She digs for a family's roots

It's the passion of an aging population, the place where family and history meet.

''I don't know if it's facing your mortality and that's why we're interested," said Wareham Free Library's Lynda Byrne of the cultural fascination with genealogy. But, after the children are raised and out of the house, many people discover the time and inclination to find out where they came from.

And when they do, many turn to seasoned genealogists such as Byrne, a local history and genealogy librarian. They come with lots of questions, but mostly they just want to know how to get started.

The first piece of advice Byrne gives them is a warning against secondary sources. ''Don't ever accept anything you find on computer or even published unless you go to primary sources yourself," she said.

''Nothing is carved in stone, not even gravestones. You have no idea how many gravestones are wrong."

Byrne said she believes that a fascination with history and ancestry is a natural product of aging. ''Older people, myself included, love to talk about the past, their childhood, what it was like when they were kids," Byrne said.

Byrne caught the passion for genealogy from her mother, an only child with little sense of her family's past. She wanted to know more, and Byrne made it a project to help her find out. Now she uses her own research experience -- successes and setbacks -- to help guide others.

Byrne has been able to trace one side of her family back to the Mayflower and the other side back to the 1500s in England. People are generally able to trace their familes back to the ancestors who came to America, she said. Before that the search is more difficult. Irish records are hard to find, and phonetic spellings by immigration officials of foreign family names also complicate the search, Byrne said.

''Give me anything back to 1620, and I'm your girl," Byrne said.

Primary documents such as official birth, marriage, and death records are made at the time of the event, which enhances the odds of accuracy. Later documents, such as obituaries, are less reliable because they rely on memory.

Birth records are relatively easy to find if you know where your subject lived. Wareham Town Hall, like all municipalities, keeps records for all local births. If your father was born there -- as Byrne's was -- you can ask to see his birth record, a primary source.

If it's Boston (where Byrne's mother was born), Boston's city records are your destination. If you are unsure of the town or city of birth, go to the state Registry of Vital Records and Statistics in Dorchester. (Its website, vitalrec.com, can help get your search started.)

Massachusetts Vital Records keeps birth records from 1911 to the present. Birth records from 1847 to 1910 are kept in the Massachusetts Archives, housed at Columbia Point (sec.state.ma.us/arc/arcgen/genidx.htm.

Other states have their own systems. Looking for her great-grandfather's death record, Byrne assumed -- incorrectly, she now notes -- the record would be available in the New York State archives in Albany. The state archive does keep copies of vital records for all the state's municipalities -- except for New York City. Each city borough keeps its own. The moral of that story: ''You shouldn't assume."

Dealing with big city bureaucracy illustrates that patience and persistence play a role in success. Byrne wrote to all the boroughs with no luck. Discovering from other sources -- including an obituary in a New Bedford paper -- that Brooklyn was the place of death, she asked them to search again, and they found it. Her great-grandfather's death record had been filed under a misspelling of his name.

If you know a location but not a date, you can check the annual town reports at local libraries, which list all the births, marriages, and deaths. The Stone Room has them back to 1914.

When you don't have a good idea where an ancestor lived, try census records. Massachusetts has two good 19th-century censuses, done in 1855 and 1865, Byrne said. United States census records are available in its northeast regional archives -- the nearest one is in Waltham. Some early federal censuses include valuable immigration information -- where residents came from, the year they were naturalized, how long married, and how many children they had.

Here's where computer searches are handy. Byrne points to Ancestry.com, a paid subscription service that consists of scanned records -- so you can see the primary records themselves on the screen. ''It can save a trip to Waltham," she said.

In Wareham, library patrons can also use the library's enhanced version of the service, Ancestry Plus, which includes census data from some other countries and other information as well. There are some useful free online sources too.

Familysearch.org -- ''every novice starts with that," she said -- consists of family genealogy records of both Mormons and non-Mormons compiled by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints as part of their religious obligations. You can search with a name and add other filters by location.

Regional libraries collect other useful local history sources. The Wareham library has a data base of information on town residents compiled by a volunteer's search through local newspaper obituaries. The Stone room also has old 19th-century ''county atlas" maps that show the family name at each residence.

Further help and support can be found at the library's weekly genealogy groups held from 6:30 to 8 Thursday evenings.

Participants may bring questions or just share some stories, Byrne said. ''It's an opportunity to take a little trip down memory lane."