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I grew up in a village in rural Southwestern Ontario, where people were born, lived, and died for generations; many never moving much further than the next town over.
I remember going through elementary school and finding out over time that it seemed everyone was related to everybody else. I can’t recall anyone who was an only child, other than myself. My parents and I moved there from Toronto when I was just a baby, living a half hour from where my maternal grandparents moved to retire, on the shores of Lake Huron.
I wasn’t related to anyone. My closest cousins lived over an hour away, and the others scattered along the 401 between Kitchener and Québec. After I realized that I didn’t have the same local family connections as my friends and neighbours, I lost that sense of belonging in the town. In our ten page phone book, my last name stood out as one of the only two Q’s, next to a family by an equally different name of Querengesser. Where did my name, Quackenbush, come from? It just all seemed so strange to me.
In 2001, when I was ten years old, my maternal great-Aunt Hilda published a family tree in a binder and mailed copies to as many family members as she was in touch with. Aunt Hilda had worked on her own maternal family history for over thirty years. I remember looking at the names, dates, and places on the pedigree chart showing all of my cousins on different branches – and there I was! We didn’t often all get together, so it was, in my own way, seeing seeing my family.
Over and over, I would pull out the family tree binder and wonder who all of the other people were in it. I certainly had never heard of some of those names. The curiosity had struck me.
Fast forward to high school, we moved to Burlington. I realized being in the city, there were so many more people like me – not related to everyone!
I was fifteen, and I realized that the family tree book I had been looking at for the last 5 years, didn’t have any information on my Dad’s family! I didn’t put two and two together that Aunt Hilda wouldn’t have done research on my Dad’s family, heck, she even had his birthday wrong in her tree! I decided I wanted to tell the story of my Dad’s family history – the Quackenbush and Walker families. It seemed like my Dad knew very little beyond his immediate family. Who were these families? and Where did they come from?
This stemmed my passion for discovery and learning about the people that came before us and that connect us all. For over fifteen years now, I have travelled and researched in many churches, archives, and other repositories in my crusade to learn about my own family. In the last ten years, I’ve helped friends (some identified now as cousins) learn more about people in their family tree, which grew to taking on clients around the world.