The weather is cooling down, the Fall decorations are going up, and the Pumpkin Spice fairies have returned turning lattes everywhere a shade of orange. It's also the perfect time for a short road trip, a chance to stretch our travel legs after a long year and a half cooped up since COVID took center stage. So what's a genealogist to do, but plan a family history trip!?
I've been meaning to visit Halifax County, Virginia, for years now. It's the place a quarter of my family lived for generations, and yet it remains something of an enigma to me. So I went ahead and made a plan, and I'm heading to Halifax this weekend for a short but much needed trip.
How can you plan a family history trip? Come along with me as I share what I've done to prepare to visit the land of my ancestors!
Get your bearings
Before we can plan any trip, we have to get our bearings - to discover the place we're going to see. There are several ways we can do that, but I start with Google Maps.
When you search for a county on Google Maps, the county outline will appear on the map. This is great because it helps us see the boundaries of the county. In the case of Halifax County, there's a lot to see and explore! So to make it more manageable, I've saved important spots as I've discovered them.
Here, you can see where I've selected an important location in my family's story, Ingram Christian Church. To save a location to your map, you just select "save" next to directions. I've made a list called "Halifax" for myself, which you can see above.
You'll want to figure out how far your destination is from home - Halifax is a 3 hour drive - so I'll have to leave early in the morning. I found a convenient (and super affordable) place on
airbnb, which I would definitely recommend. Next, it's planning where to go!
Taking time for research
For Virginia research, I'm spoiled with the
Library of Virginia whose resources are seemingly endless. But there are special sources that are only available on the ground in local courthouses, community archives, libraries, and museums. So before any genealogy trip, we need to discover where these locations are, their hours and accessibility, and what can
only be discovered
on site. We need to check out what we already have on our ancestors and where there are holes in our research.
Along with getting our bearings for our trip, we should discover the history and resources available for the place we're going. Wikipedia is a great first stop for history and context of a new place. For example, I can learn that
Halifax County had just barely 36,000 people in 2010. It's still a very rural place!
Next, we should always look at the FamilySearch wiki. For
Halifax County, we can see what records are available for research there as well as history that's relevant for our search. It's always important to check out the parent county from which our focus location was formed. Halifax was formed in 1752 from Lunenburg County, which had been formed in 1745 from Brunswick County. You can track the genealogy of Virginia counties (or any state's counties for that matter) over at the
Atlas of Historical County Boundaries Project from the Newberry Library. Aside from being an amazing resource, it's tons of fun to use their interactive maps.
My plan includes stopping at these important locations:
There's only so much I can do in one day, and I also want to see all that Halifax has to offer. So I have to make a plan to see the places my ancestors would have known!
Seeing the sights
A family history trip is much more than a research trip. We can do research in so many places these days, but its a rare treat to walk where our ancestors walked. I have a few places I know I have to visit while I'm in Halifax.
I love cemeteries, y'all! I've written before how we can
seek ancestors in cemeteries, so no family history trip would be complete without a cemetery trip (or two or three!) With ancestors from two sides of my family from Halifax, I have a lot of cemeteries to seek out. We can find cemeteries on
Find a Grave but we can also discover these important places in our ancestors' records. Death certificates are the easiest place to find cemetery names and locations for our family members since the 20th century.
If your family lived in cities, you can find their addresses in city directories and on the U.S. census. This is a fun way to visit our ancestral homes and to see the places that cultivated our family in the past. My mom's grandfather was from
South Boston in Halifax, a quaint town of about 8,000 people. My grandmother remembers her great-aunts and great-uncle who lived together unmarried into old age in South Boston. I found the home on Google Maps, saved it to my list, and I'm looking forward to sending a photo to my grandmother.
I'll also visit the location where my ancestor Meades Anderson formed
Meadville in 1787. The town diminished over the years, but the name still can be found on street, church, and school names in the area.
*****
Planning a family history trip should be fun. It's a chance to discover what we know and what we don't yet know about our ancestral homelands. In this case, my homeland is a three-hour drive from home. It's a place filled with the sights and sounds my great-grandfathers knew well and which I have yet to discover for myself. Well, that all changes this Friday! Stay tuned for the story of Sam in Halifax!
Have you planned a family history trip before? Will you be planning one for this Fall or Winter?
Your ancestors deserve the best researcher, the most passionate story-teller, and the dignity of being remembered. So let's encounter your ancestors through family history and remember the past made present today!
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