Was your great-great grandfather an adventurer, a rogue or a famous politician? While enjoying your vacation rental home and all the wonderful adventures to be found in the great Utah outdoors, here’s a terrific and unique adventure you can also try: Look up your ancestors. Salt Lake City is one of the best places in the world to do it.
Salt Lake City has the most exhaustive genealogical records in the world, located within the Family Search Library in downtown Salt Lake City. The database contains over a billion names. Computer searches are free and volunteers who are experienced genealogists are on hand to assist library patrons.
Even if you don’t have more than a vague memory of where you lived as a child, the helpful staff will likely find a record of your ancestors in short order.
One elderly man, who was not computer literate, launched a search for his great grandparents. They had come to the United States from Russia in the late 1800′s. He said the couple’s name had been changed at Ellis Island.
In fact the notion that family names were changed as a matter of course, when immigrants reached Ellis Island, is mostly myth. The clerks at Ellis Island worked from passenger lists provided by the shipping company and some of those entering the U.S. were too illiterate to know how to spell family names, when tickets were purchased.
A lazy ticket seller may have written the name incorrectly, or it may have been a name that couldn’t accurately be translated into English. Immigrants often Anglicized foreign-sounding names, as they were desperate to fit into the culture in their new homeland.
One of the library’s genealogists helped this man start with his own parents, and then he traced their parents and eventually found the names and records for the man’s great grandparents. The records went back for generations and the searcher soon discovered one of his ancestors was a personal physician to the Russian Czar in 1750!
What will you discover, when you launch a search for your ancestors at the Family History Library?
And when you’re done digging around in those family roots, remember that the great Utah outdoors is second to none. Schedule some time to hit the slopes or hike and be close to nature.