Ten years and counting: my genealogical journey

Posted on May 29, 2007 in Genealogy by DM

It occurred to me this weekend, as I traipsed around Winterset Cemetery looking for a needle in a haystack (because the plat office was closed - CLOSED! On Memorial Day!) that I’ve been a genealogist for ten years. I have photos from my first trip (as an adult, anyway) to this very cemetery in the Spring of 1997, showing my three-year-old daughter leaning against a variety of Thornburg headstones.

The beginning of my genealogical journey is bittersweet. In late November, 1996, at the age of 63, my mother (Beverly Ann Thornburg Barcheski) suffered her second heart attack. She spent a week in the hospital, and during that same week my husband and I were preparing to leave for our first Carribean cruise. One night mid-week, I remarked to him that upon our return from vacation I was going to begin researching my family history by talking to my mom about her childhood in Winterset “before it’s too late.”

On Friday, December 6, we traveled to Missouri to drop off our daughter for the week she would spend with her paternal grandparents while we were gone. When we got back from Missouri that night, there was a message from my dad to get to the hospital right away - Mom had collapsed while taking a ’stress test’ before being released to go home, and was in emergency open heart surgery. She did not survive.

A few months later, I began the genealogical journey anyway. Mom’s mother, my grandmother Verdie Elizabeth Thornburg Craft, was alive and well, and gave me glimpses into daily life in Madison County from the beginning of the 20th Century. She was not, as it turned out, willing to talk much about my mother’s childhood, as the birth had been out of wedlock. Since I had not set out to upset my grandmother by delving into topics that she found shameful or resurrecting demons she had spent a lifetime beating back, I determined early on that I would have to find the evidence of Mom’s childhood myself through photos, papers, stories previously shared, and other sources.

Since that time, genealogy has became an obsession - rooting out the names and dates of critical life events for my ancestors, connecting with far-flung cousins (some of whom possess precious antique family photographs!), pouring over brittle old documents in the basements of historic courthouses, wandering through cemeteries large and small in search of a stone with a familiar name.

The identity of my mother’s father remains a mystery and likely always will, but that’s okay. The important thing - at least for me - is not necessarily to collect all the answers. It’s merely to find my place among the characters of the past, and to find the things that make us a family.

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