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Archiver > NJHUDSON > 1999-03 > 0920558030


From: "Scientist Guy" <>
Subject: [NJHUDSON-L] Wall Street Journal Story on Genealogy
Date: Thu, 04 Mar 1999 06:33:50 PST


March 3, 1999

Sharlene Van Rooy Reunites People With Ancestral Mementos -- but Why?
By QUENTIN HARDY Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

HOLLISTER, Calif. -- "There are so many old pictures that have no one,"
says Sharlene Van Rooy. "I know they belong on somebody's wall."
There are also diaries, marriage licenses, greeting-card collections and
all the other bygone memorials of everyday life. They cover Mrs. Van
Rooy's desk. She touches the documents, rescued from the anonymity of
junk shops and antique sales. "Why did someone get rid of this?" she
asks, pausing at a hank of hair looped inside a baby book.
Since 1995, the 34-year-old Mrs. Van Rooy has found an avocation in
gathering abandoned mementos and researching the lives of their departed
owners. She often starts with little more than a family name. Then, if
she can track down living relatives, she will offer them an unbidden
piece of their distant past.
Most are delighted. "We had no idea it was in an antique shop," says
Gloria Burroughs, a Delton, Mich., resident who received an 1874 wedding
certificate with pictures of her great-grandparents from Mrs. Van Rooy.
"My mom thought her cousins still had it."
To get it to Mrs. Burroughs, Mrs. Van Rooy and her husband traveled at
their own expense to Michigan, where they met the faces behind her
names. "I can see why some people think it's kind of creepy, since I
don't know any of these people," Mrs. Van Rooy says. "But it's neat --
all the sleuthing, and getting the families talking to each other."
Not everyone finds it neat. The service is free, and Mrs. Van Rooy only
occasionally asks to be reimbursed for more expensive items, but "it was
kind of odd," says John Jensen of Carson City, Nev., who turned down
Mrs. Rooy's phone offer of an album of photos of his grandmother as a
baby. "You've got to ask yourself, 'Why is she doing this?' "
Some people "hang up on me," and some are "uninterested," says Mrs. Van
Rooy, who earns her living as a technical illustrator and volunteers at
the local historical society. But soon, her curiosity gets the best of
her, and she is on to a new relative or heirloom.
Just Plain Curious
Mrs. Van Rooy is one of several genealogists, historians or the just
plain curious around the country who try to unite people with their
forebears' possessions. In most cases, they are collectors who become
interested in their antiques' provenance and get a kick out of neatening
up history's messes.
"If you go to a lot of garage sales or flea markets, you end up with
boxes of stuff -- lots of wedding albums and pictures," says Edward W.
Elliott, a Scotrun, Pa., collector and president of Your Past
Connections (www.pastconnect.com), an Internet bulletin board where
people list items like old family Bibles and baby books. "I don't do it
for money. You realize it's valuable to people in other ways."
Some of the people who post items on that Web site ask for small sums.
Others like to be paid in details about the family they have adopted. "I
sent my lineage, back to my fourth great-grandfather," to a Dunkirk,
N.Y., minister in exchange for a family Bible from 1828, says Tanya
Kief, a Houston, Pa., housewife. "I was really happy to do it," she
adds. "A lot of people have things that don't belong in their hands."
That minister, L. Edward Durbin, says his pleasure is "finding out there
is a real family" to go with an old book. He hopes to place more old
Bibles, which frequently contain family trees.
'There's Always Someone'
Mrs. Van Rooy's approach takes a lot more effort than posting a notice
on a Web page. She says she spends "all her free time" researching
strangers, starting with scant clues such as the name of a school board
mentioned in a diary or names in a wedding document. Then she writes to
the district or church, or calls historical societies for any record of
people named. "I find someone who is as jazzed up about this kind of
thing as I am," she says. "There's always someone."
The sleuthing mixes schmoozing and hard research. In the case of Mr.
Jensen's grandmother's baby book, the bookseller who sold it to Mrs. Van
Rooy said the photos were somehow related to Jackie Jensen, a former
professional baseball player. She found through library research that
Jackie Jensen was married to Zoe Ann Olsen, an Olympic diver. Norma
Bragstad, the name of the baby in the book, was Zoe Ann Olsen's mother
(and was also the inventor of synchronized swimming). Jackie and Zoe
Jensen had lived in Oakland, Calif., with their two children, and
through a local historical society, Mrs. Van Rooy found out how to
contact their son, John Jensen.
Mrs. Van Rooy uses the Internet, her own books on genealogy and the
Sutro Library in San Francisco, a major genealogical center, which
houses resources like old phone books from around the country.
In her biggest project to date, a four-year effort, she has identified
more than 300 members of a family descended from Dora Tenant, who was 19
years old when she wrote her diary in 1881. She has even helped arrange
family reunions for Tenants on both sides of the country.
Mrs. Van Rooy's passion for strangers' lives grew from researching her
own family, which settled in New Hampshire in the 1600s. "I had kind of
done my own family tree -- at least as far back as William the
Conqueror," she says over a cold soda in this sleepy Central California
town. About that time, she came across the Tenant diary at the
historical society, and soon after that saw the wedding pictures from
Mrs. Burroughs's family, hanging in an antique store.
"The bride had these really piercing eyes," she recalls, "I told myself,
'I bet I can figure out who that belongs to.' " Now she investigates a
half-dozen family heirlooms at a time, taking up one if she gets stuck
on another.
Haberdasher's Almanac
The collection spills over a table: a thin file with a baby boy's
footprint, and later news from his tour in Okinawa; a 1901 diary inside
an Illinois haberdasher's almanac; a fat album in red leather that
chronicles a marriage between 1935 and 1949. Many are cards, marking
anniversaries, Christmas, Father's Day. None bear more than a few words;
most have just a signature.
"I was so disappointed when I got home with this and there were no
messages. Nothing from the husband to the wife," she says, turning the
pages of the marriage chronicle. "You have to make your own story up
when you look at it."
The researcher admits that there is something eccentric about her hobby.
"My husband thinks I'm nuts," she says, "I'll talk about all these
people all the time, and he can't even keep them straight."
But sometimes there are impressive coincidences, too. In Michigan, with
the Burroughses, Mrs. Van Rooy ate a five-course Mother's Day meal off
the same dishes the 19th-century bride and groom used at their wedding.
Mrs. Burroughs, whose son had just died in a car accident, says
receiving the pride of her great-grandmother's youth gave her "a sense
of completion."
"I felt I was giving her something good," says Mrs. Van Rooy. "It closed
a circle."
Mrs. Van Rooy, who has yet to have children, says she would be happy if
her own detailed genealogy falls away from her family tree, into some
21st-century flea market.
"Somebody will find it," she says confidently. "They'll figure it out."

Copyright 1999 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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