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Names, one discovers, can be tricky--even without adoptions, divorces and illegitimate children. "Drunk census takers and bad penmanship can drive you insane!" says Rawlings, the Florida real estate broker. Lorraine St-Louis-Harrison, a Canadian genealogist, had a hard time tracing her French-speaking grandfather until she realized that an English census taker had transcribed St Louis as "Salway." Likewise, immigrants disembarking at Ellis Island found their names arbitrarily Anglicized. And some families, wanting to assimilate, did so later on their own.
Contrary to myth, blacks don't always carry the names of their family's last slaveholder: slaves could change hands numerous times without changing their surname, points out Tony Burroughs, who teaches genealogy at Chicago State University. In the case of biracial children born to slaves, it is often impossible to tell if the father was the slave owner, the overseer or a relative of the slave owner given liberties with the slave (see story, next page). Jewish researchers run into complications too: traditionally Jews did not have surnames; they were called, for instance, Isaac, son of Jacob. Only beginning in the late 18th century were surnames imposed by edicts passed in Europe and Russia.
DEALING WITH SURPRISES
In a celebrity-obsessed culture, it is no wonder that some root seekers hope to uncover an aristocratic connection. Stokes, the former Dallas principal, thought his family might be related to Robert E. Lee, as several generations had a family member with the middle name Lee or Lea in honor of the general. It turned out that his great-great-great-grandfather had been an admirer, not a relative, of Lee's. In fact, as he went back, Stokes found his first American ancestors were indentured servants. "We came to America basically as white slaves," he says, with a laugh. Lately, Harold Brooks-Baker--head of Burke's Peerage, the British company that does genealogical searches--sees a change. People are less obsessed with nobility and more with the dramatic. "If their ancestor was a horse thief, all the better," he says. Care to chat about family skeletons? The International Black Sheep Society of Genealogists has set up a website and an electronic mailing list for "those who have a dastardly, infamous individual of public knowledge and ill repute in their family."
In Australia, once a penal colony, Valerie Garton, 61, warns that "one must never start family history unless you're willing to accept everything you find." Garton's great-grandfather was transported to Tasmania for stealing sheep. Only a few decades ago, it was considered a taboo Down Under to admit to convict ancestry, and early census records were destroyed by politicians and others who did not want their origins revealed. But lately it has become fashionable to be a first-fleet Australian. Likewise, in the new South Africa, nonwhite ancestry for an Afrikaner is not only politically correct but socially advantageous. Former President Frederik Willem de Klerk, once a defender of apartheid, now admits to a Bengali-slave forebear. In the U.S., blacks and whites are cooperating in joint genealogy searches. Says Colorado land appraiser James Rogers, a Caucasian who unearthed a slave ancestor: "It certainly brought home to me that we are all related."