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Federal records are rich troves for census, immigration and military records. Prison logs can be helpful too: "Pray that there were sinners in your family," says Denver Public Library genealogy specialist James Jeffrey. They root around local historical societies and county courthouses for land deeds, wills and probate, and tax rolls. "There's nothing like the smell of musty records, the feel of heavy deed books, the irritated look on the clerk's face when you say you're a genealogist," writes Sharon DeBartolo Carmack in The Genealogy Sourcebook. But the rewards are worth it: Alice Wilkinson, a retired Houston schoolteacher, found an inventory of a relative's 18th century will listing 12 fur buttons, an ax handle and a three-legged stool. "Back then, people had fewer possessions and more land," she says. Another souvenir from the hunt: four bricks from her great-grandparents' house in Tennessee. Local newspaper archives can tell you more than you want to know. Dennis Rawlings, a Fort Myers, Fla., real estate broker, unearthed an account of his great-grandparents' wedding in Cedar Bluffs, Neb. The guests were named, the bride's dress described and the presents listed, including five pickle casters. "Pickle casters must have been the late 1800s equivalent of can openers," Rawlings jokes.
OVERCOMING OBSTACLES
Root seeking inevitably demands patience--and ingenuity. Joseph Silinonte, 42, from Brooklyn, N.Y., had scoured U.S. Census, Naturalization and Board of Election documents for the birthplace of his great-great-great-grandfather, saloon owner Charles O'Neil, to no avail. Even an 1887 obituary in the Brooklyn Eagle was no help. Then he remembered that the record of O'Neil's son's marriage in 1872 had contained a little mark indicating a dispensation of banns--forgoing the public announcement, on three successive Sundays, of intention to wed. Silinonte persuaded a diocesan official to take him to the Roman Catholic archives in Queens, where he found the 19th century ledgers stored in a corner. On the page was the elder O'Neil's place of birth: County Leitrim, Ireland. "You have to be stubborn," says Silinonte.
Root seekers haunt cemeteries. Dennis Rawlings had almost given up searching for a set of great-grandparents in a Port Hope, Ont., graveyard when, on a hunch, he took a pen from his pocket and poked it into the ground, hitting something hard. Tearing up the sod, he found an old stone reading MARY ANN RAWLINGS--DIED 1869. "We picked up 'Grandma' and cleaned her up for the next 100 years, until somebody else comes to visit," he recalls. "It felt like an episode from The Twilight Zone."
Genealogists' obstacle courses sometimes read like scripts for a whodunit. Wars and natural disasters wreak havoc: the U.S. 1890 Census was almost completely wiped out in a fire, and Southern courthouses were burned in the Civil War. The public records office in Dublin, Ireland, was destroyed in a fire in 1922. And in China's Cultural Revolution, the centuries-old ancestor records compiled by villages were declared "feudal garbage." In India, where most vital statistics are still unrecorded, rare documents are at Hindu holy spots where priests, known as pundits, write down births, deaths and marriages. But the documents, narrow sheaves of paper tied in cloth, are crumbling from rot, and the pundits themselves are dying out.