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Genealogy
We can all take a journey through time
by Joan Carpenter

Researching my family, finding out who I am through finding my roots, is an experience in time travel.

In the Scranton, PA newspapers for 1910, I found an item about a birthday party in Taylor, a small mining town where my parents were born. The guest list included Edmund and Leona White, my father and his sister. He was eight years old, his sister six.

I have walked the streets of Taylor and have a snapshot of my father as a child. In my mind's eye I see him on Taylor Street, perhaps skipping, clutching a present in one hand, his other holding Leona's, as they meander from their home at Storrs and Taylor down the block to the party at Phoebe Jones' house. So carefree.

In less than five years he would go to work in the breaker of the local mine, sorting coal. A few short years later he would be down in the pit. I travel beside him.

In 1918 my mother's great grandmother, Mary Ann East-Salmon, in her 94th year, wrote a short autobiography of her life. She was born in 1824 in Kilmersdon, Sommersetshire, England. Mary Ann's first husband was James Salmon.

I've been in touch with people who live in Kilmersdon now and others researching in the area. They have sent me pictures, historical notes, descriptions of the village, anecdotes. I even received a hand-drawn map of the village as it now stands, pinpointing the inn James' parents owned at the time the two met, and the school where James taught before and after their marriage.

With all this help, I travel with Mary Ann and James on the coach from Bristol, where they ran away to get married, walk along with them from the end of the line at Radsock over the rolling green hills with livestock quietly munching. As they crest the last hill, I hear with them the tolling of the church bells announcing to all the village their homecoming and no-longer-secret marriage. Mary Ann was widowed three times before the age of 44, bore 11 children, five of whom lived to adulthood. She died just a year short of her 100th birthday, religious, rebellious and strong, a survivor.

I learn about myself as I learn about her. I am the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter going back six generations (so far). As I sit at my desk, the ghosts of Mary Ann, of my parents, of all my ancestors hover around me, pointing the way to the next discovery.

My hope is that 80 years down the line, an unknown descendent of mine will read my words, and become sufficiently curious about this era in turn-of-the-century California, to embark on her own journey through time.

Joan Carpenter lives in McKinleyville, from where she has traveled to Pennsylvania and Canada in person and to England and Wales through the Internet to search out family history. She suggests that everyone searching their roots check out rootsweb.com and subscribe to the lists in the geographical areas of their interest. She can be reached at jlc12@mckinleyville.net.