RESEARCH JOURNEYS: UNCOVERING A FAMILY TRAIL

Western History library staff hear many personal stories from our patrons as we help them search for evidence documenting the many twists and turns of history. Often, questions that appear to be about one thing develop into a different topic entirely. In the case we’re about to discuss, a query that at first seemed to be an academic research project turned out to be a very personal story of a family impacted by larger historical events. This post is the first of a new series sharing reference questions that unfolded into a greater picture.

As this particular reference interview developed, a remarkable story fleshed out. Our researcher, Martin*, lives in New York City. We began corresponding while New York was under lockdown due to the pandemic. While missing his annual road trip to New England for lobster and blueberry pie, he was making good use of this time to work on his genealogy and writing projects.

Martin was born in Denver in the mid-1940s to agricultural workers who had first come to Colorado from Mexico in 1919. Repeated and temporary migration for seasonal farmwork was common in that era, most often followed by a return to Mexico during the off-season. This practice, and the economics that made it necessary, resulted in temporary family separations that sometimes produced painful impacts on families, much as we see it can today.

Martin believes his father came to the United States for work several times over the years. Shortly after his birth in Denver, his mother placed him in the Colorado State Home for Dependent and Neglected Children, for unknown reasons. His stay in the home was brief: a young Denver couple adopted him, and his life thereafter pursued a different path. As an adult, Martin has served the global community through a wide-reaching career in international humanitarian aid. Recently, he learned the identity of his birth parents through DNA research, and he has been tracing his family story since.

As we were not able to find additional information on his father specifically, we have turned to collections that give Martin an understanding of what his birth family’s lives might have been like. This is something genealogists do a lot: help researchers understand the past by highlighting historical movements that possibly could have shaped their ancestors' actions. The items we located for Martin range from the manuscript collections of agricultural laborers of Mexican descent, to information on sugar beet workers (one of the Colorado crops that brought many agricultural laborers here), to books about Mexican return migration and the Hispanic community in Colorado during the first half of the 20th century. These materials have allowed him to possibly see the world through their eyes, and to understand more about the context of his earliest days of life.