Digging into the past

You never know what you might find when you dig into your family's past. Searching through birth records in North Carolina, Maria Montgomery, labor and delivery supervisor at Northside Hospital in Atlanta, kept seeing a familiar name, Rosetta Jernigan.

"It turns out that my great-grandmother was a lay midwife in North Carolina and recorded a lot of the births, so working in labor and delivery isn't new in our family," said Montgomery, BSN. "Makes you wonder how much of our personality is nature and how much nurture, doesn't it? I love finding out interesting details like that."

Montgomery started researching her family's history as a hobby soon after she married in 1992. "My sister and I took a trip to Hertford County, N.C., where my father grew up. We started with one person's story," she said.

Montgomery was told that her grandfather, who was 24 years older than her grandmother, had known his wife's parents and waited for her to grow up so that they could get married. Montgomery began going through courthouse records and found her grandfather's birth certificate from 1870.

"At that time, we were reading original registers and they'd let us use the copy machine when we found something," she said. "Now, it's so much easier, because so many records are online, at sites like www.ancestry.com."

Since then Montgomery has become the unofficial historian for her family, spending hours on the Internet, keeping files, compiling a family tree and making a scrapbook to share at family reunions. She also has had old photographs restored and preserved, including two vintage portraits of her great-grandmothers in antebellum gowns.

"You can see a resemblance to one great-grandmother in my sister," she said.

Montgomery began with her father's family and traced it to 1860. "Before that, it's difficult to find records of black families. You need access to slave records, but I discovered that there was a large freed population in Hertford County, and that members of the Meherrin Indian (part of the Iroquois nation) tribe assimilated into it," she said.

Her father's family has white, Indian and black blood lines.

Montgomery has also researched her mother's family. The earliest date she's found for a direct ancestor is 1846, but she's traced the family name to 1790.

"When you're young you never think of your parents or grandparents having been young and having lives of their own," Montgomery said. "You think of everyone back in the old days as being farmers. What surprised me was how diverse their lives were."

She discovered family members who fought in the Civil War (on both sides), and people who worked as accountants, nurses and oystermen in a branch of her mother's family that lived on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

"We grew up in Norfolk, Va., and that may explain why my brother was always drawn to the water and became a tugboat captain," she said.

Montgomery found one relative who had recorded data for the 1920 census in his area; she's proud that his name is a permanent part of history. She also discovered two distant cousins from her mother's and father's family who had married each other, intertwining the families.

She also found some skeletons in the family closet, including an ancestor who had fathered two families, but only lived with one wife.

When she finds new information about an ancestor, Montgomery writes a story about each person's life and puts it in a scrapbook that her children have used for school projects.

"Families used to grow up within about 50 miles of each other, but are now scattered all over the country," Montgomery said, "but everything is all written down for my kids."

Although the hobby is time-consuming, Montgomery says that it's rewarding. "It's added a lot to how I value my family and their contributions."