Hello, hello!

I’m Eric Wells and I have a problem: I love searching through old records, walking through graveyards, hunting for dead people and talking to complete strangers. Most people may call that crazy, but those in the know call that type of person a genealogist. Having spent the last quarter of a century as a residential construction contractor specializing in remodels and repair, it came to me as a complete surprise that I truly enjoyed spending hours upon hours to find that one piece of information which could break a genealogy case wide open. And for most of us genealogy researchers, that record is always going to be the next one.

I feel like I came into genealogy through the backdoor. I was visiting with my 80 year old grandmother in Southern California and went into her closet to get dog food to feed her dog. I noticed a stack of manila envelopes with names of each of her children on them. These large envelopes were stuffed with photographs, a mixture of new and old, but most of which I had never seen before. I asked Gran (that’s what we all call her) about them and she started crying. You can imagine I was taken aback, thinking I had unintentionally hurt her feelings, but she did begin to explain what was going on. She told me that before she passed away, she wanted to have sorted through the photographs and give an envelope to each one of her children (she has 7 children), but the problem she was stumbling on was that there were so many individual photos that should go to more than one child. With only one copy of the photo, she didn’t know what to do. Unbeknownst to me (and the rest of our really big family) this was a project she had been stuck on for a long, long time.

With my watery eyes, melted heart and a determined mind I told her I would take on the project. Being somewhat proficient with computers and harnessing the internet’s capabilities, I promised her a photo book she could present to each of her children. The very first step was to digitize all she had and that was thousands upon thousands of photographs, from the very recent to the very old images. The next step was to find out who the people were in these frozen moments in time. I could pick out many of my cousins, aunts, uncles and their spouses, but there were so many more people I didn’t know.

Sitting down with Gran she began introducing me to these new faces along with new stories triggered with each photo. It was at this point I knew a simple photo book could never do justice to these photographs. The ghosts of the past needed to be connected somehow to my Gran in order to become real, to preserve their context, to give relevance to the work and supply interest to the reader. It became unavoidable that the promise I had made must be turned into a monumental genealogy project.

This project started from scratch. Having absolutely no research skill and very little knowledge of our family tree it blossomed into a passion for the past. The posters and Heritage Books, as I call it, took thousands of dollars and thousands of hours over a surprisingly short period of four years. It was presented at a Chamberlain Family Reunion in July of 2013. The finished product was a 250 page individualized hardcover book spanning 5 generations and a framed 8 generation poster. The presentation to the family was such a fulfilling and addicting experience. I felt like a hero (at least in my own mind) having saved our family heritage, where our family came from and how we got to where we were. All this was preserved before losing that very last and frail connection to those people, the last link with our family heritage, my grandmother.