Family History Center at LDS Church offers free help to
residents searching for their heritage, here and abroad
I recently graduated from San Benito High School and decided
that knowing exactly where I came from was important to discovering
who I am myself. I knew, from my father, that I came from a very
large family that came from southern California and Mexico.
Family History Center at LDS Church offers free help to residents searching for their heritage, here and abroad
I recently graduated from San Benito High School and decided that knowing exactly where I came from was important to discovering who I am myself. I knew, from my father, that I came from a very large family that came from southern California and Mexico.
My great-grandfather on my dad’s side died when I was 17 so I was able to learn about his life and family from him directly. My dad was very interested about where we came from and who our family was, so he decided to do a little research himself.
After digging through the years of our relatives, he was able to uncover almost all of my great-grandfather’s family, including his parents and siblings. It turned out that his mother was almost 6 feet tall; unfortunately, I think that gene skipped over me.
To get some more help with researching our family, I visited the Family History Center, which has been in Hollister since 1996. The Family History Center is located at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints on Cienega Road. There, Ramona Starkweather, the director of the library, helped me find more information about my family history.
The genealogy library is a branch of a larger library located in Utah called the Genealogical Society of Utah, established in 1894.
The Genealogical Society of Utah is one the largest genealogy libraries in the world and has resources such as microfilm, an Internet database, books, and birth and death records.
Starkweather, who has worked at the family history center for eight years, helped me go through all the resources the library had to find out more about my ancestry. I was able to look through multiple websites, such as familysearch.org and ancestry.com, to find census records and information about where my family lived.
The available census records date back to 1700. These census records allow users to see records of where family members have lived, how many people they lived with and even their occupation.
The website familysearch.org also has an additional link that only the genealogy staff can access, fhc.familysearch.org. It requires a code by given just to staff members. This addition to the site allows users to have further access to records and information that is not available through the public site.
When I arrived at the genealogy library, I was unaware that I was supposed to bring previous information about my life, such as names, birthdates and where my relatives lived.
“Without this information,” Starkweather said, “it would be almost impossible to find people.”
To start off my family history research, I had to begin with one side of my family and continue on from there. Considering I have the names of my great grandfather’s parents, I started with them.
The genealogy library can locate people from around the world, not only in the United States. It consists of files from other countries; if those countries kept records of their people. Those with ancestors in European countries, such as Britain and France, places where the government kept strict records, are more likely to find information as compared to Mexico and Ireland, where government records are spottier.
I was able to look through Mexican records to see if I could find any of my relatives that came from that country. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find them. Starkweather and I assumed they lived in an area that didn’t keep records of its residents.
I was intrigued to see that the census organization of Mexico was so bad, having only two available sources of records, compared to Britain, which had almost 15.
As I continued to search for my family members on the various websites that the family history center provided me with, I learned something about my family. It was almost as if they hadn’t existed. I could not find any records of my family before my great-grandfather. One possibility is that my family had come here illegally and avoided all census records, because they were nowhere to be found, before my great-grandfather.
The only record that we found of my great-grandfather was when he was in the army. He had served in World War II as part of the Airborne 101. Besides the confirmation of his service, I was unable any new information.
After the third day of searching for my relatives, I had everyone in the library helping me try to find some evidence of their residence here in the United States, but with no luck. Not one census record contained my family’s names.
I did not expect the search for my family to be so difficult but Starkweather assured me that sometimes people are just able to hide themselves. She told me about how she was also trying to find a family member of hers that seemed to be nonexistent.
I was grateful to the family history center for trying so hard to find my family and with all the help they provided to me. I may not have been able to find my family then, but I have many family members who are willing to tell me stories of my ancestry and what they remember from their childhood.
The Hollister Family History Center is located at 1670 Cienega Road, and is open to anyone interested in researching their family history. The library is open Tuesday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Wednesday from noon to 3 p.m. and 6 to 9 p.m., and Thursday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 6 to 9 p.m.
