The ghosts in our family tree

They’re part detective, part teacher and part therapist.

“We ask people to come in and tell us what they know,” said Kara Rosenberg, a former adult-school principal who discovered genealogy after retirement. “Then we teach them how to do the research and how to trace their ancestry, verify sources and organize what they find.”

What used to take years of phone calls and snail mail letters can now unfold with a few online searches. Most of the genealogy world today lives online, and the technology transforming the field is, you guessed it, artificial intelligence. “You can type in a place and a name,” she told me, “and AI will start searching for you, linking possible records.”

Of course, the challenge is verification. Like any detective, genealogists have to confirm their leads with evidence such as birth and death certificates, census data, church registries, military files and even cemetery records. The library’s status as a FamilySearch affiliate means patrons can access materials that aren’t available from home and hidden archives that might hold the missing link in a family’s story.

There are times when the search pays off. One recent visitor had been trying for years to find her grandfather and a library volunteer located him online within the hour. A friend of mine who was adopted as a baby found his birth parents through a subscription-based genealogy service. For those who want to be found, it’s an extraordinary opportunity to finally know one’s fuller story.

It’s easy to dismiss genealogy as a niche hobby but if you listen closely, it sounds a lot like forensic science. Both fields rely on evidence, pattern recognition and increasingly, DNA. In fact, modern genealogy and forensic research share tools and databases, sometimes even solving cold cases by tracing distant relatives through genetic markers. The same data that helps families reclaim a sense of belonging can also bring justice or closure decades later.

Interestingly, genealogical records for European families are relatively easy to find, but for Asian, Central American or South American ancestry, the records are harder to access. That’s starting to change with new partnerships bringing Chinese family ledgers online and a growing number of companies specializing in Latin American archives. This Nov. 22, the library will host Grant Din, an expert on Chinese genealogy and the architecture of Chinatowns, for an in-person event aimed at expanding awareness.

But now that Halloween and Día de los Muertos have passed, perhaps it’s time to ponder a bit  less about the stories of our deceased or missed connections and more about the conversations we still can have with our loved ones.

The questions start simple: Where were they born? Why did they move here? What was life like before? How did they meet? From a forensic standpoint, these details are important data about one’s family history. Without them, even the most complete record feels skeletal.

As the holidays approach, the volunteers plan to remind people that Thanksgiving, the season of crowded tables and passed-down recipes, is also the perfect time to start asking questions. “If kids can get interested,” Rosenberg said, “it’s one way they can talk to their grandparents.” That intergenerational exchange may be the most meaningful inheritance of all.

Who knows, one day it may be your story someone is trying to find from a photo mislabeled in a random folder. They will be our stories of this incredible moment in time, just waiting for someone to ask about them.

Halloween has already come and gone, and Día de los Muertos lingers as an invitation to look a little deeper. Maybe light a candle tonight not just for those who are gone, but for the stories still waiting to be told. Pull out an old photo, call an elder relative, ask them to tell you something you’ve never heard before. The answers might surprise you, or they might haunt you in the best possible way. The past is whispering.