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.