Finding Family

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Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

Monterey County Genealogy Society hosts conference
By LISA CRAWFORD WATSON
Herald correspondent

Perhaps there was an argument, a falling out. Maybe an affair. Or a financial crisis. Or maybe something much more dramatic, anything, one might hope, that would make the pondering worthwhile. What else would cause her grandparents to pack up the kids and the car and move out of state, closing the door on their past?

It’s not that Junel S. Davidsen never wondered, not that she never asked her mother what happened to those who came before. It’s just that her mother, out of respect for her own mother’s wishes, never brought it up. And so the story, it seemed, was buried with the generation.

“Some families are unwilling to talk about the past,” Davidsen said. “My grandmother simply said we could find out after she was gone. I always hoped she’d leave us some papers, some indication about the history of our family. But she didn’t leave us a clue. After she died, I was able to find her Social Security death index, from which I ordered a copy of her application. On that it told me where she was born. It was a start.”

The real beginning was the genealogy kit Davidsen’s husband gave her for Christmas, coupled with her father’s permission to start researching her mother’s side of the family. And the real Christmas gift came when she located her mother’s cousin in Watsonville. It was the first contact with extended family in more than 70 years.

The impetus for genealogy, the study of family history and lineage, is often the desire to solve a mystery, to verify citizenship,

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