'The past is another country'
Tens of thousands of people a year visit this public library in Indiana, all looking for the same thing: A slice of the past that helps them understand the present.
My genealogy journey has taken me to Sweden, Wisconsin and Chicago, but for many people, it takes them to Fort Wayne, Indiana.
That’s where you’ll find the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center, one of the world’s one of the world’s foremost genealogical research centers.
This year marks a decade since I first learned that, in 1892, my most recent immigrant ancestor left an island in the middle of the Baltic Sea to move to the United States with her two young children in tow. Her husband had left 10 years earlier when she was pregnant with their second child. They eventually reunited in Missouri, where I was raised 100 years later.
That’s the story that launched what has become an epic journey. In 2016, my sister and I went to Sweden for the first time, where we walked inside the church where our foremother had been christened in 1855. A few months later, we found our long-lost family online.
In just one week, we are going back to Sweden, this time with my mom and niece, to meet them in person.
But last fall, I spent a morning at the country’s second-largest genealogy library to see what else I might find about my family history.
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The library has more than 1.2 million physical research materials from all over North America to Europe and South Africa. Yes, census and tax records, but also phone books, yearbooks, farmers logs, church minutes, Curt Witcher, the library’s director of special collections, told a group of us at a tour of the library last fall. “Any item that puts a person in a place at a time engaged in something. That becomes a thread of that person’s story.”
The collection — housed in a 42,000-square-foot space inside the downtown library of this city of 267,000 people — started because of a director in the early 1960s who thought that genealogists were a discriminated class of library patrons. “They ask a lot of questions, and they stay all day and use a lot of materials,” Witcher explained. “That’s how they became ‘those patrons’.”
But over the decades, thanks to sites like Ancestry.com that allow people to do a lot of this work at home, genealogy has become even more popular, and the Allen County Public Library’s embrace of the subject has led to it becoming one of the best-funded library systems in the country. (Residents of Allen County pay 70 cents per $100 of assessed valuation, which is twice the rate of Boston, Baltimore and Miami.)
That investment has paid off. The Genealogy Center drew upwards of 70,000 people a year leading up to the pandemic. Those in-person visits haven’t quite rebounded to those pre-pandemic highs, but the library is reaching people in new ways. During the COVID shutdown, Witcher and his team started hosting twice-a-week Zoom meetings and classes that continue to be popular today, drawing as many as 700 participants from all around the world. (During Family History Month in October, they hosted free virtual and in-person events every single day.)
Witcher, who has worked at the library for more than 40 years and is one of the country’s leading voices in genealogy, said that librarians historically haven’t been trained in genealogical research, but he has eight librarians who act as historical detectives.
“Our philosophy hasn’t been about sending you off into the stacks,” Witcher said. “We want to hear what your research challenge is, what you’re looking for today. Everyone has a story, and we’re committed to helping people find that story.”
The Allen County Public Library has a partnership with the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City to share databases and newly scanned acquisitions. (One big perk of visiting the library in person: If you bring a laptop, you can access all of the major sites for free if you use the library’s wifi. As someone who had paid hundreds of dollars to Ancestry.com, this alone makes the trip to Indiana worth it.)
Ahead of this media trip last fall, which was sponsored by the local tourism board, the library asked for our basic family tree information. When we arrived, the Allen County genealogists had filled binders with information about our ancestors.
That’s how, over the span of a few months, senior librarian Logan Knight learned almost as much about my family as I did in the 10 years before. Knight two binders with many of the records I already had digitally on Ancestry.com and even photos of my mom from her high school yearbook.
Knight found his way to genealogy through a love of history. “Global history and genealogy, it all merges together eventually.”
He studies that intersection of where individual stories ultimately affect American society at large, including how large immigrant groups form unique identities over time. For instance, the evolution of Vietnamese nail salon technicians. “It’s not because they were nail salon technicians back home,” Knight said. “Tippi Hedren, the actress, felt bad for the Vietnamese refugees [in the 1970s], so she sponsored them to get trained in nail salons and they trained the next iteration and so on.”
Genealogy is a particularly American phenomenon because of its foundation as a country of immigrants. “I can only imagine someone saying, ‘I guess I’m going to go to another continent where I may or may not know anyone.’ People still do this today. It’s still such an incredible thing to do,” Knight said.
Many of those immigrants might have come to America to farm but many ended up working in factories for wages that weren’t that great here, but back in their home county, they would be a big man in a small village, Knight explained.
He credits the surge of interest in genealogy to a general feeling of being unmoored. “Our society moves very quickly, change happens, people don’t stay in one spot as much as they used to. This is a way to anchor yourself….Especially when we think about what people have lived through and survived, that gives people a lot of comfort in knowing that they aren’t alone.”
Knight compares it to a game of telephone or going on a trip to a place you’ve never been, which is one reason many people are drawn to this work.
“The past is another country.”
Knight acknowledged the mistakes that we make when retelling our family histories. In the absence of data, we have our imaginations, and sometimes that leads to mistaken stories, such as a family with Black heritage that might claim to be Indigenous.
Genealogy services manager Allison Singleton pointed out the importance of thinking beyond genetics. “You can research your own bloodline, but you can also research your heart line,” she tells visitors, especially young kids, who visit the library. “Your heart line is anyone who you love, and it doesn’t matter if you’re biologically related to them. Family is what we want it to be, and so is the research.”
There are critics of this work who say that genealogists spend so much time in the country of the past that they forget that we are citizens of the present. But Witcher said that learning family history changes peoples lives in surprisingly tangible ways.
He cited research that found that fourth graders who can name all four of their grandparents — just their names, not their birthdays or jobs or where they lived — do considerably better on tests and get along better with their peers when they get to high school. Genealogy work also helps kids understand global history because they feel like they have a stake in it.
But the most powerful data is coming from the other end of the age spectrum. A 2022 study from the National Institute for Dementia Education found that photo reminiscence therapy can slow dementia and improve the quality of life in people who are in their elder years by making them more open to taking a doctor’s advice about, say, taking a certain medication.
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