Enter with me, if you will, one of Houston’s gems: the Clayton Genealogical Library.

Armed only with my mom’ mother’s first and maiden names, and the knowledge that Grandma Ada was born in New Jersey, I set to work. My first stop was one of the dozen computer terminals in Clayton that provide special access to various ancestry databases. Powerful search engines sift through millions of records of birth and death, marriage and military service, pre-1940 U.S. censuses and up-to-the present photos of gravestones.

Eureka! I soon learned that Grandma was born August 22, 1891, in Upper Penn’s Neck, New Jersey.

I turned next to one of the Clayton’s mammoth atlas’s in order to locate Upper Penn’s Neck within New Jersey. Salem County, on the Delaware River. Down the carpeted hallway I walked, past stacks of wonderful volumes of vital records from every state.

Like a child in a candy store, my eyes darted up, down, left and right, scanning the New Jersey counties until I came to the section devoted to volumes of public records for Salem County. Excitedly, I  began pulling down volumes of eighteenth and nineteenth century birth and marriage records.

Dalbow. Grandma’s maiden name. I cannot express the sheer delight in seeing row after row of a name that I had heard only a few times in my life. The deeper I delved into indexes of hundred, and hundred-fifty-year-old records, the more I found of my mother’s past. Even then, I knew I had merely scratched the surface.

Forty-three years after she had died, I felt as if I was for the first time finding my mother. Sitting there, on the floor of the Clayton Genealogical Library, surrounded by musty odes to lives lived so very long ago. I was hooked: The ghosts of the past infused me with a desire to grab as many moments from the present in order to learn more about them, about my mother, and ultimately, about myself.

The search for half of my past had truly, in earnest, begun.

Mom died when I was a teenager.

I can’t remember any of us ever talking about where she was born, where she spent her childhood, or where she daydreamed as a teen. She just appeared. As Mom.

We knew everything about Dad–where he was born, where he went to school, our fascinating roots on both his mother’s and father’s sides. All the way back to the 1600s.

Well, two months ago, I looked, as if for the first time, at my mother’s birth certificate. And there it was: Woman’s Hospital, New York City! Mom was born at a hospital on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, only blocks from where my son, Lorenz, was born seventy-six years later. A whole new world opened to me. There I was, looking closely at my grandmother’s maiden name, and her place of birth—New Jersey. My grandfather, whom I never met, was born in Missouri. Imagine that.

I was thrilled and saddened, shamed at years of learned disinterest and determined to find the family roots that led to this woman, Mom–and to me, and to Lorenz. And learn, I did.

Mom, you had a fascinating history. I’m grateful for the search that led me to you, and I’m excited to share the geneological journey that took me there!