa” were actually about my
great-grandfather, but when he started in on aunts, uncles, and cousins I’d get
hopelessly lost trying to figure out how I was related to these people. There were way too many names to keep track
of by hand, so I downloaded a freeware genealogy program to input all the
people and the info he passed along. Having a picture of who everyone was made it a lot easier to follow the
emails!
Once I had all of the Dwyer/Kenny side of the family input
to the freeware program, it was only logical to input the Murray/Coleman side
too. Of course, this was the more
difficult side to fill in. Nana died
when I was 4, Grandpa Murray when I was 12, so there weren’t many family tales
to fill in. Nana had two sisters and a
brother who out lived her by many years, but they weren’t people I saw
often. Except for one evening in the
late 1990s when Aunt Margaret, Nana’s younger sister, was over to dinner with
my parents. She started telling stories
of her family and about half way through I realized that someone needed to grab
a pen and notepad and start taking notes, so I did. That I hung on to them for years later is something that amazes
me. I plugged in what I knew and asked
Mom to help fill in some of the gaps with what she knew. Over the years, I would update the family
tree with the information from my uncle and the usual family births, deaths,
and marriages as they occurred.
It was a fairly passive way to keep track of the family
tree, but I always had in the back of my mind that I’d do some real digging
when I got some time. Even in the
digital age, it was going to take some real leg work to get a lot of the
information. Then, one day about 2 years
ago, I was picking up some office supplies and I saw a copy of Family Tree
Maker 2009 available on sale. It was a
much more robust program than the freeware program I’d been using for close to
a decade and I hadn’t been able to upgrade the freeware program in a while so I
figured what the heck, and picked it up. The only downside was I was going to have to manually transfer all the
data from the freeware program to Family Tree Maker – there wasn’t a clean way
to do it otherwise. That was going to
take a while. I did the easy bit first
– entering the immediate family – and I’d get to the rest of it as time
permitted.
It took the better part of two years to get the data copied
over from the freeware program. While
it was somewhat time intensive, it was more a matter of only having small
amounts of time to spend copying the data than the volume of data to be
copied. Once I had the data in place, I
decided that it was finally time to start getting serious about getting to work
on the Murray/Coleman side of the tree. There was already so much information on the Dwyer/Kenny side from my
uncle that I didn’t need to worry about researching a full half of my
family! 2012 was to be the year to
start digging in and seeing what I could find. One other nice part of Family Tree Maker is that it’s distributed by
Ancestry.com, and if you have a paid membership you can access the data
archives there and merge it into your family tree. So I decided to pony up for the US only membership and see how it
went. Boy was I in for a surprise!
Coming Next: The
first month of digging.
