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It’s been just over six months since our second child was born, and I owe my blog readers a follow-up post about what name we chose!

In my earlier post, I wrote about some of the characteristics we looked for in names for our children. Obviously, as a genealogist, it was important to me that the names come from somewhere in our family tree. We also took into consideration popularity, cultural origin and meaning, spelling, initials, and more.

So what did we choose for baby #2?

Meet Lena Maureen.

A More Difficult Decision

We still had our boy’s name from the first time around, and we still liked it. Since we weren’t going to find out the sex ahead of time, we had to pick another girl’s name to cover that possibility. Choosing another girl’s name was much harder than the first time around. With our first child, my wife and I both liked the name Eliza and agreed on it without much discussion. This time, when we shared our short lists for another girl’s name with one another we found zero overlap. And Lena wasn’t on either list!

The reason Lena wasn’t on either list is that none of our ancestors were formally named Lena. The name emerged late in the game as I combed through the family tree again looking for a compromise.

The top name on my wife’s list was Helen, after her great-grandmother Helen Clauson (1884-1963). Looking at Helen more closely I had something of an epiphany. In the U.S., she went by Helen, but she had been baptized in Norway under the name Jakobine Helene Klausdatter. Listen to how that sounds in Norwegian (click the speaker button under Norwegian). Yah’-ko-bee’-nah Heh-leh’-neh.

I then recalled that a number of our other ancestors up several different branches of the family tree were nicknamed Lena. There was German immigrant Helena “Lena” Schultz (maiden name Krieg or Krug or Knag or something; ca1801-1887), my wife’s 3x-great-grandmother. There was also Melina “Lena” Marier (1883-1955), a 2x-great-grandmother on my French-Canadian side. And on my dad’s Old-Stock American side can be found the similar name Laney, belonging to my 4x-great-grandmother Laney Dunham (ca1817-1887).

I liked Lena as a name better than most of the names on my wife’s list. What really sold me was that we had found a single name that drew from our daughter’s German, Norwegian, French-Canadian, and English heritage. Now we were talking! My wife liked the name too, and it helped that it derived from her top choice Helen. (Later, after we had agreed on Lena as the name, I was reminded that my biological father’s grandmother Helen Steffes [1905-1977] had been called Lena as a girl. This name draws on nearly every branch of our daughter’s family tree.)

Of course, we still needed to agree on a middle name. And we still had to check all the other naming factors to make sure we didn’t overlook something.

Passing the other tests

The middle name was easy enough. Since our first daughter’s middle name came from my wife’s close family (Pauline, after my wife’s feisty grandma), our second daughter’s middle name would come from my immediate family. It came down to a decision between my mother’s name, Maureen, and my paternal grandmother’s middle name, Lucille. I still like Lena Lucille, but I ultimately decided my mom deserved the honor. She has done a lot in her lifetime to build and maintain family relationships, despite some significant challenges. Passing her name on to Lena serves as a legacy to how important family has always been to her. Plus, the name Maureen is an Irish variation of Mary, so Lena’s full name effectively represents nearly all of her heritage: Norwegian, German, French-Canadian, English, and Irish (with a Czech last name!). Only a direct link to her Dutch ancestry is missing.

Lena also fit most of our other criteria quite nicely.

Popularity—According to Social Security Administration data, Lena was the 304^th-most popular baby name in 2017. (For comparison, Eliza ranked 212^th in 2014, the year before she was born.) It’s definitely not a Top 10 name, but it’s also not unheard of. People are familiar with it. Perfect.

Functionality—Lena is short and easy to spell. It’s cute for a kid (we call her Lena Bear because of all her hair!) and will look just fine on a resume when she’s applying for jobs.

Initials—L.M.V. doesn’t spell a word. If pronounced, it doesn’t sound like a word. The acronym doesn’t have any widely known associations. All good things!

Meaning—Though Lena has been a common nickname for centuries, it ultimately derives from several other more ancient names. Most often, Lena is a short form of Helena or Magdalena, names which have different origins. Helena—which is the relevant source in our heritage—derives from Greek Helene. In Greek, the name possibly means “light” or “torch,” or more specifically “corposant,” which refers to the electrical glow also known as St. Elmo’s fire that sometimes appears on ships masts and other elevated things during storms. The name’s most famous bearer was of course Helen of Troy, beauty of beauties, whose abduction (or elopement) instigated the Trojan War.

The name Laney derives from the same root. Laney is an English diminutive of the Arthurian name Elaine, which itself is an Old French form of Helen. (If instead Laney Dunham’s given name was actually “Adelana,” as it was recorded only once, in the 1860 census, then the root would be the Germanic element adal meaning “noble.”)

The name Magdalena originated with the Biblical character Mary Magdalene, whose second name means “of Magdala,” a town on the Sea of Galilee. I have a least a dozen distant French-Canadian ancestors named Marie Magdeleine, but they’re not the reason we chose the name Lena.

Much more relevant was the given name of my 2x-great grandmother Lena Dupre. She was baptized as Marie Melina Marier and gave Melina as her name on her marriage license. Apart from official documents, she was called simply “Lena.” The name Melina, like Melissa and Melanie, derives from the Greek word meli, meaning honey. Melina is a diminutive form meaning “little honey.”

Taken together, these meanings further convinced me that this was the right name for our daughter. Our Lena would be a light to the world, and not just any light, but a kind seen only rarely, under exceptional circumstances. She would be noble and forthright but also sweet (like honey), her heart filled with kindness. She would be bold and beautiful like Helen of Troy, and maybe just maybe change the course of world history as much as that Helen did. Whether any of this actually pans out waits to be seen. These ideals, at least, will shape how we raise her.

Spelling and Pronunciation—All of our ancestors spelled the nickname Lena the same way—L-E-N-A—so there wasn’t any debate here. The real underlying issue, as we’ve discovered, is pronunciation.

If there is an area of concern with the name Lena it is ambiguous pronunciation. Admittedly, this did not occur to my wife and me. When we discussed the name, we both used the same pronunciation: lay-nuh. We assumed (wrongly) that since we were native speakers of American English, we must have picked this up correctly. However, since Lena’s birth, many people have initially greeted her as lee-nuh. The automated appointment reminder from the doctor’s office says lee-nuh. Yes, we were aware of the old Ole and Lena jokes, which used to be especially popular here in Minnesota. In those jokes, the accent of Scandinavian immigrants is exaggerated for effect [Oh-laaaay and Leeee-nuh]. But our generation doesn’t use them. They’re finally on their way out.

I suspect my intuitive pronunciation of lay-nuh is due to my being much more tuned-in to the name’s European origins than most Americans. In Europe it’s leh-nuh or lay-nuh. In my head, lee-nuh would be written Lina.   A comment by user HungarianNameGeek on Babynamewizard.com’s page for “Lena” states the issue succinctly:

The letter ‘e’ has two possible values in many European languages: /eh/ like in ‘set’ (or the Greek letter epsilon), or /ay/ like the vowel in ‘say’ (or the Greek letter eta). Thus, from Europeans you’re about equally likely to get LEH-na or LAY-na. It’s really only in English that LEE-na is a possibility, due to the Great English Vowel Shift; in most other languages, you’d need to write it as Lina to get it pronounced with an /ee/.

My first guess would be LEH-na, I think, but most likely I’d try to wait for someone else to say it first – and then I’d promptly forget which version it was.

If you can have a Zen attitude that LEE-na, LEH-na, and LAY-na are all correct, just in different languages or accents, then Lena is a lovely name. (I especially like it as a nickname for Magdalena or Helena.)

Look at the ancestors from whom we drew the name. The only one we believe pronounced her name lee-nuh was Lena Marier. In her case the /ee/ sound derived from a full name (Melina) where the sound was represented by ‘i,’ as one would expect from people whose native language was French. I knew Lena Marier pronounced her name lee-nuh, but because Melina is much less common than Helena or Magdalena AND is spelled with an ‘i,’ I assumed it was the outlier.

Anyway, we decided just to go with the Zen attitude. If having her name slightly mispronounced the first time she meets someone is the worst thing in her life, then our Lena will be doing just fine. We’ve told several friends to think of it as we do, as a nickname for Helena or Magdalena or Adelana, and that has seemed to help.

Mini Ancestor Bios

The final piece of the naming puzzle was to examine the lives of the ancestors who carried the name. What inspiring stories about them can we share with our daughter as she grows up? Here are brief biographies that give a glimpse into the lives and characters of the four women who most directly inspired our daughter’s name.

Jakobine Helene Klausdatter Hantveit was born in 1884 on Hantveit farm in the municipality of Gulen, Norway. She grew up looking out over Gulenfjord not far from the site of the ancient Gulating. As a girl, she spent her summers up in the mountains on a seter, a seasonal pasture farm, where she helped milk the goats.

One of her schoolmates in Gulen was a boy named Louis Henrickson. Louis came from a very poor family—so poor, in fact, that he and his sister Lise were raised by an uncle. According to their daughter Marvis, “after their schooling [Helen and Louis] wanted to get married, but Helen’s parents did not feel that Louis was good enough for her.” So in 1906 Helen’s parents shipped her off to America to live with her uncle near Glenwood, Minnesota. An emigration record from Bergen, Norway, reports that Helen was going to America for bedre fortj, “better fortunes,” which from her parents’ perspectives meant better marriage prospects. According to Marvis, before Helen departed Louis gave her a friendship ring.

In what must have been a great surprise, Louis arrived in Minnesota just a year later. Apparently too poor to pay his own way, he had nonetheless made it happen. He had found an old friend who already lived in Minnesota—not far from Helen as it turned out—who was willing to pay his passage. (Had Helen secretly contributed?) Once in Minnesota, Louis put the carpentry skills he had learned from his uncle to work to earn a living. He found Helen, who was earning her own keep working in a laundry in Glenwood, and the two of them married there in 1909, far beyond the reach of Helen’s parents. They “lived happily ever after,” wrote their daughter Marvis.

Helena “Lena” Krug/Krieg/Knag (her maiden name is difficult to read and/or appears different in different documents) was born somewhere in the northern German region of Mecklenberg around 1801. In Germany she married Heinrich Schultz and together they had at least three children. The Schultz family emigrated in about 1857 or 1858, settling first in upstate New York. Her son Ludwig enlisted to fight in the 57^th New York Infantry during the Civil War.

After Ludwig mustered out in 1864, Lena and her family moved west to settle near the village of Waverly in Wright County, Minnesota. I believe the Homestead Act drew them west. After Heinrich died in 1867, Lena finished the Homestead process. According to one of the Schultz children, soon after their arrival in Waverly, the family “conducted a boarding house for laborers engaged in laying the railroad tracks through the village. Among their patrons was James J. Hill,” Minnesota’s most famous railroad tycoon. Lena lived with one or another of her children in Wright County until her own death there in 1887.

Marie Melina “Lena” Marier was born in Centerville, Minnesota, in 1883, the first of fourteen children of Camille Alphonse Marier and Marie Angelique Forcier. Her mother was just 16 years old and her father 18 when she was born. Though Lena’s mother’s family had been in Minnesota since 1847, Lena’s father and all of her grandparents had been born in Quebec. When she was 18, Lena married Oliver Delphis Dupre, an American-born man who also had fully French-Canadian heritage. French was the family’s primary language while Lena was growing up, and indeed for her whole life. Lena’s eldest daughter Alice reported that she didn’t know any English until she started school in about 1908.

Lena Marier Dupre’s life was arguably the most challenging of any of these women. The Dupres were dirt poor. As a married couple, she and Delphis lived on a small farm plot right next to railroad tracks in a two-room house that lacked insulation. Lena’s daughter Alice, born in 1903, remembered,

The only heat we had upstairs would come through a small grate above the wood heater that was downstairs. Believe me, we didn’t play around when we were getting dressed. . . . We survived several winters there. There were no iceboxes for the summer, only the flowing well or spring.

We led a happy life there on the farm, but it was a lot of work for my mother. In order to cook she had to get the kitchen range quite hot, . . . and most of the time it was three meals a day. She had big washings and a lot of ironing. My father had help [farmhands] too, his dad stayed with us, and now and then his brother (my uncle Evod and his wife Stella) would come for a while, especially in the summer. So we were quite a few around the table, and if there were too many, the children would have to wait until the grown-ups were finished.

In 1918, Delphis was killed in a hunting accident, leaving Lena with eight children ages three-months to 14 years. To help the family survive, she took a job “at the hotel in Forest Lake [since] she could walk there. . . . When there was extra soup left over, the hotel keeper would give it to her.” While Lena worked, teenager Alice took care of all the younger kids. Alice never went back to school. Later, to help the family survive, Lena “bought a sewing machine and sewed for [our family] and for others.” Things finally got a little easier once more of Lena’s children were old enough to help support her. She got them through the toughest years.

Laney Dunham was born around 1817 probably in Smithfield, Jefferson County, Ohio. (The 1860 census hints that her full name might have been “Adelana,” but all other records show her name as Laney.) Her parents had migrated from western Maryland to Jefferson County in eastern Ohio during the first decade of the 1800s. In 1820, her father purchased federal land a little bit further west in Harrison County, Ohio, and Laney grew up on a farm there. In 1833, she married Nelson Whitten, a young man from a neighboring family.

The Dunham, Whitten, Carnes, Nelson, Chaney, and other related families were early converts to the United Brethren Church. In fact, Laney’s brothers Abel and Joshua Dunham both became ministers for the church. We don’t know what Laney’s political beliefs were, but if they were anything like the men around her she was probably a reformer and a strong supporter of the Union cause in the Civil War. Her brother Abel was known to be a staunch abolitionist and was later a proponent of the temperance movement. Her son Nathaniel Whitten volunteered for service in Company I of the 33^rd Illinois Infantry regiment in September 1861, and was discharged for disability in 1863.

Arguably the defining feature of Laney Dunham’s life was widowhood. Her first husband Nelson Whitten died when he was only in his 30s. It is unclear where he died. Sometime in the late 1840s, Laney and possibly Nelson joined a caravan of extended family who all went west to buy farmland in Pike County in western Illinois. Perhaps during the journey and certainly within a few years of their arrival in Illinois, Nelson died, leaving Laney a widow with five young children. Laney married again in 1850 to Andrew Gansley, a man twenty years her senior. Within a few years he died, and Laney remarried again in 1854. Her third husband, Henry Green, was almost twenty years younger than she was—young enough to enlist in the Civil War. They had one child together in 1856. In September 1861, Henry joined his stepson Nathaniel Whitten in the 33^rd Illinois Infantry. He was killed a year later near Bolivar, Mississippi, as the steamboat he was on was fired on by 2,000 rebel soldiers perched high above on the Mississippi River levee.

Laney had lost three husbands before she turned 46. If there was any consolation, it was that her last husband had died in the line of duty. For the rest of her life she received a widow’s pension of $8 dollars per month. She never remarried.

When I think of words that describe these four women, several come to mind: perseverance, resourcefulness, independence. In an era in which women’s lives were largely controlled or defined by fathers and husbands, each of these women demonstrated the ability to survive on her own and to make her own decisions. Helen Clauson was adamant enough about her choice of marriage partner that her parents sent her across an ocean to prevent it. The two of them found a way to be together anyway. The other three women survived as widows for decades. Lena (Krug) Schultz completed her husband’s Homestead claim. Lena Marier worked impossibly hard to keep her eight children fed and clothed after her husband’s accidental death. Laney Dunham endured the deaths of three husbands, but still had the courage to get up every morning to live another day. I certainly don’t wish my daughter to endure the same struggles these ancestors faced, but if she faces her own struggles like they did, with perseverance, resourcefulness, and independence, she will find success and happiness.

(Whew, all this about a baby name? I guess it’s just who I am.)

Mrs. GeneaLOGIC and I are expecting!

You know what that means. It’s time to dive into the family tree to find potential baby names.

How people choose names

Naming a child is a special event. The name we choose will shape other people’s first impressions of him or her from day one and it will affect our child’s self-identity as s/he grows up. It’s a big decision. We took it seriously with our first child, a daughter named Eliza, and we’re taking it seriously again. But how should we choose the best name?

Some people choose names that are popular at the moment. We all know the names that were popular when we went to school. Linda and Bob? 1950s. Jennifer and David? 1970s. I bet you can guess my age pretty accurately if I I tell you is that I was high school friends with triplets named Amanda, Megan, and Sara.

Other people name their children after famous or important contemporary figures. How many of you have a George Washington [Surname] or Thomas Jefferson [Surname] in your family tree? One collateral family in my tree contains sons named John Wesley Nelson, Columbus Washington Nelson, Henry Clay Nelson, George Washington Harrison Nelson, and Zachariah Winfield Santa-Anna Nelson, among others. In the last instance, the parents obviously couldn’t decide which Mexican-American War general they wanted to honor and decided to reference them all.

Many names from European cultures originally carried a literal meaning. Today, people generally don’t know the underlying meaning of most names and only go searching when expecting a baby. But even though people don’t know such meanings by heart, they still affect which names many parents choose for their children.

Biblical names like John or Elizabeth derive from Hebrew and in their original language typically spelled out the child’s relationship to God: Yochanan, “Yahveh is gracious,” or ‘Elisheva’, “My God is abundance.” Most Western versions of Hebrew names passed into common use via a Bible written in Greek or Latin, and so we have inherited Johannes (Latin from Greek) and John rather than Yochanan, and Elisabet (Greek) rather than ‘Elisheva’. For many Christians through the ages, the underlying Hebrew meaning was less important than the name’s association with important Biblical characters.

Other familiar English names originated from archaic forms of Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Italic, or Slavic languages. They likewise originally carried a literal meaning or referred to nature or divinity. Frederick, for example, derives from two Germanic components, frid “peace” and ric, “ruler.” Fiona comes from the Irish word fion, meaning “vine.” Danica was a Slavic personification of the Morning Star, Venus. And so on.

Immigrant groups from outside Europe are adding new names to America’s pool of names and meanings every day. To give just one example, a state congressional district here in Minnesota recently elected former Somali refugee Ilhan Omar as its representative. Fittingly for a politician, her given name means “to state something eloquently” in Arabic. Several names more commonly found in African-American families, such a Imani and Tariq, also derive ultimately from Arabic words and may reflect a much older link to the Muslim communities of East Africa.

For genealogists, family names are especially important. Because our family trees are bigger and we often know them by heart, we typically have more family names to choose from. We can dig deeper into the past to find the best fit. Indeed, one of my stipulations is that the names we choose must come from somewhere in our child’s direct ancestry.

Having said that, choosing a family name is just one of several important factors. There are practical things to consider like spelling in elementary school and job applications as an adult. Here are the general criteria we are using to choose names for for our children, in rough order of importance. (We never formally spelled it out like this. This is essentially a summary of many conversations over dinner and before bed.)

1. A name we both like
2. Goes well with our last name (probably no alliteration)
3. From a direct ancestor (ideally a person who led an interesting or inspiring life)
4. Sounds cute for a kid AND respectable for an adult. It has to look good on a resume.
5. Standard spelling. Sorry to all the Jaiessuns out there, but why make a simple name more complicated?
6. Not in the Top 10 most popular. No offense to the Lindas of the 1950s or the Liams of today, but we don’t want our child to share his or her name with half the school room. A certain degree of individuality is a good thing.
7. Not too obscure for the United States in the 21st century. (The flip side of #6.)
8. Ancient/original meaning is fitting and aligns with our values
9. Initials don’t spell something unfortunate

This genealogist’s first attempt

We named our first daughter Eliza Pauline. It was important to me as a genealogist to find meaning in the names we chose from the personalities or life histories of the namesake ancestors. Ultimately, that’s why we do genealogy, isn’t it? Our ancestors don’t care whether we remember them. They’re dead. But we find meaning in their lives. They help us figure out our place in the world. They may have passed skills or personality traits down to us. They can teach us how to live (or how not to live). Choosing a name of an ancestor for a new child reflects how we, as parents, understand our heritage right now.

The name Eliza comes from my side of the family and Pauline from my wife’s. There are two Elizas in our daughter’s direct ancestry.

Eliza Nelson is my 4x-great-grandmother on my dad’s old-stock American side. She was born around 1810 probably in Frederick County, Maryland. I don’t know many details of her life. In fact, I only have three primary sources that give her name: an 1831 marriage record from Harrison County, Ohio; the 1850 census from Pike County, Illinois; and her gravestone, erected presumably in 1857 when she was buried.

Eliza Kinney was born to Irish immigrants in Canada around 1845. She is my 3x-great-grandmother on my mom’s Irish side. Eliza moved many times in her life. As a girl, she traveled with her parents from Canada to Vermont and then to northern Pennsylvania. In 1864, alongside her new husband James Daly, she moved west to settle with her new family in southern Wisconsin. She left her parents and many siblings behind in Pennsylvania. Only five years later, Eliza was on the move again, this time traveling farther west to cut a new farm out of the prairie in southwestern Minnesota. By age 30, Eliza had already made five major cross-country moves—all without automobiles and mostly without trains. Later in life, Eliza’s family made a final move, another 100+ miles northwest to a farm near the South Dakota border. This Eliza is also a bit of an enigma. After her husband’s death in 1913, I can’t find her again. Her gravestone, marked “1845-1931,” is the only evidence of her whereabouts after 1913.

Though we don’t know much about the personality of either Eliza, we can still draw meaning from their stories. Both Elizas were migrants, especially Eliza Kinney. Like her namesakes, we hope our daughter Eliza goes where life takes her, or rather, takes her life where she want it to go, wherever that may be. Like her ancestors, we hope she grows up to change her own circumstances for the better.

Pauline Shoultz was my wife’s grandmother. We know a lot more about her personality. Even though she was an “old” grandma (she was almost 71 when my wife was born) my wife and her sister got to spend a lot of time with Pauline while they were growing up. I also got to know her a little bit before she passed away. She was a spirited if uncompromising woman of fully German descent. My wife remembered her this way. “She wasn’t like other people’s grandmas—polite, sweet. She was a spitfire with her own sense of humor. Grandma Pauline wasn’t a proper lady. She liked sports and hanging with the old guys at the coffee shop. She said a lot of really funny things, intentionally and unintentionally. At the same time, she was an emotional rock, steadfast and determined.” These qualities helped her live to be 98 years old.

When our daughter Eliza Pauline is a little older, we’ll explain to her why we chose the names we did. We’ll teach her about her ancestors. We’ll share our desire for her to grow into an adventurous, independent woman who is also kind, loving, and loyal.

Great family names . . . for someone else’s child

Yes, we like old family names. There aren’t a lot of Elizas or Paulines these days, but both names fit the resurgence of names that were popular around 1900.  Of course, not all old family names make good names in 21st century America. My wife’s 2x-great-grandmother was named Svanhilde. It’s a unique old Scandinavian name that was first documented in the 18th century in the same county in western Norway where our Svanhilde lived. (Her grandmother, born in 1775, was also named Svanhilde and may have been the first recorded bearer of the name since the Viking-age sagas.) I have teased my wife about naming our next child Svanhilde so much that she is frankly tired of the humor. (I think she’s taking our naming duty more seriously than I am.)

With Svanhilde at the head of the list, here’s a list of old family names we will not be using for our next child (but that I like to threaten to write on the birth certificate while my wife is still recovering):

Female

• Svanhilde
• Olga
• Josephte
• Ambjør
• Euphroseine
• Orlaug
• Jacquette

Male

• Ladislav
• Asbjørn
• Ole
• Václav
• Mareen
• Désiré
• Burgess
• Vavřinec
• Gunnar
• Livinus

Yes, all of these are given names in our future child’s direct ancestry. Most of them sound distinctively “ethnic” in 21st century America. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For example, searching the Social Security baby names lists for a few other “ethnic” names from our family tree, I discovered that more than 550 American girls were named Ingrid in 2008 and more than 650 boys were named Johan in 2016. Bridget is an evergreen name of Gaelic/Irish origin.

That said, such names do tend to raise questions about where a person is from. Svanhilde, Ambjør, Orlaug, Asbjørn, and Ole are all Norwegian in origin. (They’re “old” names in Norway now, too.) Gunnar is Swedish. Désiré and Livinus are Dutch/Flemish. Ladislav, Václav, Vavřinec, and Olga are names of some of my Czech ancestors. Josephte is a distinctively French-Canadian female name while Euphroseine is a Greek name carried by a handful of my female French-Canadian ancestors. Mareen was a French Huguenot man who settled in colonial Maryland. Burgess is an archaic given name of Scottish or English origin and the given name of Eliza Nelson’s paternal grandfather. All are interesting names for different reasons, but none fit our family in this time and this place.

So which name will we choose for baby #2? Well, you’ll have to wait for a birth announcement! We still have the boy name we chose from my wife’s first pregnancy (and we still like it). We recently agreed upon another girl name. I think we also recently agreed that, just like our first pregnancy, we won’t find out the baby’s sex until s/he is born. We like the mystery. Doing it the old fashioned way also makes naming the child a part of the birth event itself. I still remember calling Eliza by her name for the first time right after she was born. It was moment I’ll never forget.

For anyone who called herself a genealogist in the past century, spooling microfilm onto a special microfilm reader and scrolling through its pages was a rite of passage. Finding a record of your long-lost ancestor hundreds of pages into the roll was something to celebrate. But it’s the beginning of the end of the microfilm era. A major sign of the transition appeared a couple days ago.

On Monday, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) announced that it would suspend distribution of microfilm rolls on September 1, 2017. The church, which incorporates genealogy into its theology, owns about 2.5 million rolls of microfilm full of genealogical data from all over the world. For the past 80 years, the church has distributed microfilm rolls to designated research centers upon request, to the great benefit of genealogists everywhere.

Microfilm has so many benefits. It condenses information and saves archival space. It allows users to see faithful copies of original documents without risk of damaging the originals (and with very little risk of damaging the microfilm itself.)  It allows the contents of parish record books and other large documents to be sent through the mail at minimal cost. Its material components decay very slowly.

But these are not exclusive benefits. Many of them apply to digital information too. And that, indeed, is the future for LDS collections. According to the official LDS statement, “The change is the result of significant progress made in FamilySearch’s microfilm digitization efforts and the obsolescence of microfilm technology.” The church has already digitized more than 1.5 million microforms, with most of them available online at FamilySearch.org for browsing or searching. The rest, says the statement, “should be digitized by the end of 2020.” Three-and-a-half years of waiting isn’t that long for genealogists. I mean, we’re already halfway to the release of the 1950 census on April 1, 2022, and that seems (to me at least) like it’s just around the corner.

For me, the discontinuation of microfilm distribution raises two questions, one immediate and practical and one more general. First, why not continue distribution of undigitized rolls until 2020 for the sake of accessibility? The whole point of both microfilm distribution and digitization is accessibility, right? Well, LDS has a solid answer to this  question on a related FAQ page. Below is their  explanation. I included it in full because it gets to the heart of the bigger issue of obsolescence.

The microfilm industry has been in decline for a couple of decades since the advent of digitization. The cost of vesicular film used to duplicate microfilm for circulation has risen dramatically while demand has decreased significantly. At the same time, it has become increasingly difficult and costly to maintain the equipment, systems, and processes required for film duplication, distribution, and access. It is not feasible for FamilySearch to continue the microfilm distribution service for longer than it already has. Meanwhile, digitization is nearing completion and many of the records FamilySearch has not yet digitized are available on other websites accessible to FamilySearch patrons. By reinvesting resources in digital efforts, FamilySearch can accelerate and improve electronic access.

Microfilm is dying for economic reasons, plain and simple. Microfilm technology is now a niche market. Production equipment, replacement parts, and people with the proper skills to maintain microform technologies are all harder to find, which puts a premium price on the whole niche. It is easy to understand how the church arrived at its current solution.

The other question raised by the LDS discontinuation of microfilm distribution is about the future of microfilm itself. The technology is still widely used in libraries and archives around the country (and LDS microfilm collections will continue to be available at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City). I still use microfilm all the time at the Minnesota Historical Society to search for death certificates, naturalization papers, historical Minnesota newspapers, and more.

Microfilm has a few advantages not shared with digital images. Most notably, microfilm is an analog technology. All you need to read it is a good light source and a magnifying glass. Digital archiving, in fact, presents a much more complicated system of preservation in the long run. File types and software change frequently, so that obsolescence is just as much of a threat to digital media. And just like physical objects, digital objects decay with use. Obviously, the advantages of digital media (color, share-ability, ease of access) more than compensate for the new challenges it presents. Yet I wonder if―because of its simplicity―microfilm will continue to have a place in libraries and archives, including genealogical archives, for decades more. Maybe the end of ordering LDS microfilm rolls isn’t quite the end of the microfilm era.

Beware of ethnicity estimates, especially the new timeline one from 23 and Me. (Here’s another genetic genealogist’s case study of how unreliable 23 and Me’s new Ancestry Timeline is.) It’s nearly impossible to identify from the DNA alone the date one of your ancestors was last “purely” from any one country or ethnic group. There are two issues in play.

First, our genes are wildly mixed up. While different ethnic origins can sometimes be assigned to different DNA segments, this only tells you about the background population from which those genes derive. It cannot on its own identify when a particular person came from that country. The article linked above gives the example that someone with 39% British Isles ancestry might have a parent from England, or, as is actually the case, a bunch of really distant British ancestors up several different lines. If genes from those people happen to be inherited in sequence on a number of different chromosomes, it might appear that the genes originated as a single unit in the recent past rather than the reality that a bunch of different segments were inherited from many different people who ultimately came from the same population centuries ago (i.e., roots in New England).

The second issue is historical. National borders that exist today did not exist a few centuries ago. Migration has always taken place. Putting these two together, you can understand how someone of French extract—let’s call her Angelique—might have a mix of genes that appear to the test to be Scandinavian and Mediterranean (Italian) rather than Western European. For Angelique, the current French border obscures the deeper history of Roman occupation and the Viking settlement in Normandy. Even if everyone in Angelique’s document-able family tree spoke French and lived in northern France, Angelique’s genes suggest that she happened to inherit more genes derived from Roman and Viking fore-bearers than, say, Germanic (Frankish) ones.

Taking this example one step further, it’s impossible for commercial DNA tests like 23andMe or AncestryDNA to determine on their own (without documentary evidence of some kind) whether Angelique’s Mediterranean ancestry in fact came from an underlying Roman genetic pool or instead originated in a smaller population descended from, say, a troop of Italian craftspeople who intermarried with the local French population after migrating to France to help build a 14th-century castle. The history is simply too complex and the DNA too fragmented to tell the difference without serious scientific study of particular genes or without much larger pools of historical DNA to compare with.

In the end, population history and population genetics make something like 23andMe’s ancestry timeline an impossible endeavor. It may make good marketing, but it doesn’t make valid history.