(Editor’s Note: Michelle Sinclair is the daughter of columnist Melodie Davis; she is married and works in Washington, D.C. Her father’s family hails from Alabama and Virginia and her mother’s is mostly from Indiana.)

A small clue can open a vivid doorway into an ancestor’s life; one came while I was researching my mom’s side of the family tree, the Mennonites.

It seems like everyone has those nuggets of family lore that get passed around at reunions and visits to Grandpa’s house. Maybe your story is an ancestor who was supposed to sail on the Titanic, but her plans changed at the last minute. Maybe you’re somehow related to a famous novelist, or a Revolutionary War hero. For me, I always knew one half of my family came from a long line of Mennonite ancestors, while the other half was a mix of Appalachian mountain folk, Southern sharecroppers, and the occasional rumored Native American grandmother.

But how much is true, and how much is the result of a centuries-long game of “Telephone,” or “Gossip” where story-changing details get lost in mutation?

I tried a free 14-day trial to Ancestry.com (which usually costs about $25 a month) and quickly learned that the Federal U.S. Census information prior to 1850 is just about useless plowing farther back into the family tree. (See endnotes for information on researching families in Canada.) Prior to that year, census takers only recorded the name of the head of the house, and whether he was between the ages of, say, 25 and 44. Then they tallied the number of “free males” between the ages of 0 and 10, 10 and 15, and so on. They did the same for “free females,” and then at the end of the list, the total number of slaves. African Americans trying to research their family history through these periods must feel even more frustrated—or angry. After 1850, the censuses cough up treasures like names for everyone, exact ages, and even great details like occupation, and where mothers and fathers came from.

But fortunately we don’t have to rely entirely on censuses. Things like gravestones, obituaries, and even some other person’s application to membership in organizations like the Daughters and Sons of the American Revolution supply a wealth of family information that might be surprising. For every family story disproved by ship records (my coworker’s grandmother did not, in fact, “almost sail” on the Titanic in 1912), you gain a real insight into the realities of their world (her grandfather actually sailed to America in 1910, and a year later, in 1911, his wife and four small children emigrated to join him).

A perfect illustration of how a small clue can open a vivid doorway into an ancestor’s life came while I was researching my mom’s side of the family tree, the Mennonites. Mennonites and Quakers have a strong history of conscientious objection to war, and I’m as proud of that as I am of my WWII veteran grandfather and Civil War veteran ancestors on my dad’s side of the tree. Logic said that if I was ever going to find a Revolutionary War veteran in my family tree, it would be on the non-pacifist side.

I was wrong. To this date, the only colonial-era veteran I’ve found is on the pacifist side of my tree. Nathaniel Jefferis Sr., a Pennsylvania Quaker, fought in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Surprising as that is (and of course in those days there was no such thing as being allowed to abstain from fighting and “conscientiously object” to war), I noticed something odd about his records. His first wife died in 1777. So did all eight of their children. And his mother. And his father.

The poor, poor man! Since that was right at the start of the war era (1775-1783), I originally thought they had been killed in the crossfire of a battle. But in the 18th century, the actual violence of war tended to stay on the battlefields and out of civilian homes. A Google search turned up the cause of death for his first wife: “camp fever.”

I consulted my friend William Tatum—a historian who specializes in 18th century military history—and he explained that a number of diseases went by the name of camp fever at that time, including typhus. “The Continental Army was a cesspot [cesspool] of disease in the winter of 1776–1777, and was mostly quartered on the civilian population. It would not have been unusual at all for some form of contagion to jump to the civilian population and start wiping people out.” He added that the Continental Army was moving troops and material through the exact area where the Jefferis family lived in 1777.

Nathaniel Jefferis remarried after the war, and my family is descended from his second wife, but I wonder, did he join the war after his entire family died or was he already away with a regiment, and thus escaped the infection? I’ll probably never know, but what I do know now is invaluable.

Once you start researching your family, you probably won’t want to stop (Ancestry.com knows what they’re doing with those free trials). Still, once the initial groundwork is done, there are lots of free supplemental resources available online—all accessible through a simple Google search. There are also records at local libraries, the National Archives, and state or provincial collections of individual memoirs. More and more of these documents are getting scanned (and thus, searchable) every day.

And finally, as it turns out, one bit of my family lore holds water. My dad does have a Native American great-grandmother. Thanks to my research, and the scanning and sharing efforts of a cousin we never knew we had, we now have the pictures to prove it.

(*Ancestry.com has a “World” membership that is $35 a month, and gives you access to census records from all over the world, including Canada. Other sources include the Library and Archives of Canada.)

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