The Gazette often gets queries from families looking for traces of their past relatives. A news item, a birth, marriage or death notice. Our archive is neither complete nor digitally searchable, which means, depending on how much information the enquirer has about dates and places, it can be pretty hit-and-miss.

Something I ask every researcher is, “have you tried the Marilyn Adams Genealogical Research Centre?” Only to find out, sometimes, that the Marilyn Adams has sent them to the Gazette! 

But most of the time there’s a strong value-added component in putting a researcher in touch with this extraordinary research centre. They’re a team of experts, all volunteers, who came to their enthusiasm through interest in their own family histories — and then found the interconnections we all share. 

A genealogy may be a line of related individuals, but each line overlaps and crosses over into others to create a web of cultural inheritance.

The Centre itself is an inheritance of sorts. Marilyn Adams was a local schoolteacher and member of the Seventh Town Historical Society. At her death in 1990, she surprised the Society with the bequest of her estate for a publicly accessible centre for historical research.

Opening in 1994 in Ameliasburgh, the Marilyn Adams Genealogical Research Centre is now home to all kinds of documents, from personal letters and diaries and historical land records to microfilm and digital holdings (including some Picton Gazettes).

It is a welcoming place, in particular because of its people, who are kind and helpful as well as wise. There’s a lunch room.

I spent some time there a couple of years ago, looking for a forgotten soldier whose disappearance had been noted in a Gazette of the 1920s, and, as far as my records showed, had vanished without a trace.

With the help of Erin McFaul Davis, who is now the president, I learned there is rarely such a thing as “without a trace.” Like a kid in a candy shop, she called up army records, and then with stunning ease was able to interpret them: “they kept telling him he had flat feet: they were suggesting he could leave the army, but he seems to have refused,” she told me.

We found him in a later census, and we found his death certificate. His County ancestry was the easy part.

We had recovered history. When I published my account of Charles J. Pierson as a Remembrance Day editorial, one of his relatives wrote to say thanks, because we had found parts of his history unknown to the family.

We all feel more connected after an experience like that. That is a heritage in and of itself.  

The Marilyn Adams is hosting “Trace your roots Tuesdays” this month for Flashback February. For more information, visit the Marilyn Adams Genealogical Research Centre.