The Children Don’t Want It!

By Bob Buddemeier

As a retirement community FHC (Frequently Heard Complaint), it’s right up there with mental or physical disability and the quality of the food.  After a lifetime of collecting really cool stuff, people find out that their offspring have zero interest in inheriting it. It’s bad enough when the “it” is Grandma’s set of crystal goblets or Uncle Milt’s collection of lapel pins.  It’s when the ungrateful wretches don’t give a rat’s patootie about family history and connections that it really gets personal.

If you are like most RVMers, you have several shoeboxes of family memorabilia that you have somehow been unable to downsize.  With the recent birth of a great-grandson came the realization that I am an ancestor.  And the realization I was the last family member alive to have known my father’s parents and all of his siblings and their families. And further, I had the part realization, part assumption that nobody cared.

BUT!! Lo and behold, there appeared granddaughter Remy, encouraging me to donate a tube full of spit because she wanted to find out about my/her DNA. It turned out that she had become intrigued by family history because of her other grandfather, who had, shall we say, been cast in a different mold.

Hoo Boy, I thought, here’s a live one – package those papers!  But then the laggard but logical part of my brain perked up and said:  “Waitaminute.  What is Remy going to make of a bunch of unlabeled photos and letters signed with initials?  It needs context and organization.”  Oh, yeah.

So, I found myself enrolled in 3 online genealogy sites, and struggling to crawl up the trunk of my beetle-infested family tree. It was surprisingly hard going – but I was not alone.  To my wonder and amazement, Rita Derbas appeared, riding out of the west and wearing the hat (she has many) of the lead sprout of the RVM genealogical tree (a.k.a. the Trace Your Ancestors Genealogy Group (TYAGG) – see the activities and Amenities page in MyRVM, or Bits & Pieces).  Rita has been digging into her roots for over 40 years, and is part of the group that started TYAGG back in the pre-covid days.

Rita pointed out some tree-climbing residents to consult, and invited me to the meetings of TYAGG – 4^th Monday of the month, 2:00 p.m. in the Cascade Room. She also urged me to join the Rogue Valley Genealogical Society (RVGS). [3405 S Pacific Hwy, Medford, OR 97501; 541-512-2340; https://rvgslibrary.org]

Relevant Digression:  The RVGS sets aside time once a month for TYAGG to visit with their genealogists. RVGS membership is a Good Deal for individuals if you are going to pursue the hobby actively.  Membership is not particularly costly, and it carries with it access to a library of national as well as local information, one-on-one tutorials, lectures, and access to most of the online genealogy programs – including some that have pretty high charges for private memberships. Rita has accompanied me there twice – for a tutorial and a tour, and then for a lecture/demo on website use.

About the RVM aborists, or arboreals.  Because of Monday conflicts I’ve only been able to attend one meeting, but I learned quite a bit.  Including the taxonomy of genealogists: there are the deep time types who want to push further and further back in their lineages,  and there are the lets-get-acquainted folks more interested in fleshing out details about recent antecedents.  In terms of research style, there are the hard-core purists (nothing used without seeing and documenting the original source) and the good-until-disqualified people.

My meeting with the group –  there were 9 people (total membership is about 20), which was a good size for conversation. We traded information on what we were trying to do, how we were going about it, and the problems being encountered (and sometimes solved).  And, of course we talked story about the interesting family members, which leads me to conclude with the following HINT:

If you want to pique the interest of your children, or especially the grandchildren, find a relative who was notorious, scandalous, or just plain peculiar. My daughter got into a discussion with a co-worker about who had the most interesting family.  She appealed for help, and I sent her information on my father’s cousin who had been a soldier of fortune; among other exploits he had flown a fighter for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War.  That was good enough to beat out her colleague’s uncle, a former gun-runner for the IRA.

Give it a try – find out what might be nesting in your tree.