The multi-year effort to bring my family ancestry to life: How a desire to learn more about my heritage became a quest to reimagine the way we perform family genealogy.

Sitting in the backseat of a taxi stuck in Bay Area rush hour traffic, my colleague and I joked about the traits we received from our parents. His parents are part of extensive family trees like many other families of Indian descent. He explained that a few years earlier one of his relatives started to unravel the family’s lineage—and her research led to several fascinating and surprising discoveries.

My colleague shared stories of his family’s migration between regions of India in the early twentieth century and their experiences while living under colonial rule. According to his relative, these facts and dozens more were based on letters and journal entries left behind by their ancestors.

His stories were great, but the most engaging part of our conversation was how much he admired his family. It hardly mattered that they were simple, everyday people. My colleague was intensely proud of the lives they led and how they paved the way for future generations. Inspiring to say the least.

As we continued to sit in the urban standstill, my colleague turned and asked about my own heritage.

My face dropped with embarrassment as I admitted that my answers were few. People always commented on the Dutch nature of my surname—LOOMANS—but I had little idea of anything beyond the obvious. When did my family immigrate to the United States? What were their professions? Why was Wisconsin their final destination?

I had nothing… zip… forget about it.  

While I came up short on answers in the moment, my colleague did strike my curiosity. I brought the same questions to my father, aunts, uncles, and cousins. They also knew little.

The last person I prompted with questions was my grandfather. He knew some, but held limited knowledge of our family story in the years preceding his birth in 1935. I did learn that his sister—my great aunt who had passed in the early 2010s—recorded some family research before her death. She collected information from the immediate family, but there were still many gaps and my fundamental question about who my ancestors were remained unanswered.

The Undertaking: A Book, a Reunion, and a Digital Archive

For the next two years that single question became a significant personal undertaking. It was a journey to uncover a missing part of my family story. The effort was one of the most challenging but rewarding experiences of my life. Complete with frustration, weariness, excitement, and enjoyment, the process of discovering my ancestry was a bag of mixed emotions.

The result of my determination was a bound, hard cover book with a family tree that included more than 300 family members dating back to the 1500s. The book included a 50-page narrative that took readers from our earliest roots in the Netherlands through more than three centuries of history to the present. It covered my family’s immigration to the United States and made use of artifacts like the ship’s manifest which included their written names. Throughout its pages more than three dozen pictures of my family were featured, with the oldest dating back to the 1870s.

Despite all the challenges faced in an undertaking of that size, I felt gratified and accomplished when the book was finally printed and purchased by members of my extended family. Many now keep it on their coffee tables as reading material for guests and page through it at gatherings to share their favorite picture or check the name of a long-lost relative.

Based on the positive feedback and response, I took it a step further two years after the book was finished and organized a family reunion, inviting more than 150 members of the extended family to attend.

The event was complete with an eight-foot interactive family tree, a table with images and artifacts, family-themed bingo, and a picnic-style lunch. About 100 members of our family participated in the event—some traveling more than two thousand miles to reconnect with their heritage.

The reunion was another step on this multi-year journey. For the relatives who wanted to purchase a copy of the book or receive a digital version of the family tree, I came up short. Not only did I know it would be costly to conduct a reprint of the book with only a limited number of copies, but I also recognized that the family tree would likely be out-of-date soon after printing. It was an inevitable part of performing genealogy—the work was never really done.

This was the point I began researching options for a digital family history archive. What would it take to build? Would services in the market like ancestry.com be sufficient? What would the scope be for such an effort? How much was I willing to commit and invest in the initiative?

It took the better part of a year to answer these questions and put pen to paper, but the result is so much more than I initially imagined for a digital family archive.

Assembling the Archives: What It Took

As I wrote in a previous post about my late grandfather, the process for assembling the archives really started as a way to digitize my 2019 book The Living Years that documented my family’s history.

My approach from the beginning was to provide members of my extended family resources about our heritage that were consumable and relevant, which meant that the typical database-driven approach of reporting one’s history would not work. I wanted to provide my family more than just a list of names, dates, and locations. It had to be engaging and share a story that put the characters of our family story in the broader context of the time periods they experienced.

This required a fundamentally different approach from using a traditional genealogy service.

After coming to this decision, I bought a domain, paid for a year-long hosting subscription on Squarespace, and started watching help videos for designing a website. The entire investment was less than $200.

Outlining the website’s structure was my first step in the overall effort, identifying what I wanted to include, how I wanted it to be branded, and how all the various elements of the family story should flow together. Three sections seemed most appropriate for the final design: a blog-based storyline of the family history (roughly following key chapters in The Living Years), an image gallery, and a page that documented the pre-US and US-born family tree.

Over the course of a year, these three components were pulled together, essentially putting the genealogy of the Loomans family history online for the world to access and consume. Now when a long-last relative was curious about the origins of their surname, a quick search would reveal a trove of information that can aid their efforts.

Planning For What’s Next

While I do hope to take a short sabbatical from genealogy after four years of work toward this juncture, I am nonetheless already considering what’s next.

Clearly what began as a website to host the Loomans family archives has evolved into a home for other hobbies of mine, like Go for Growth and my passion for supporting community organizations. Refining these offerings are undoubtedly at the top of my list for 2023, alongside other genealogy efforts like:

• Adding videos and other multimedia content to the Loomans story

• Documenting my maternal grandfather’s heritage (the surname ‘Conger’ which has a much more extensive US-based history to share, starting in the late 1600s)

• Packaging the materials used for the family reunion in 2021 and making them available to other reunion planners

Perhaps the most ambitious of my 2023 plans on this topic is finishing a ‘how-to’ guide on telling your family story based on my experiences the last several years taking my own family’s genealogy from a list of names and dates to a digital, standalone archive that offers much more than the typical family tree.

The Uncommon Genealogist: 50 Quick Tips for Researching, Documenting, and Celebrating Your Family Story will cover a variety of topics and concepts, offering other ‘uncommon genealogists’ out in the world the opportunity to develop a hobby without the pressure of becoming an academic expert.

The journey to ‘assembling the archives’ was a long, but exciting journey. Looking back on nearly four years of effort, its easy to reflect on my experience and recognize how the hard work paid off.

If nothing else, I hope the archives provide my family an easy-to-use resource for learning about their story and serve as an inspiration to others who wish to learn more about their own heritage.