Everyone Has a Role In Family History

My Grandmother Hansen infected me with “genealogy fever” when I was 12-years-old and was visiting her home in Monroe, Utah for a week. She showed me all the genealogy she had worked on, and showed me how to make my own large genealogy chart, telling me their stories as we worked. She gave me copies of their histories, on mimeographed paper.

When I went home, I kept my histories and my large genealogy chart and my life-long love affair with family history had begun. When my grandmother’s health began to fail, she moved in with my Aunt only a few blocks from our house. I now had two “collaborators” to assist me with my genealogy. I went with them to family reunions where I got more information, met more relatives and learned more about genealogy and family history. My Grandmother Hansen died when I was 15-years-old, but I never recovered from “genealogy fever.”

When we finally retired to Centerville in 1990, I worked full time for 19 years so I didn’t have much time to do anything about my family histories. However I kept collecting information. My cousin and I went to Monroe, Utah to get some histories from my great-aunt Agnes, where I was able to take a photo of a picture one of my ancestors had painted. My cousin and I shared what information we had and I kept going to my Grandmother Hansen’s Millers’ family reunion.

After I finally retired from work, I joined the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers (DUP), and I decided to write the biographies of some of my ancestors. I was grateful for all the histories I had collected throughout the years—even the mimeographed pages that were now so old that they were hard to read. I checked with DUP to see which of my ancestors did not have biographies in the DUP archives. I found one—my great- grandfather, Peter Hansen. I combined the information I had collected, being careful to cite where I got the information (I had obtained five biographies, including a short autobiography he’d written). 

Then I went to http://history.lds.org/overlandtravels/. You can put in an ancestor’s first and last name, birth and death year and it will pull up which ship and wagon train they came across in if they came between 1847 and 1868. I discovered Peter Hansen, his sister, mother, and stepfather had come to Utah in one of the first groups of Scandinavians 1853. It also had journal accounts of others in the same wagon train so you could read what happened along the way. I was touched when I read the death of Peter Hansen’s stepfather in the journal of another pioneer: “Sunday, July 24. A quarter of a mile’s travel brought us to plenty of water. This morning Hans Andersen Pill passed away.”

 This same ancestor served in the Utah Blackhawk War so I was able to go to the Utah State Archives and get copies of his service in that war—when he enlisted, when he left and where he served. I discovered the letters he wrote in the 1900s trying to get a pension for his service in that war; however he couldn’t prove he was the same person who enlisted as Peter Allen (he was using his second stepfather’s last name) but was released as Peter Hansen (his real name). Even though he received a medal for serving in the war, he couldn’t get the Federal Government to acknowledge he’d served in the war. 

I was touched in researching another ancestor, my Grandmother Hansen’s mother’s father Henry Bucholdt Christensen. Grandmother’s mother had died bearing her 10^th child and her father had married two other times. He had three children with his third wife, but none of Grandmother’s family knew much of his second family and almost nothing about Grandfather Christensen. However my great-aunt Agnes wrote, “I’ve never heard very much about my great-grandfather. .  and wanted to know more about this grandfather . . . [I] called grandfather’s daughter Katherine . . .  and will now proceed to write his history as I understand it.”  It was this history, by Agnes, that was the most complete history of him that I found. I know without it, we wouldn’t have known nearly as much about him.

My saving all those biographies throughout the years--including those old mimeographed ones I got from my grandmother—were the basis for my biographies. I couldn’t have written the biographies without them. 

I turned in my history of Niels Peter Hansen to the DUP last year. I was touched recently when I saw it on Family Search submitted by someone I didn’t know. I was ashamed to think I hadn’t even thought to put it on Family Search. So I put my recently completed Henry Bocholtz Christensen’s biography on Family Search so others could learn about him.

There are many ways you can help in Family History: You can collect biographies and information (like I did for over 60 years); you can actually interview and write the histories (like my great-aunt Agnes), you can share histories; you can help others learn how to research and write histories; you can collaborate with others, whether it is family, DUP and or at reunions. You can encourage children, youth and the younger generation as my grandmother did. Everyone can share what they have in Family Search. Everyone has a role in family history.