Library Genealogy Services Unlock Family History

Charlemagne, king of France and the first Holy Roman Emperor, a ruler whose achievements earned him both canonization as a saint and immortality as the patriarch of virtually every royal family in Europe, was so shamed by his own illegitimate birth that he requisitioned a family tree “correcting” that inconvenient fact and tracing his lineage back to Adam and Eve.

Family matters.

Whether we are descended from kings or paupers, one thing most of us have in common is a sense of connection to the generations that preceded us—to the uncle who shares our red hair, to the grandparent whose second toe also does that weird thing, to the great-aunt whose talent for music shines through in our own ability to play the piano by ear.

Television shows like “Who Do You Think You Are?” and websites like Ancestry.com feed our desire to forge a connection with our forebears, and make it easier than ever to connect the dots in the family tree. But unless you’re a celebrity, TLC probably won’t be offering up a special episode for you, and Ancestry.com can get expensive.

The internet makes it easier than ever to find your roots, and the local library can also provide a wealth of resources to make the search a little easier. For starters, library patrons can access Ancestry.com at the library for free. And many libraries offer patrons some guidance in figuring out what to look for and how to look for it.

But few libraries have the good fortune of having a Su Terry on hand.

Ms. Terry, a genealogy buff with decades of experience tracking down forgotten family links, offers her services the first and third Wednesday of the month at the Westhampton Free Library. She approaches her genealogy work almost as a ministry—fitting, as her late husband was a minister, and she holds a degree in pastoral ministry.

“People tend to start doing family tree work anywhere from 18 months to two years after a significant loss,” she says. “Death, divorce, loss of a house, loss of a job. When you lose a connection, you try to make a bigger connection to something else. One of the things I’ve researched is how to use genealogy to help un-stick people who are stuck in grief. If you can’t let go of what you’ve lost, you’re not going to move forward. But if you can get attached to a family tree, you can see that you’re still attached, but to a bigger picture.”

Retired from the library at Dowling College, where she worked in the archives, Ms. Terry started providing her services at the Westhampton library in early 2013, after some programs she offered drew a lot of interest from library patrons.

“We were looking for someone to do a one-shot program on genealogy, and her name came up,” says program coordinator Nola Thacker. “It was October, and we wanted to do a program on the genealogy of ghosts. Then we did another program on building a family tree using possessions, like glasses from weddings, names on samplers. Then, when she retired, she volunteered to come twice a week, and it’s been a wonderful thing for the library, and a wonderful gift to the community.

“People love Su, and some of them come from as far away as New York City to see her.”

When Ms. Terry shows up on a Wednesday morning, there’s no telling what her day will hold. “A lot of seniors will come in, and they’ve suffered a loss,” she said. “They want to share their story, and having somebody hear that story is very important to them.

“People will tell me things they won’t tell their spouse or their closest friend—about illegitimacies, about mafia connections. Two things that I found surprising at first were how many children were born before nine months in a marriage, and in how many immigrant families there was a second wife. Usually, the gentleman would be married back home, emigrate to the United States and take another wife, then bring his wife over from the old country and end up with two wives here.

“People didn’t get divorced, so he would be married to both,” she added. “Sometimes the children knew about the other wife. One woman told me she was walking down the street with her father, and he said, ‘That’s your sister over there.’”

Often, patrons who have been doing their own family history research will come to Ms. Terry for assistance when they get stuck. “One man came in and told me, ‘My brother was born two years before our parents got married. What’s going on?’ That was one of those cases where you have to find a way to tell someone really hard things,” she said.

The story behind his question had actually made the front page of The New York Times. The man’s father had been married with two sons, a toddler and an infant. Every afternoon, the family walked down to the docks. One day, the toddler tumbled into the water, and the mother jumped in to rescue him. Tragically, both drowned, leaving the infant and father behind.

The grieving father subsequently remarried, to Terry’s client’s mother—but nobody ever talked about the wife and son he had lost. The client had the answer to his question about the timeline of his brother’s birth, but he also had to face the difficult decision of whether to share what he had found with his brother.

“He took it very well, but it’s always difficult to give somebody hard news like that. For example, how do you tell someone about the Holocaust? A young woman came to me when I was at Dowling, and she wanted to know about her relatives who had died in the camps. The Germans kept very detailed records. I kept asking her, ‘Are you sure you really want to know?’ The records showed how they were executed. She took a brief look at it and ended up in the bathroom vomiting.

“I knew it was coming, but when a patron says they want the information, I feel like I have to tell them everything I can. It’s hard, but it might have given her the closure she needed.”

Other cases are less horrific, but may still be traumatic to the client. “I got in trouble once because I traced somebody back who was ‘passing.’ To me it was, like, ‘Wow, this is interesting—you have slave ancestors.’ But she was very upper crust and very Southern, and she did not take it well.”

Ms. Terry learned about genealogy from her mother-in-law, and now she’s passing her knowledge along to her son’s girlfriend, Gen Common, who often helps her out at the library and is full of admiration for her mentor’s commitment. “When she’s at home, she’s doing this most of the time,” Ms. Common said.

“I don’t like to disappoint people, and you never know how far a family tree is going to go until you start working on it,” replied Ms. Terry, who refuses to charge for her work. “I’m helping people, and that’s important to me. It also feeds me as much as it feeds them. Each family has a story, so doing this work is like reading a novel—but it’s more interesting than a novel, because it’s real.”

“I Seek Dead People History” with Su Terry will be held next on Wednesday, February 22, from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Westhampton Free Library. The services are available to everyone—not just Westhampton Free Library cardholders. For more information, call the library at 631-288-3335, extension 4.