Web reveals its real magic as time travel becomes a breeze

Generosity of one woman in Wisconsin helped me trace generations of family history

THERE IT was, still as horrific to read as it must have been in 1907.

“SHOCKING ACCIDENT

Eugene Place crushed to Death in the Sawmill of the Peshtigo Lumber Co

FELL INTO REFUSE HOPPER

Body Crushed and Death was Instantaneous

FOUND BY A WORKMAN.”

Eugene Place was my great grandfather. I had always known he had died in a terrible sawmill accident that left his wife and six young children without any income. His son William, my mother’s father, was then forced to go to work as a young boy. William grew into a quiet man who rarely spoke of his past.

Neither my mother nor I had ever heard of the details of this family tragedy until we read it online, over a century later. And that’s only because a decade ago, a woman had carefully hand copied the story from newspaper records in a Wisconsin town library.

She then typed up her records for a genealogy e-mail list. She wasn’t posting them for anybody in particular, so it worried her a bit that others might find her posts superfluous.

“If this ‘clutters’ up the list too much, I can just take requests for information,” she wrote in 2000.

Another list member quickly responded: “Don’t worry for even a moment. You never know when a tidbit of info will help someone out. And the bonus is if the data is posted here, it is searchable thru the Rootsweb Archive search engine.”

Amen. That someone turned out to be a cousin of my mother’s. Years later, she used data posted on that discussion to piece together genealogical information for a site run by her Wisconsin county that lets local people upload such research.

In turn, one of my aunts came upon the site, and passed along the link to my mother. And thus began a wonderful genealogical treasure hunt, thanks to the extraordinary “gift economy” of the web, in which people research, write, create, produce, and make the results freely available to others.

None of us knew very much about the Place family. And I never met my grandfather Bill, who died just a week before my own parents married. I’d always assumed the Places immigrated from England to Wisconsin in the 19th century. As if in a mini episode of Who Do You Think You Are, I was to discover the truth was completely different.

Online was a wonderful photograph of the person with whom this small exploration begins – my great-great-great-grandfather Lyman Place. In a surprisingly casual image, he sits next to one of his many sons, Abram, a fascinating great great uncle (I am descended from another of Lyman’s sons, Job, for whom, I learned, a local school would eventually be named).

A trader of goods with the local Indian tribes, Abram married two Chippewa women – his first wife, in a native American ceremony rather than in the church. With his second wife, Abram took in abandoned children and the couple raised them as their own.

Old records indicate the couple seemed to keep a friendly open house, with visitors coming and going and many of the local Indians sticking around to do various tasks including supplying them with game.

But I was surprised by one specific detail – Lyman was born in Vermont in the late 18th century, spending most of his life either there or in New York. If he was born there, his own parents must already have been in the US.

It took me two days and lots of Googling various combinations to track down Lyman’s parents in census records: Job and Susan. And they were both born on the east coast. As was Job’s father, the wonderfully named Benajah. Online, there was quite a bit of information about Benajah, from Rhode Island. None of us had ever imagined that our family had roots in the US east coast.

To my astonishment, I was able to trace a whole range of these far distant multiple-great grandmothers and grandfathers not just to people who fought in the Revolutionary War, but to those who arrived over with the first settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s – even the specific ship some came on. A multiple-great-grandmother founded the state of Rhode Island, which she set up with a group of followers after being tried and convicted of heresy by the Puritans.

Some more searching took me all the way back to the original “Plaise” name, in Yorkshire in 1282. Meanwhile, through the Rhode Island line, there was a family link to restoration dramatist John Dryden as well as Jonathan Swift.

I was astonished and amazed to find all of this information, thanks to the labours of so many countless others, slowly accumulating online as genealogists both amateur and professional freely posted up records, resources, and research.

Once upon a time, finding out such information would have taken multiple international trips, years of work, and training to understand and use the source materials. It took me just a few hours over two days. I know it is information I will return to and explore further over many hours in the years ahead.

The process was one of those jaw-dropping times when the internet, now so often taken for granted, reveals its utter magic. And it was a humbling reminder of the essentially generous nature of the crowd, which meant that a decade after one woman in a small Wisconsin town posted to a discussion list, I was able to take her information, time travel back through the centuries, and find I wasn’t at all who I thought I was.