Every genealogist should eventually make the trek out to SLC to visit the FamilySearch Library (formerly known as the Family History Library). It is open access and free to the public, like a city library, except it is wholly focused on genealogy research materials and managed by the company FamilySearch (founded by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints).
One of the genealogy societies I belong to, Ventura County Genealogical Society (VCGS), makes an annual pilgrimage to the library on what they have termed the Salt Lake City Safari. I learned about their trip a couple years ago and felt I'd need to tag along when the schedule made sense for me. 2025 was the year!
A group of about 35 of us joined together in Utah for a week in March filled with family history research and group dinners. This was the 2nd genealogy research excursion I've taken (the first being to Dublin, Ireland), and I have really grown to love them. Your research is done solo and on your own time table, but you can balance it out with social time among the type of people who won't be bored about you droning on about your family tree. It's a good mix.
Plus, it gives you the comfort of traveling with a group to a location you may not be super familiar with, so that level of security really puts me at ease, too. I'd love for my next research trip to be on a genealogy cruise, if I can make it work with my schedule!
For this trip, I had put together 3 separate research projects to dive into. My objectives were:
1. Discover the actions of my 2nd great grandfather Charles Edward Foltz, born 31 August 1848 in Hagerstown, Washington County, Maryland and died 24 October 1921 in Vermillion, Marshall County, Kansas, between the years 1860 and 1872 when he was migrating between Maryland and Illinois during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
2. Determine the death date and place for my 2nd great grandfather Christian Eggenberger, born 29 April 1838 in Switzerland, and died likely between 1876 and 1879 in Cole County, Missouri or Wayne County, Ohio. Christian was married to Ester Sauvain on 1 October 1861 in Wayne County, Ohio, and his last child born was said to be Julia E. Eggenberger on 22 February 1878 in Jefferson, Cole County, Missouri.
3. Find the newspaper which published the obituary for my 3rd great grandfather Charles Henry Miller in Boone County, Iowa within the week following his death on Friday, 9 April 1886. The article mentioned him being the oldest member of the Masonic fraternity in the city, having passed the 32nd degree, but not belonging to any of the local lodges.
I wish I could say I uncovered tons of information at the library to fulfill all 3 of the above objectives, but alas, I was really striking out left and right throughout the entire week! To be honest though, I did specifically select these 3 projects because they have all been brick walls for me. I was hoping that having access to the plethora of microfilm records on file at the FamilySearch Library would knock at least one of those walls down. It was just not meant to be. Instead, I have to look at each of them as having made progress by eliminating avenues of research. There are now tons of records I can say that I've looked through with negative results. That is just the necessary and unsatisfying part of family history research.
So once I completed all 3 research logs, the remaining day and a half in Salt Lake I spent researching other random branches of my family tree just for fun. Instead of tactfully going about it with a formal research question and objective, I just dove in and went on the hunt for whichever ancestors were speaking to me while I was there. And going about it that way, I was able to find some goodies!
I stumbled upon a collection of survey cards from a remote village in Switzerland where my 2nd great grandmother Ester Sauvain grew up. And they even included a road named for her family! In French, it was titled "Sauvain Path," and mentioned it was constructed by a Sauvain from Grandval (which was the next village over, which Ester's father had emigrated from). So this must have been near where her house would have been in the early 1800s.
I also discovered a 1st cousin 4x removed's wild encounter with an armed gunman while he was on duty as a policeman in Wheeling, West Virginia. The library had access to several digitized newspaper subscription sites that I did not have access to at home.
Surprisingly, I found a distant cousin of mine listed on the membership roll for a genealogy society in Iowa, as I was thumbing through their published newsletters. This surprised me, as I had never known her to be interested in family history.
I learned my 3rd great grandfather Washington Stafford was a staunch Democrat through and through, proudly placing his vote against Abraham Lincoln and many other Republican and Whig nominees for President over the years.
Although conducting family history research is different than a haphazard family history search, I always tend to have more fun with the latter. Usually you'll make further progress in the long run with a formal research plan that can help you answer your definitive questions about your family tree, but honestly, the "bright shiny objects" and "rabbit holes" of ancestor hunting is where I find the most joy. So, I may not have answered any of my research questions I set out to answer on this trip, but I had a great time just coincidentally finding long lost stories about my people.
Fast forward a month after our SLC Safari, and I happened to read an email newsletter written by Diana Elder of Research Like a Pro and Family Locket. She wrote about an ancestor's tombstone being shaped like an obelisk and engraved with Freemason insignias. It led her to discover he was a Royal Arch Mason. This struck a chord with me, because my 3rd great grandfather Charlies Miller's headstone was in the shape of an obelisk (though there were no carvings in it). He was the subject of my 3rd objective on the SLC research trip. Part of that objective was to help confirm his participation in the Freemason fraternity by locating his obituary in a newspaper.
The headstone symbolism encouraged me to return to Charles Miller's FindAGrave memorial page and analyze it for the 1000th time. The same uncited obituary was also on his memorial page, but the page creator and contributors could not explain where the info had originated from. I then did a Google search for the cemetery (again, something I've done 1000 times over again).
Wouldn't you know it, but they had upgraded their website and added searchable transcripts of owners for different burial plots! I immediately searched for Charles Miller. Upon initial look, I couldn't find him listed. But eventually I found his family's plot recorded under "Unknown Miller." It didn't brandish any new info for me, but it got me invested once more in the cemetery.
From that page, I navigated to the city's government website (the caretakers for the cemetery). And from there, I happened to click on the city's library website. I felt as though my ancestor was guiding me along the path. Charles was trying to lead me to some answers.
Their city library had a special Genealogy section on their website. I drilled down further and found they had digitized all of their historical local newspapers and had made them text-searchable! I plugged in Charles' name and the year of his death, and BOOM. Not only did I immediately find the obituary I had been seeking for the past decade (and for the entire week at the Salt Lake City FamilySearch Library), but I also found two other variations of his obituary in other local papers as well! My 3rd research objective was successfully reached -- finally.
In the end, the FamilySearch Library may not have been the answer to my Miller objective, but another library had been! Many thanks to the Ericson Public Library in Boone, Iowa for digitizing their newspaper collection. Libraries in all shapes, sizes, and locations are such a "boon" for our family research.
Sounds like you had a very successful visit! I was there 20 years ago - it was so exciting. Sadly, I won't be visiting from Canada until 2029...
ReplyDeleteI would definitely mark it down as being a successful trip! I'm sure you'll be counting the days until your next one. I'm actually headed up to Canada soon for my very first time!
Delete