Looking For Clues
When I was a kid, we used to go tromping through cemeteries.
My dad, as you’ve probably figured out, is Phares O’Daffer, the “stumbleologist” who has spent a lot of his spare time in the last 58 years collecting and sharing information on our ancestors.
On family vacations or trips out east, we’d often take detours through the countryside to find old gravesites. Particularly in Ohio or Pennsylvania where some of the earliest Odaffers lived.
“Alright, everybody out of the car,” Dad would announce as he pulled our station wagon up to some tombstone grassy knoll. “Start looking for Odaffers.”
My sister Sue and I would pull our heads out of our books, put our shoes on, and gamely start tromping through the cemetery looking at each tombstone for clues to our past. It was a game for Eric, our brother, who was too little to know what we were doing. Mom went along with it because she knew how important it was to Dad.
And, like everything he does, Dad made it fun. “You’ve got 10 minutes,” he said. “Find me someone who was born in 1850. First one who does gets a milkshake.”
Come to think of it, running around a cemetery was a brilliant ploy to break up the monotony of riding in the car on a long trip. Get some exercise and tire us out so we’d stop asking, “Are we there yet?” And no matter who found what, we all got milkshakes.
Also, it was a way for Dad to involve all of us in his research into our family history. I never really appreciated that as a kid. As we grew older, none of us became interested enough in genealogy to carry on where he left off.
But I don’t think Dad ever expected that. He just wanted to pursue his passion and be able to share what he’d learned. Hence, this website.
Turns out that Dad’s first big discovery about our ancestors didn’t happen in a cemetery, but a library. The Daughters of the American Revolution Genealogy Library in Washington, D.C., to be exact.
Searching for clues in libraries on our family vacations wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun as going to cemeteries.