The rule in family history research is that you start with somebody you know and work backwards to discover their parents, grandparents and family groups.
And so we are starting with Clarence Monroe Barnes. How much we find will depend on how many of the state primary records have been digitized and are available online.
Researching family history is like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle without knowing how many pieces you’re meant to have or what the finished picture is meant to look like. It can be frustrating, surprising and exciting.
And along the way, you can learn some of the local and social history of the time and the area in which you are researching, as I did about Tennessee.
The call came in September 2004. “If I send you a book on ‘Genealogy on the Internet’, would you research our family history?” It was my aunt speaking, my father’s younger sister. She was the only one left of the three children born to my paternal grandparents.
And so began my travels on the family history trail. It was a journey both intensely frustrating at times and incredibly rewarding at others.
And which led to the moment that I realised the importance of knowing and understanding our roots.
In 2015 a friend in America said that there was no known family history back beyond his great grandfather Clarence Monroe Barnes, because Clarence’s father had died when Clarence was young and there was no oral history.
I set myself the challenge to follow the paper trail and uncover his family history.
The more I studied the draft family tree and the letters, the more I began to perceive anomalies. So exactly where and when had Henry been born?
I set out to solve the mystery and to prove all the information in the letters.
Kim investigates the Miller family archives, the papers which she’d kept after her husband Joe died. And finds letters from previously unknown people in the USA, to Henry’s widow, Linda.
What was their connection to Henry?
