On May 27, 1963, The (Bergen County, NJ) Record ran a story about my great-great grandfather, Edward B. Root, a Civil War veteran buried in Woodside Cemetery in Dumont, NJ. With Memorial Day approaching, The Record published excerpts from his wartime diary, which my father had inherited.

A portion of Edward B. Root's hand-written family record.

Thirty-three years later, I was trying to imagine the myriad lines of ancestors that led to the child my wife was carrying, when I remembered another piece of Ed Root's legacy: a hand-written family tree going back to 1635. But that was just one branch. How was I to find information on the others, including my surname? I could only trace the Merklee name back to my great-grandfather, William Henry Merklee. I wanted to know when the Merklees had come to America. I went to the Internet. The first rude awakening about genealogy on the Internet is this: You cannot just download your family history from somewhere, and the vast majority of vital records (birth, death, marriage, census) are not yet available on line. But, as I will show in this article, there is plenty of help out there to prepare you for the legwork that's still necessary to document your family history.

Since I was on AOL at the time, I checked out their Genealogy Forum. Here I found useful information on getting started, a bulletin board area where I could leave messages about the surnames I was researching, and a place to share GEDCOM files with other researchers. (GEDCOM -- GEnealogical Data COMmunication -- is a near-universal computer file format for exchanging family research. Most current genealogy software can import and export GEDCOMs.) This brings us to the other rude awakening about genealogy on the Internet: The family information you do find on line is only as good as the researcher who's offering it. A piece of bad information, circulated enough times in cyberspace, takes on an air of authority it doesn't deserve. As with your own research, any information you get from someone else should have its sources documented. Most times, the files include a way to contact the submitter of the file.

At the AOL site, you can also download freeware and shareware genealogy programs. Here I downloaded a free program that would help me organize my information. After entering names and dates in an on-screen form, I could navigate through my family information, readily see the relationships, create pedigree charts, even attach scanned photos of relatives to appear with their files. Though I would later upgrade to one of the more sophisticated commercial programs (which can create larger charts and generate book-style reports as well as web pages), it was this little program that got me hooked.

Edward B. Root, from an undated tintype.

I posted a message to the AOL forum about the Root family, and I soon received an e-mail from a gentleman in Texas. He suggested I purchase a reprint of a book on the Root family from the Higginson Book Company of Salem, Massachusetts. The book, a massive record of the Root family in America from the 1630s to the 1870s, verified most of what was in my great-great-grandfather's family tree and filled in many blanks. This was a thrilling find. My hopes were raised that something similar could be found for my own surname. No such luck.

Since Merklee is not a common surname, I decided anything I found about the name had to be relevant. The first thing I tried was entering my surname into some of the Internet search engines, like Yahoo and Excite. This can sometimes turn up genealogical web sites, both personal and commercial, with information on your name. Just one site appeared: a personal genealogy site by a couple from Arizona. They had a Margaret Merklee who'd married a Wandle Mace in New York City in 1828. I e-mailed them, and they sent me information on Margaret's siblings and parents. The parents, Conrad and Anna, were said to have emigrated from Holland. I was always told our name was Dutch, so I considered this a good lead, even without primary documentation like birth or death records.

Next, I searched the RootsWeb site. RootsWeb is the oldest and largest data cooperative for genealogists on the Web, where you can find the names of others researching a surname and post your own names.

Nothing. But I did post some of my names to their site and I joined their e-mail list. The list sends several e-mail digests each day containing messages from people requesting and offering information. While I've gotten no leads on my surname, I have been able to help others, and have gotten quite a bit of help with other parts of my family tree.

What should have been the first thing I thought of was actually the last: using the various Internet phone directories. As expected, only a few names turned up, all in the northeast. Rather than call out of the blue, I sent letters. I received two replies. One turned out to be a great aunt by marriage, living out on Long Island. We arranged to meet at her house, and what started as a short visit turned into an evening of dinner and family photo albums and copies of the family records from her Bible. The first revelation she had for me was that my great-grandmother had divorced my great-grandfather and then married the milkman. It was a revelation because in all the years of visiting an uncle's grave at the Old South Church in Bergenfield, my great-grandmother was right there in the same plot, buried with her second husband under his surname. The other revelation was a family plot in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn where thirty of my relatives are interred.

Two weeks later, flush with anticipation, I went to Cypress Hills. Leaving the cemetery office with map in hand, I drove the winding, broken road to the appropriate section. Trudging up the sloped path paved with cracked slate, I made my way past worn and leaning headstones partly obscured by the tall grass; past rusted, wrought-iron fences draped in withered vines, the sound of hundreds of cicadas blending with the rumble of the nearby elevated train. Here, at last, was the ancestral burying ground in the heart of Brooklyn. And then my heart sank.

There were only four marked graves on the whole plot, and I did not recognize any of the first names. I asked at the cemetery office if there'd been a mistake. They assured me that thirty relatives were buried there. I was told the plot was purchased in 1850, and that many families back then could only afford the burial, not the headstones. Then they informed me that, for a fee, I could have a printed report showing who was buried there, including ages and places, dates, and causes of death. I was glad they took credit cards.

This was a tremendous break after all. On the list, I recognized my grandfather, great-grandfather, and a great uncle. I just had to connect the other 27 relatives.

Since almost all of them had died in Brooklyn, I spent several hours at the New York City archives and, armed with dates of death, found death records on microfilm for most of the people on the list. Estimating dates of birth from the cemetery records, I was able to turn up several birth certificates as well. And information from these allowed me to find some marriage records.

The pieces started falling into place. I found that my great-grandfather's father was Charles Merklee, whose father was John Merklee (who had originally purchased the plot at Cypress Hills). This John Merklee had the same birth date as a John Merklee on the list I received via e-mail from the couple in Arizona. While I still needed some primary documentation, I was satisfied that I had finally traced my name to Conrad and Anna Merklee, who had emigrated to New York from Holland around 1800.

While it's true that I may have found my great aunt on Long Island by perusing phone books at the local library, the time I saved finding her on the Internet is considerable. And without the Internet, I certainly wouldn't have found the couple from Arizona, whose surname is not Merklee, but who had information on my family just the same. Without the Internet, I may never have developed this obsession in the first place.

One last thing: Despite the fact that you cannot just download your family tree, occasionally the Internet does provide surprises in genealogical research.

There are several web sites where you can search GEDCOMs submitted by other researchers and download their information. My favorite is GenServ, which you can also access via e-mail (This is especially useful if you subscribe to an e-mail-only service like Juno). Genserv charges a nominal yearly fee for access to an ever-growing database (currently more than 13 million names), and you need to submit your own GEDCOM in order to join. About two months after I subscribed, I received an e-mail from a Massachusetts gentleman asking about my great-grandmother, Susan Hoyt Tremper (the one who married the milkman). In researching the Tremper family, he only had her date and place of birth. My great-grandmother had been a dead-end in my research as well; I knew nothing of her ancestry. After comparing birth information to make sure we were talking about the same person, I was able to tell this gentleman what became of Susan, and in exchange, he sent me her well-documented ancestry going back to 1570. With one e-mail, the size of my family tree literally doubled.

Genealogy isn't just about names and dates. It's about people: finding out what your ancestors did and how they lived, and the new people you meet on your quest for that knowledge. I now know I have an ancestor who was on the Half Moon with Henry Hudson when he first sailed the river that would later bear his name. I have ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. My great-great-great-great-great-aunt Margaret Merklee Mace converted to Mormonism and was part of the Mormon trek west with Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. In the memoirs of her husband, Wandle Mace (available on the Internet), I've read first-hand accounts of their journey. And I've found many distant cousins in every corner of the country.

Now my daughter will know where she came from, that one half of her family has been in America since the time of the Pilgrims, and the other half came over with the great wave of immigrants at the start of the 20th century. And she'll be able to make personal connections to the history she'll learn in school -- partly because her great-great-great-grandfather thought enough of his family to record their history, and partly because Daddy used the Internet.