n By Kelly Savio Staff Writer
Harold and Betty Kelsey have quite a legacy to pass on to their two children and three grandchildren: They have book after book chronicling their family lineage, going all the way back to the Mayflower on Harold’s side. They have pictures of ancestors sitting with Buffalo Bill Cody. Best of all, they have love letters Harold sent Betty during their courting days, corsages from dances they attended together and albums full of family pictures and the stories that go along with the photos.
Harold and Betty, Gilroy residents, have made preserving their family history a top priority, carefully documenting their ancestors and, more recently, documenting their own lives.
“When people die, they take all their memories, all their stories, all the things they know about the family with them,” said Cheryl Boomgaarden, also a Gilroy resident, who has worked for decades to chronicle her family’s history. “It’s so important to preserve all that information. If it isn’t written down, it’s lost forever. So many people say, ‘Aunt so-and-so died and left me all these pictures, but I don’t know who any of the people in the pictures are.’ It’s so sad.”
Cheryl has been documenting her family history since she was a teenager. She would sit and listen to her grandfather tell stories at the family home in South Dakota and she would take notes. Eventually, she turned all of her notes into a biography of her grandfather. That led her to start biographies of other family members as well, including her parents and herself. After she married her husband, Dale, she began working on biographies of his parents, too. She’s currently working on her husband’s biography.
“It’s not just lineage that’s important, it’s the stories, too,” Cheryl said. “It’s great when you have one or the other, but when you have both, it’s really special.”
Betty’s mother began tracing her family in the 1950s by sending letters to people asking for information. Betty took an interest in following the family tree and began writing to people for information in the 1960s. With the advent of the computer age and the Internet, tracing the family tree has become much easier, Harold said.
“There’s a huge difference between now and then,” he said. “Then, I was working on a wide-carriage type setter. Now, I’m on a computer using programs designed specifically for finding family records.”
The Hollister Family History Center is one resource that both the Boomgaardens and Kelseys use to trace their family lineage.
The center, which serves the whole South Valley, is sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and features computers, about 800 books, microfiche readers and film readers. Because finding and keeping track of ancestors is one aspect of the Mormon faith, the church not only provides access to many genealogy Web sites that would normally require a subscription, they have designed and run their own free genealogy site, www.familysearch.org.
Volunteers at the center, which is open to the general public and free to use, help people trace family members through census data, Social Security records, marriage and death certificates, and other sources of information. The center can order newspaper clips on microfiche or church parish records on film for visitors to use in their efforts to put together a complete family tree. The only costs at the center are for supplies, such as shipping fees for the microfiche or printing fees, which range from 10 cents to a quarter to cover paper and ink.
“It’s like a puzzle,” said Cheryl, who volunteers at the center. “I get so excited when I find something, but I get excited when other people come in and find something, too. You can see how thrilled they are when they find a name from someone in their family.”
Harold and Betty, also volunteers at the center, said they like using the center’s resources because they were able to get information other than ancestors’ names that made them real people.
“You get things like pictures or military records for World War I, or you get marriage certificates, and those things make people come off the page and give them a real identity,” Harold said. “They’re more than just a name.”
Though tracing family lineage can seem daunting, Harold explained, all you need are a few names to start, and people at the family center can help you find the next steps to take.
And if genealogy seems too daunting, at least chronicle your own memories, Cheryl said. Her granddaughter gave her a small book from a stationery store that had a different question on every page. The topics of the questions range from pets she’s had and places she’s lived to her hobbies and family vacations. Because the pages were small, Cheryl used the topics of the question as inspiration and typed out answers on decorative paper, then bound the papers into a notebook for her granddaughter.
“I talked about a lot of things my grandkids don’t know anything about,” Cheryl said. “I talked about record players and outhouses – dumb things, but things that were very much a part of my life.”
Harold has a similar book he bought at a local bookstore called “A Father’s Legacy.” It has larger pages, so he’s been filling out the book, answering the questions about his life. Betty said she’s glad he’s filling it out in his own handwriting so future generations can see what it looked like.
“You start writing an answer, and it gets you thinking about other things, so you go off on a tangent,” he said. “It’s good, though. You have the answer to the question and all the other memories that the question sparked. It’s important to write it all down.”
