Arizona is a hotbed of family history
Download mp3 (10.95 MB)Lots of us try to find out about our family histories — who our ancestors were and what their lives were like. And Saturday, there’s a virtual event aimed at people interested in just that.
Duane Roen will be taking part in the fourth-annual Arizona Genealogy Day, but he also runs separate workshops on family histories.
Roen is a former English professor and dean at Arizona State University. Since he retired in 2022, he says he’s been doing a lot of work in this area. He joined The Show to talk about it.
Interview highlights
People seem really interested in their family histories. Do you feel people are more interested in this now than they have been in the past — or maybe there are just more tools to help us find out about it now?
ROEN: I think there are a number of things. One, there are a lot more tools when I started doing this work. When I was a teenager, I had to go to the cemeteries. I had to go to the libraries, I had to go to the historical societies. I had to go to the courthouses. Now, almost everything that you need is online. So you never have to leave your house. The other thing that shows, like "Finding Your Roots" on PBS, has done a lot to generate interest in family history. And Arizona is a hotbed of family history for all sorts of reasons. And, you know, that's why we're having the Arizona Genealogy Day coming up on Feb. 24. ... And it's, it's going to be an exciting lineup of people that day and I hope a lot of people are able to tune in on Zoom.
Why is Arizona such a hotbed for this?
ROEN: Well, there are a lot of retired people in Arizona and unlike me who started when I was a teenager, most people get interested in family history when they retire. One, because they've got more time to do this work. And, among other things, the more time makes them wonder: "... [W]here did I come from?"
So how do you try to help people go from what they would get from something like ancestry.com or 23andMe, where you get the names of people and maybe where they lived and how old they, they lived to be. How do you go from sort of the facts to the stories behind those people?
ROEN: So, all sorts of things, all sorts of ways. ... One of my workshops is on keeping a journal. That is, we should be sharing the stories about our own lives so that we can pass them down to descendants. One of my workshop focuses on how to do the research about what it was like where your ancestors live at that time and place. You can fill in some of the gaps. And I'm going to give you a good example of that I have in front of me. Right now, a letter written in Norwegian from 1866 to my great grandfather, great grandpa, Christian Christianson Roen, from his uncle, Olis Bronis. And there was one line in this letter that said: "Olis" — who was his cousin — "Olis went to war as soon as it broke out. And when he served his time, nearly out with only five months left, he was taken prisoner and died in prison."
Well, it was the U.S. Civil War, of course. And it didn't take me more than an hour's research to discover that Olis was captured at the battle of Chickamauga in September of 1863, went to Andersonville prison camp where he died. Like so many people who went to Andersonville, died from waterborne diseases, most likely. Now you want to know what life was like at Anderson? ... Do a Google search. You will find hundreds of thousands of sites that'll give you great details about what daily life was like, including the images of what daily life was like.
And so, you know, we, we all sorts of things like this letter makes us curious about the lives of our ancestors. And so, so I help people do the research. But then also I have all of these workshops, and I'll do one of them at Arizona Genealogy Day, along with the other speakers. And mine is the workshop on how to fill in the gaps when you don't have the stories, how to draw on the history of that location at that time, to find out what it was like to farm in Norway in the 1850s, for example. Or what it was like to be a shoemaker in Berlin in the 1830s, something like that.
So it might not be specifically your ancestors story, but it is the story that your ancestor probably would have been a part of.
ROEN: Right. Exactly. And and then so that, you know, this is the reason why I focused so much on getting people to tell their own stories, because our ancestors didn't have the opportunity to do that. We do, So among other things, my wife and I, since our first child was born in .... 1978, have kept a daily journal on my family.
We just passed 21,000 pages of journal entries in our family and those journal entries have things such as — I'm just gonna pick a thing that random — "For his first time today, Nick," our oldest oldest child, "Nick was able to reach light switches." This was when he was just about two years old with the use of a stool. "That means that he can reach 48 inches high."
So little details like that, people say, "Well, are little details like that interesting?"
Well, I like to put it this way. If you could find, like in our journal — we'll talk about what we had for dinner. Sometimes if you could find a journal from an ancestor from 400 years ago, might you be interested in what they had for dinner that night?
It's so interesting because I think we often look at our family history and think about what is in the past. What have people left for us — without thinking about maybe what can we leave for the people who follow us.
ROEN: Jonas Salk, who developed the Polio vaccine, he has a quotation that says that says: "Are we being good ancestors?" And being a good ancestor means all sorts of things. Relling stories to leave for our descendants. Leaving a legacy. One of my workshops is one is the legacy that you're leaving.
When you're doing your journal, how do you find the time to do it every day?
ROEN: So, every day since October of 1978, crawl into bed, write in the journal. And that's the perfect time to do it because the day is still fresh and fresh in your mind, as opposed to waiting until tomorrow when some of it will be gone forever.
