This post originally appeared in the Kenosha News as part of the column Sunday Mornings With Basil Willis – July 21, 2011

I have been something of a window shopper when it comes to genealogy, casually cataloging stories and keeping a mental tally of the tree as I knew it. Maybe because I’m getting older, or perhaps motivated by my near death experience or my mom’s anecdotes on a recent visit, I finally set out to find and document my ancestors.

I’m not one to read directions unless I have to, so I dove right in. Google led me to a number of quality research tools and free sites that allow one to build a tree and I wasted no time getting started.
I quickly realized that genealogy sites don’t show you your family tree; they are libraries that give you the tools to do your own research. Lured by the offer of a free trial, I broke down and created an account with the “world’s largest genealogy website,” which seems to be running a lot of TV ads lately.

The power of joining a community, whether free or paid, is the ability to compare your tree to existing trees. The farther back you go in time, the more intersections you’ll see with other people. And the larger the user base of a given site, the more chances you’ll have to run across other users exploring the same bloodlines that have documentation you didn’t.

When I plugged the work I had already done into the pay site, little leaves started popping up on my tree, suggesting documents that might be related to the people I was working with. The site is always scanning databases behind the scenes and the more documentation and relations I entered, the stronger the proof became and even more leaves appeared.

Exploring history this way is a fascinating process of looking through old census records, birth, death and marriage certificates, probate and military records, thesis papers, newspaper articles, personal letters, pictures and research other people have done. It is literally a matter of triangulating a person’s identity. There is an amazing amount of old paper records that have been scanned, uploaded and organized into databases on the web, and it is impressive how well records were kept over 300 years ago in what was the New World.

A few times I thought I found who I was looking for, only to realize later I had the wrong person. It is a continuous process of backtracking, grooming and reviewing until you become so familiar with a person and their relations that you no longer need the look at the wireframe.

When I started my tree, I focused on my surname and I only knew back to my great grandfather. Within a few hours of meticulously building, double and triple checking documents and comparing my tree to other users’ trees, I had traced the Willis family back to England in the 17th century. More than once I got goose bumps as I uncovered new links.

Twelve generations ago, John Willis arrived in Boston in 1661 when he was 23. His great grandson, Henry Harry Willis founded the city of Fredericksburg, Virginia by donating the initial land in 1727. He also owned Willis Hill and the land that is now the National Cemetery. My seventh great grandfather (I have learned that genealogists use ordinals instead of saying “great” seven times), Lewis Willis, was a colonel in the Revolutionary War from 1776 to 1778. Lewis’ mother (my eighth great grandmother) Mildred, was George Washington’s aunt and godmother.

My great grandfather Solomon Willis had a son named Basil (my dad and I are both Basils too, making me a 3rd) and they’ve been spelling it wrong for over a hundred years. On the 1910 US Census, the child’s name was spelled Bassell. In 1920 it was spelled Bossle (it is pronounced baz-ull, like ‘razzle’ or ‘dazzle’). The census takers at the time must have done oral interviews and written the names down themselves, getting it as phonetically close as possible. Everything was done in cursive back then, and working through these types of mistakes is part of the hunt.

When I took a step back and looked at the tree, the vastness of time and experience was breathtaking. I was in a hurry to go as far back as possible – always the quest to find the next set of Willis parents – but once I started fleshing out individuals, I came to know not only the lineage but each person. A story began to form with every new piece of evidence, and I found myself following threads that took me horizontally, learning about siblings and in-laws and the cities and times they lived in.

I imagine what their lives were like and the challenges they faced. At this time of year I think about the type of clothes they wore and not having air conditioning. People historically married young and started breeding young. My third great grandfather, Daniel Willis, only lived to 29, just long enough to have three kids, the last of which was my second great grandfather George, who was one year old when his dad died in 1852.

There are things I found that I’m not proud of. Probate records from 1740 show that my eighth great grandfather, Henry Willis, was a slave owner who bequeathed slaves to son Lewis. Times and attitudes changed; when Lewis died, his will insisted that his children give up their slaves or be denied their inheritance.

The search will only get more challenging. All I’ve had to do is follow males with my surname, and they were well documented and relatively well known. Tracing women with name changes can be more difficult. For now I’ve stopped with Willis on the English shores and will work on the other three lines of my grandparents. My cousin just told me she has my maternal grandmother’s Swiss records back to the 1500s. I’m not sure how far this rabbit hole goes, but it’s going to be fun finding out.