Climbing the Family Tree

Genealogy is all the rage and Carleton alumni have joined the ranks of people who are serious about uncovering and preserving their family history. Whether it’s a beautiful book filled with photos, recipes, and other memorabilia or a blog that is easily accessible to family members all over the globe, the important thing is to leave a legacy for your children and grandchildren. And to do it now.

Frank Sinatra famously sang of being a puppet, pauper, poet, pirate—a pawn and a king. Bill Buffett’s life is almost as eventful. In his 81 years, the Nebraska native and longtime Massachusetts resident has been a high school history teacher, Boston taxi driver, and administrator in a state mental hospital. Buffett added author to his dossier in 2006 when he published Dear Katherine, a tribute to his then recently deceased mother, Katherine Norris Buffett.

Now, with a total of four sumptuously illustrated family history books to his credit and a fifth on the way, Buffett ’55 has added yet another title: advocate—for the importance of recording family history.

“I want people to think about leaving something of themselves behind,” says Buffett. “Your progeny may appreciate inheriting Grandmother’s candlesticks, but even more than that, they want to know something about you.”

Many Americans—Carls among them—are heeding Buffett’s counsel. Genealogy is hot. An estimated 84 million people around the world spend anywhere from $1,000 to $18,000 a year in search of their ancestors, according to a 2012 report by market research firm Global Industry Analysts. Genealogy ranks second only to gardening as America’s favorite hobby, and second only to porn as the most frequently searched subject on the Internet. Genealogy juggernaut Ancestry.com boasts some 2 million subscribers who pay from $13 to $35 per month for access to more than 10 billion records from more than 40 countries dating back to the 13th century. At the end of 2012, the website reported $2 billion in total revenue and was sold to a European private equity firm and other investors for a cash value of $1.6 billion.

Though the terms are often used interchangeably, family history and genealogy denote slightly different activities. Genealogy traces a living person’s ancestry or pedigree back in time from the present using archival records. Family history involves researching family members’ biographies and often results in narratives. Family history is genealogy come alive, say its practitioners, including Buffett. For genealogists, the thrill comes primarily from solving complex puzzles.

Judy Sosted ’61 counts herself among the genealogists. The retired Northfield social worker has traced the Norwegian side of her family back to 1250 and the Cornish side to 1066. Sosted recalls looking with her cousin at a photo of their great-great-grandparents. The cousin knew their names, birthdays, and where they were born in Norway—and Sosted was hooked. “Here was something to go on,” she says. “I had to see where I fit in, to solve that puzzle.”

“People who are interested in family history have different ways of approaching their research,” Buffett says. “My first cousin wrote a really thorough book on the Buffett family. It’s mostly names and birthdays and death dates, but knowing when my great-grandfather died doesn’t begin to satisfy my desire to know him.”

In fact, if he could bring back any human being in history, Buffett wouldn’t choose Lincoln or Napoleon. He’d resurrect Daniel Gibbon Norris, his maternal great-grandfather, who homesteaded during Nebraska’s land rush days. Buffett spent every childhood summer from the age of two on that old family farm.

Of this ancestor, Buffett says, “I am aching to know the answers to questions like Why did you leave Kentucky at age 24? Did you ever see your parents again? How did you make it through that first Nebraska winter, and how did you meet your wife?” Buffett’s fourth book, Grubbed Stumps Fixed Fence Pa to Town: Our Nebraska Farm 1871–2010, which was released in August 2013 at the Willa Cather Foundation in Red Cloud, Nebraska (near the ancestral farm), is the outcome of his curiosity.

“I don’t think Daniel could have imagined that 80 years after his death, his great-grandchild would want to know the answers to these simple questions,” Buffett says. “But I believe that our progeny, years down the line, will want to know these things about us.”

Tom Weaver ’69 agrees. He publishes his genealogical finds and family stories in a blog titled “Prairie-Lakes Journeys from a Two Spirited View.” Says Weaver: “To me, sharing the stories, passing them on to my sons, and building relationships is the thing that supports life.”

At one time, people who undertook genealogic searches were motivated primarily by a desire to identify noble blood in their ancestral line. But following the enormous success of the television miniseries Roots in the 1970s, more people became interested in learning where and whom they came from. In the pre-Internet past, however, genealogy searches meant hiring professionals or trekking to far-flung libraries and archives to squint for hours at microfilm. Today, most genealogists are still motivated by a desire to identify who is in their family tree—and by a need to feel connected to their past—but their task has been made infinitely simpler through easy access to online birth, death, marriage, census, military, church, and other records. Statistics show that the majority of visitors to online genealogy sites are white women age 55 and older, a demographic expected to grow 36 percent by 2020.

The Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) maintains the world’s largest genealogical archives. Where once genealogists had to travel to LDS headquarters in Salt Lake City (as both Judy Sosted and Tom Weaver have done), the material is now available free to researchers at FamilySearch.com and at 4,500 LDS reading rooms in 80 countries.

Yet even with so many online tools, nothing compares to visiting an ancestral site in person. Weaver and Sosted both have trekked to Europe—including Germany, Norway, and England—in search of family data. “There’s always a librarian or someone in those little towns who knows everything,” says Weaver, a business consultant and retired physician from suburban Minneapolis.

Weaver discovered that he is a direct descendant of Rebecca Nurse, who, although there was no credible evidence against her, was hanged as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Rather than write books, as Buffett has done, Weaver uses the Web to share his genealogical finds and musings with younger family members. One method isn’t better than another. Some people prefer to record their findings in an online format (websites or blogs), which are easy to share. And other people prefer the traditional printed format. Many of Buffett’s books have been inspired—or at least influenced—by the treasure trove of old family letters he has in his possession.

Buffett’s second book, Foods You Will Enjoy: The Story of Buffett’s Store (2008), is a tribute to the Omaha grocery and butcher shop founded in 1869 by Bill’s great-grandfather Sidney Buffett. Letters written by Sidney’s son and Bill’s grandfather, Ernest, provide personal and historical details about the workings of the old-school emporium, where the staff picked groceries off the shelves for patrons and created elaborate displays of canned goods and produce to entice shoppers. A reviewer noted, “Bill Buffett used to teach history, and the true historian’s touch infuses this book. It is a social history of 20th-century America.”

Buffett’s father, Fred, took over the store from Ernest, and Bill and his brother, Fritz, were expected to pitch in. “I realized that I was one of the last people alive who knew how that store worked,” Buffett says. “The personal touch and generations of independent ownership were very different from today’s chain supermarkets.”

Buffett’s first cousin and investment guru Warren Buffett wrote a chapter about their grandfather for the book. “He knew more about our grandfather than I did because he worked closely with him for a summer,” Buffett says. “Warren credits Buffett’s store with giving him a start in business.”

Considering that he’s descended from farmers and grocers, it’s not surprising that family recipes are a recurring theme in his books. In fact, the books themselves follow a recipe of sorts: Gather letters, snapshots, and diaries. Solicit stories and memories from friends and relatives. Conduct research in museums, libraries, and newspaper archives. Enlist a talented creative team (Boston-based graphic designer Rick Rawlins and editor Carol Henderson) to combine your findings. Take advantage of printing technology that allows for small runs of high-quality books. Voila!

After completing Dear Katherine and Foods You Will Enjoy, Buffett wanted to write about his own life. But first he had to silence his doubts about whether anyone would be interested. He narrowed his audience to family and friends, and realized he didn’t have to write an autobiography that “began at the beginning.” His third book, Recollections and Recipes (2009), is a collection of essays based on memories and events in his life.

By far the most personally revealing of the four, Recollections and Recipes does not shy away from the darker periods of Buffett’s life. The essay “Checker #74” begins: “It’s difficult to explain why someone in his early forties with two graduate degrees, including a Harvard doctorate, opts to drive a cab. . . . Years later I learned that my parents weren’t proud . . . [yet] no cloud in my life has had more of a silver lining than driving a taxi. I look back on the experience as one of the best in my life.” Buffett writes that driving a cab was his spiritual education. “Hacking brought me into brief but sometimes intimate contact with all kinds of people. For forty years [before that], I’d rubbed shoulders with only the white middle class.”

Not incidentally, Buffett mentions Carleton frequently in all of his books. “I’m wild about Carleton,” he says.  “So much of who I am came from that place. I like the school even better now than I did when I went there.”

Buffett has donated the originals of his Carleton letters to the college archives, and he is dedicating his latest book, An Old Man’s ABC Book (2014), to the Class of 1955 as a measure of his appreciation and affection for his classmates.

In fact, Buffett, Weaver, and Sosted all have lent their genealogy skills to Carleton in one way or another. Sosted, a class agent and chair of the Cannon Valley alumni club, records oral histories of alumni and staff for the Carleton archives and volunteers at the Northfield Historical Society. She also enters obituaries into a database for the Norwegian-American Historical Society, based at St. Olaf.

Weaver is working with Carleton archivists on a project to trace Dacie Moses’s family tree, an interest piqued by his years singing with the Knights when the group practiced in her home. Weaver maintains a page about Moses on his blog and has started a Dacie Moses family tree at Ancestry.com. He welcomes help from Moses family members and friends as he identifies people in family photos.

Meanwhile, Buffett takes advantage of any opportunity to encourage others to preserve their family histories. Buffett met Marion Richie Vance ’60 on a recent Carleton Alumni Adventures trip to Cuba and later shared his books with her. She wrote to him in February, “Your life and the stories you distill out of it provide a great answer to that perennial question, ‘So what do you do with a philosophy major?’ ” Vance is currently writing an essay about her childhood for the historical society in Woodland Park, Colorado, where she now lives—just west of where her great-grandmother settled.

Buffett likes to use the metaphor of a library for all that lies within us: our thoughts, memories, stories, anecdotes, and beliefs. “When a person dies, a library dies with that person. Chances are, right now, your library is closed,” he says. “Only you have the key. You are the only one who can tell—and preserve—your story.”

History Lesson

Children often learn the alphabet from ABC books. Bill Buffett’s An Old Man’s ABC Book (2014) is written from the other end of life. At 81, Buffett connects his experiences and opinions to letters. For example, B stands for “Begging at Burger King,” a charming tale about Buffett sweet-talking his way out of paying for a Diet Coke refill at the Kansas City airport. Buffett ’55 wanted to include advice in the ABC Book for readers who want to write their own memoir, but his editor and designer said it didn’t fit with the book’s theme.

But we’re here to help. Our alumni genealogists and family historians—Buffett, Judy Sosted ’61, and Tom Weaver ’69—share their advice and encouragement.

• If you can’t write a book, write a letter. When Buffett turned 81 in February, his daughter sent him a five-page handwritten letter. He loved it. (The L in An Old Man’s ABC Book stands for Letters.) After each visit with his grandchildren, who are toddlers, Buffett writes them a letter. Their parents save them, unopened, for when the children are older. Parents also can write letters—perhaps once a year or so—to their own children.
• Identify the people in your photos. Do it now.
• Start collecting family stories and objects today. Even if your children aren’t interested now, they will be one day.
• Answer the questions you wish you could have asked your parents and grandparents. If your parents and grandparents are still living, don’t wait to ask them!
• Write without fear. If you’re feeling intimidated by the blank page, borrow Buffett’s idea: tie stories to letters of the alphabet. Or compile a list of the places you’ve visited or lived and tell a story about each place.
• Collect family myths, because in every myth is a grain of truth.
• But then check facts. Sosted has learned not to trust anyone’s memory—or even dates on tombstones.
• Take notes during your search. If you need to verify something later, the notes will reveal where you found the information initially.
• Treat researching family history as an adventure. You’ll find information that delights you, surprises you, and embarrasses you. “Don’t judge,” says Sosted. “That’s why you’re here.”
• Ask for help—from family members and from other genealogists. Says Sosted: “It’s fun to go on the hunt.”

Laura Weber is a communications manager at the Minnesota Historical Society.