Ancestors' neighbors offer insight

Breathing life into an ancestor can inflate him from a one-dimensional name on a piece of paper into a three-dimensional person who experienced life in his own unique way.

Going the extra hundred (thousand or million) miles for the men and women who contributed to your gene pool is the difference between being a real genealogist and being a name collector.

But if your ancestor was a simple man who grew up poor, served his country, came home and died poor, where in the world do you find documents to enrich the history of his ordinary life?

"Research the neighbors" is the basic genealogical tenet that will guide you through the research maze to your common forefathers and mothers.

This is not the kind of research that will reveal exactly what your ancestor did on any particular day or any conversation he had with his friends about a specific topic.

The research task I'm about to give you isn't one of looking for your ancestor's will, marriage license or property records. I want you to dig into books in which your ancestor isn't even named, let alone discussed. These will be books not about him but about the time in which he lived and perhaps about the unrelated men and women who walked, worked, lived and died near him.

This is one of those research adventures best begun on the Internet, at book vendor and publishers' sites. Try Barnes and Noble (www.barnesandnoble.com) and Amazon (www.amazon.com). Some of my favorite sites are university presses, because their books usually are more research rather than "lore" oriented. Try Johns Hopkins Press, University of California Press, University of North Carolina Press, etc. Keep in mind that university presses don't just have a bent toward regional topics.

Your search will be guided by the basics you already know about your unsung ancestor. Was he a farmer, storekeeper or gunslinger? Was she a "lady of the evening" or a school marm?

Some of these sites will have search boxes into which you can type specific words, such as "farmer" or "merchant," but most will have lists of broad topics, such as "history," "sociology" or "anthropology."

You'll find book descriptions that are bound to excite you. But before you whip out the credit card and make a full-price purchase, explore one other avenue. From various sites, pick actual titles from the subject matter lists.

Then, armed with those titles, enter them into a general search engine, such as Google, or go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Not only will you find the shiny new books for full price, you'll find used books at a fraction of the price.

For example, at the University of North Carolina Press website, I found a book I wanted: Susanna Delefino's "Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South." At this publisher's site, it was listed for $73.95 (cloth) or $27.95 (paper). Then I tried Amazon and found a used paperback copy for $2.79. Used book dealers are really good at honestly describing the condition of their books. I've bought "very good condition" books that I would have sworn had never been opened.

Once I get Delefino's book, I'll get a better feel for my female ancestors who worked alongside their husbands on small farms that barely supported their families from their own labor.

Then I might turn to a book such as Willard Cochrane's "Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis."

Suppose your ancestor lived in 19th century Myricks, Mass. Your ancestor probably isn't in the index of Gail E. Terry's "Myricks, Massachusetts: A Farming Settlement, A Railroad Village"; but what a time you'll have learning about the things that went on that surely affected everyone who lived there!

Check out Maia's Books (www.maiasbooks.com). Hers is a site dedicated to books of interest to historians and genealogists.