Story Photos
 Photo by Roger Werth Carl Devin flips through the pages of his life --- and the lives of his ancestors. The Longview retiree started delving into his family past six years ago ... and that journey has led him to a group of other locals similarly smitten with genealogy. |
Longview genealogist has a passion for the past
Tuesday, May 9, 2006 12:38 PM PDT
By Cathy Zimmerman
Printable version
E-mail this articleCarl Devin's sons kept giving him the same present every birthday and Christmas: blank books.
"My kids had been after me to write my life story," Devin said last month. "My dad had written his, and I got the unique opportunity to edit it."
His own father, who reluctantly had a limited education, once found an old typewriter in the dump. "He said, 'I can fix this,' " Devin recalled. The elder did just that -- and hunted and pecked out his family's migration to the remote northeast corner of Oregon in the Wallowa mountains.
It took Devin until his retirement six years ago, after 30 years as a dean at Lower Columbia College, to plunge into his personal history. He hasn't surfaced since.
"I documented all the memories, from the 1960s to the '90s," Devin said.
He went back farther than that. Following the trail blazed by his dad, Devin tracked centuries of global comings and goings -- and ironies and surprises.
Devin discovered that his forebears were indeed Irish, but many generations back, they had been Huguenots forced to leave France in the 1600s.
"Dad went into mourning when he found out his true blood was French," Devin said, chuckling.
Devin must have a mutated gene; he has become passionate about mining the past, not peering into the future. His latest project is writing the history of the Corman Road area, where he and wife live on the idyllic pastoral patch in the middle of Longview.
A hunger for history
Devin is a lot like his compatriots in the Lower Columbia Genealogical Society.
Most are retired, freed to unleash hungry minds on family research. They pore over county and state records, unearth family Bibles, follow roads with family names, troll the Internet and travel the world.
"It's a personal, emotional thing," said Lonny Haseman, president of the society for nine years now. "It enhances history for us.
"You have to have the passion to do the work," she said. "Some of life's most thrilling moments happen when you search and search, and you finally find out something. It's such a high."
The fascination with human beginnings is probably as old as homo sapiens. An ancient and universal symbol is the tree of life, appearing in many religious traditions and remade in popular domestic imagery as the family tree.
Local genealogy buffs may be related to German and Irish migrants who came to work in the silk mills in New Jersey, or to Scots who sailed around the Horn and made their way to Oregon in wagons.
Some are Daughters of the American Revolution; others trace roots deep enough to make them Daughters of the American Colonies.
Notorious ancestors are the best, however. "They got in the papers, not the farmers," said local society member Charles Byers. "Everybody wants to be related to somebody famous, but that's never the way it is."
Maybe genealogy itself is in the blood, since many researchers catch the bug from family.
"My husband's cousin inspired me," Haseman said. "She did research in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. She took me, and it was one of the highlights of my life.
"I was hooked from that moment on."
Haseman and her husband recently visited Germany, she said. "The connections that happen! We have cousins all over the world. ... We love to walk the streets where our ancestors must have walked."
"I call it ghost chasing," said Byers, a Longview native and past president of the society.
Byers has been into genealogy since his retirement from teaching in 1987.
"My family came across in the wagon trains," he said. "They were one of two families that came across Natches Pass" near Yakima.
He now attends wagon-train reunions, and in '88 made the first of regular trips back East to do research and see the towns where his ancestors lived.
"My cousins did a tremendous amount of research for me," Byers said. One group had a family Bible from Arkansas, passed down on Byers' mother's side. "They had no kids, so they asked me if I'd like to have it."
He keeps the Bible, from the 1860s, wrapped in the rope the original owners used. "Those old Bibles published in the 1800s record births, deaths, marriages," he said.
One notation in the Bible, dated March 21, 1853, is the "exact time they left, 4 o'clock, heading West from Stark County, Illinois," Byers said.
When he travels, Byers looks up genealogy groups, usually through libraries, good sources of genealogical information throughout the country.
Genealogists are a generous lot -- they spend almost as much time sharing techniques and discoveries as they do finding them.
Locally, the society spends $1,500 annually on books for the collection at the Longview Public Library, said member Pat Crimmel of Kelso, a genealogist for 16 years who is on the library committee. The group also donated about $2,500 to the library last year, remembrances for members who died, she said.
Anyone who joins should beware of raising a hand, Crimmel said. "You'll do all kinds of chores."
The group's shelves in the library include how-to books, she said, histories, "a lot of state records on births, deaths, military records," published by genealogical groups or individuals.
The society donates one afternoon a week, from 1 to 3 p.m. Wednesdays, when a member is always available to answer questions from anyone who wants to come in.
The Lower Columbia Genealogists number about 70 people. They hold monthly meetings on a theme, including one this month that featured a Portland expert on DNA testing and genealogy.
Genetics and the Internet have transformed genealogical research, society members said. All agreed, however, that even as science and technology heat up their hobby, the paper chase still excites them.
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After Carl Devin moved to Corman Road, he ran into questions.
"Is that a private road?" for instance. Or, "Who was Corman, anyway?"
"It's just a little bumpy country road, with Christmas lights" that draw crowds, he said.
Genealogists know, however, that land claims and road names provide significant clues. Corman Road data might not have anything to do with Devin's family tree, but they could become branches on somebody else's.
"I thought, I'll spend a couple days at city hall and I'll be done," Devin said. "I just wanted something to share with my neighbors. That was two years ago. I'm still in the middle of the project."
He has spent hours scanning lists in the auditor's office, visiting the county assessor, following property transactions. He has found the donation land claims and information on the rail line that predated the 1949 platting of Corman Road.
Clyde Corman probably made the first purchase of property along the road, Devin said, but his wasn't the first house. "Talking to neighbors" -- including the Bruscos, Jeanne Wertheimer and Emmet Koelsch -- "little things pop out."
Devin tracked down hearsay about a possible golf course on the site, finding old photographs of tee-offs that he scrutinized for visual clues. In search of more, he met recently with John McClelland, Jr. of Seattle, a regional historian whose father was the first publisher of The Daily News.
Devin recorded everything he's learned in a book, with copies of documents, maps and old photos. He's trying to learn Power Point so he can transfer the Corman Road story to that format. Fellow Rotary members are "needling" him to get on with it, he said.
Maybe they're forgetting that Devin is a genealogist. "I may never finish," he said, grinning hugely.
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