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Psychic Roots: Serendipity and Intuition in Genealogy

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I had always avoided the subject of genealogy as being completely boring. It conjured up visions of people sitting in libraries for hours and hours going over ancient records trying to find names of their long-dead ancestors. What a weary way to waste one's days! However, a friend recently put into my hand Henry Z. Jones' PSYCHIC ROOTS, Serendipity & Intuition in Genealogy. It has totally changed my views. I was amazed to find success in genealogy often comes from intuition, searching not with just the mind, but also an open heart, enjoying warm feelings with the desceased. Again and again in his book, Jones describes how helpful hints, items seemingly droppped from nowhere, somehow unite the living with the thoughts and deeds of the departed. As the author concludes:"I do believe that our ancestors have no wish to be forgotten: they want to be found." And I would add, our ancestors have been over and about us since we were born, seeking to lead us into ever greater dimensions. Genealogy can open the doors to deeper understanding of our larger family "in the beyond," but still close in influence and love. Don't miss this book. It will open your heart to ancestors who are as close as breathing.

Has an ancestor ever just 'fallen' into your lap? Have you ever found what you were not looking for? Have you ever pulled the `wrong' book off the shelf and found an answer in it? Have you chased ancestors until they found you?

If you can answer 'yes' to any of these questions as they pertain to genealogy - and even if you can't - you can certainly appreciate unexpected surprises. I would venture to say that most of us have experienced things like this even in non-genealogical situations.

Hank Jones's "Psychic Roots: Serendipity and Intuition in Genealogy" and his follow-up book, "More Psychic Roots: Further Adventures in Serendipity and Intuition in Genealogy" demonstrate the reasons for his venture into the `less scientific' methods of finding ancestors. He begins with the premise that our ancestors want to be found. For him, it all started when he was a young boy peeking into a forbidden trunk in an attic. In writing this book, he is, as far as I know, the first professional genealogist to mention out loud and in print, the possibility that our ancestors want us to find them and will use various ways to get us to do that which are not always based solely on solid, scholarly research methods.

As a genealogy librarian, I've heard stories like those in Hank's books many times. Hank says initially he was concerned about taking some flack for his theory, which some professionals would criticize as undermining years of attempts to make genealogy a more solid, respectable field of research, based on sound reasoning, solid research methods, and hard evidence. His call for examples of `psychic roots' experiences brought stories even from some of the most respected names in the field. He was surprised that even the genealogical scholars had moments like this that they were willing to share, that they also wondered if something unexplainable was at work all along but were reluctant to share it.

Hank's books provided a `safe place' to share stories of strange coincidence and serendipity. He had so many responses to his invitation to genealogists to share their own stories that he wrote the second book. I think Hank's theory has been more than validated. I suspect that any qualms he may have had about being taken seriously diminished as the stories rolled in.

Hank does not for a moment lessen the importance of sound, solid research methods. He himself is a distinguished Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists. But neither does he discount or dismiss the less-scholarly methods that bring us many of the answers we seek. He's seen, heard, and read far too many examples to brush them off simply as stories of just dumb luck, although even dumb luck can sometimes be a factor in a fortuitous find.

Another concept Hank discusses in conjunction with serendipity and intuition is psychologist Carl Jung's theory of synchronicity, which is the occurrence of two seemingly unrelated events that come together in a meaningful way that cannot be explained to the person experiencing them. In short, synchronicity is "meaningful coincidence." It might even be called `being in the right place at the right time.'

So what's actually responsible for `strange' successes in genealogy? Serendipity? Preparation? Accident? Solid research? Educated guesses? Intuition? Being in the right place at the right time? I think it's probably a mixture of these and other things. How would we know we were having a Eureka moment if we hadn't laid some kind of groundwork already? We may not have been prepared to find the answer this way, so we may think it simply jumped out at us. Maybe we'd filed something years ago that didn't really connect with what we knew at the time, but couldn't just toss it out. Down the road, we find something that makes us rifle through that file for that seemingly unconnected piece of evidence, and our puzzle - or maybe just a part of it - is solved. I believe in what Louis Pasteur said: "Chance favors the prepared mind." But I also believe what Jules Henri Poincaré said, that "It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover."

Hank Jones spent twenty years in movies, especially Disney films, and that freed him up later on to pursue his genealogical interests, both as an author and as a well-known national conference speaker, for both of which he received the NGS Award of Merit. He's best known as the expert on the Palatine German immigrants, but also for this volume about the influence of coincidence, intuition, and serendipity in family research -- and we've all experienced it: The nagging feeling that you really need to venture up into a strange courthouse attic, no matter how dark it is; the discovery that the person sitting next to you on your flight to Salt Lake is your fourth cousin; the search through a cemetery for a particular grave that unexpectedly turns up a branch of the family you had no idea was there. (All three of those examples have occurred in my own immediate family, by the way.) The author relates his own brushes with the preternatural and brings together the similar experiences of several dozen other researchers, including such well known figures as Carl Boyer, William Filby, Charles Hansen, Helen Leary, Joan Kirchman Mitchell, Marsha Hoffman Rising, Christine Rose, Eugene Stratton, Neil Thompson -- and Winston De Ville.

I've enjoyed reading this book because am heavily into genealogy myself. For those who are not it would probably be pretty boring or perhaps even confusing when it comes to some of the technical aspects of doing reasearch.

With that caveat for the most part the book is interesting enough. If this book has any problems it is that you soon get the feeling this book is about attributing to some otherworldy or ESP-ish quality the results of hard work in research. There is a bit of balance by including a few comments by genealogists who point this out. But of course most of the material is by or about people who WANT TO BELIEVE that there can be something psychic involved in tracing ancestors.

Frankly it is a little silly to act surprised that someone who has done a lot of background work finds what he or she is looking for. Now if the person had never entered a library or sought the info and it landed in their lap, so to speak: that would be weird, maybe even psychic. But if because someone looked for info they found it, that is hardly mysterious.

this was a book group reading. Illustrating the sudden answer to a research question in Genealogy, this book confirms the existence of the phenomenon with stories collected by the author.