Beginning to Search

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.