Mr. Write's Page

Back in the 1990s, the genealogy bug bit me, and I spent some time trying to expand the family tree as we knew it at the time.

You can imagine the challenges — the obstacles, the frustration, the dead ends, the false leads — of researching Smiths. I pretty much got nowhere.

All my life, what was known about our family history had been simple and brief: in the late 1700s or early 1800s, three Smith brothers arrived in Georgia, supposedly from North Carolina. One of the three, Archibald, settled in South Georgia. We are his descendents.

The names of Archibald’s brothers and where they settled, nobody knew. Where the brothers came from, we had no clue.

I wasn’t the first Smith to try to solve the mystery. Lots of enterprising folks had tried before me, examining census records, leafing through the pages of courthouse files, digging through the documents of the departed. They all came up empty.

Part of the problem was the Smith factor. Smiths are maddeningly numerous. That’s even true of Archibald Smiths. When I did my search, I found five Archibald Smiths in Georgia in the early 1800s.

In addition, there are crucial gaps in the historic record. As I discovered when doing research in North and South Carolina, census records for certain years are missing. They were lost at various times in accidental fires.

And then, of course, there was the biggest factor of all: in the old days, there was no such thing as Googling. Online research had not been invented yet.

But, ah, online research is now a reality, and it is truly wondrous to behold.

Based on a couple of promising leads, and using Ancestry.com, my son Dustin hit the jackpot. He identified the three Smith brothers and traced them back to Maryland.

We now have pretty solid information about a passel of early Smiths — names, dates, and places regarding parents, siblings, and children going back another five generations.

Most fascinating of all, we may have found the original Smith — the first to arrive here by boat from the old country.

It appears that a James Smith (1620-1693) came here from England (maybe with his parents, maybe as a young adult) and settled in Somerset, Maryland.

James married a local girl, and they had a son, who had a son, who had a son, whose son was our man Archibald.

I’ll spare you further details, because nobody cares about the Jameses, Georges, and Archibalds in someone else’s family.

The point is, thanks to these recent revelations and other data we’ve found online, we know twice as much about the family as my parents, or anyone before them, ever did.

The genealogy resources available online today are staggering. Consider one anecdote.

Recently, I decided to consolidate all of my scattered “family tree” information into a single document. The finished item is 16 pages of cryptic who-begat-whom data, and I’m very pleased with it.

While building the file, I found that I didn’t know the date of birth of my great-uncle Sidney, who is buried in Savannah. Probably, the missing date is in one of the boxes of family papers in my garage, but I wasn’t ready for that step. So I Googled him.

What popped up was this photograph on Findagrave.com:

Stunning.

For a long time, I was of the opinion that the most impressive, most amazing, most consequential invention in the last 200 years is the telephone. That was premature.

The winner, hands down, is the Internet.