by Heather Rascon

Created on: July 29, 2009

Investigating a family history can be fun and interesting. Finding things out about your own family brings you closer to people you never knew and gives you a better sense of your own place in the world. Your ancestors become actual people who lived lives, made mistakes, and experienced the world just as you are doing now. It puts historical facts into perspective and personalizes them for you. You may also discover that family stories are sometimes true and sometimes a little exaggerated.

While I was growing up there was a story of a great-great grandfather who had seven wives and 53 children. While looking into the actual history and finding the genealogy, I found there were actually four wives and 23 children. What I also discovered was that he was part of the great hand-cart movement from Nebraska to Utah. His second wife died from childbirth during this trip and he remarried shortly after.

While investigating this particular branch of my family, I learned all about the Mormon movement, when and how it began, and how they were persecuted for their beliefs. This persecution resulted in them immigrating to Utah, some walking the entire way pulling handcarts full of their possessions. Many men died leaving women alone to raise their children. Often, other men would marry these women to protect them and their children. This was the origin of the Mormon practice of having more than one wife.

Another branch of my family were on the second wagon train from St. Louis to Missouri. My great-great grandfather was one of the co-captains. They claimed a parcel of land in Oregon and started an apple grove. The father never filed his claim with the county so when he died his sons had no legal claim to the property. Other men came to the property, guns in hand, telling the sons to leave and that the property was now theirs.

I can trace this part of the family back to Scotland and the Isle of Mull. They were part of the McLain clan that owned the castle on the island. Two brothers, one my ancestor, immigrated to America during the great potato famine of the 1800's.

Another branch of my family were sheep farmers in the panhandle of Texas. I have a copy of the entries in the family bible showing that there were eleven children, one of which was my great-grandfather. The family lived during the civil war, losing two sons to the war and two other children to a cholera epidemic.

The one thing I learned while searching through my family history was that they weren't just ancestors. They were real living breathing humans that made mistakes, lived normal lives and lost their lives. They lived harder lives than what we have now. Parents had more children because they often would lose half of them. Investigating your own family history can bring world and national history alive for you. You start to see events as something more concrete because it could have happened to an ancestor of your own.

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