Genealogy: My mother's journey to the dark places of American History
By Brian Schwarz Researching our family tree was the number one objective of my mother’s retirement. She would fly once or twice a year to Utah on a genealogy vacation where she researched at the Family History Library with a personal librarian. In the beginning she seemed most interested in discovering specifics of her Scottish heritage. She was like a kid in a candy store with each new discovery as she started learning to really dig in to the past. Loaded with new bits of information and random details, she had big plans to visit the ancestral homeland and tie all the ends together in person. She was keen on discovering family churches, specific towns, and possibly finding a castle or two to explore when she arrived in Scotland. She found everything she was looking for and her discoveries aligned with much of what already had been passed down to her via oral tradition. After her first trip to Scotland – there would be others – she was drawn more deeply into our family’s inception ...