New wastes of time

So I've been spending a lot of time on Ancestry.com, my newest diversion from everything else that I really should be doing. But I recognize that what I'm doing is as far from real genealogy as stickfigures are from Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel. If anything, Ancestry.com allows me to piggy-back on the work that real genealogists and archivists have done over the years as well as that of all of the (I'm certain) underpaid librarians, library-assistance, summer interns, and well-meaning archive volunteers.

The sheer documentary volume is overwhelming. There are hundreds of years of census records, immigration records, and everything else that they advertise. What have I learned? Patterns tend to repeat over generations. My own family represents a virtual matriarchy. I can trace back mother's mother's mother's families back to 1049 (I'm not kidding!) but the father's lines all seem to dry up after one or two generations: all of them. Or, they have the most common names of their generations. Let us take for granted my great-great-grandfather on my mother's side, Samuel Maxwell. We've had these little daguerreotypes of two forlorn little girls in the family for years and never have known from whence they issued. Turns out, according to the 1870 that Ol' Sam was a daguerreotype artist (his listed profession). But of his origin? Nothin'.

Which brings us to the most significant mystery man (in my opinion) to be shaken out of the proverbial tree, Samuel Steele. As you might guess from the overall euphony of the name, there were quite a few Sam Steeles alive during the Civil War who fought on both sides. And I've got nothing but my grandfather's death certificate to say he existed: no marriage records, no death records (or at least none that I can assert are definitely my Sam Steele and not another's), nada, zilch. As if he did not exist. And this pattern recurs over and over again.

So what have I learned? Believe it or not, I've learned something sociolinguistic: can we look at paternal heritage as a reliable indicator of immigration effects? For whom does the founder effect matter? For men or women? Or have I just learned that I need a full genealogy for my husband to pass on to my daughters?