About me

My name is Barbara Bigham. I was born in New York City, moved to Phoenix as a young adult, and now live in Oregon. I’m a writer and editor by profession and I’m probably the least likely person to become interested in genealogy!

I’m 60 years old, both my parents are deceased, and I have no children of my own with whom to share this research. Saddest of all is that, although they both died relatively recently (my father in 1999, and my mother in 2008) I never asked my parents about our ancestors. To her credit, my mother tried to pass on to me stories she had been told of the “old country.” As the daughter of Polish immigrants, she at least had some knowledge of the family history. But I never listened. I wasn’t interested. Two years after she passed, having watched a few television shows on searching for ancestors, I suddenly got curious. Great timing, huh?

My curiosity, however, was shallow. Yes, it would be interesting, I thought, to know a bit about my family, but it wasn’t the kind of consuming fascination that would have withstood the challenges of difficult research. If I’d had to write to county clerks or pay a genealogist to look up information at distant library archives, I would have given up with a shrug and gone on to a different pastime.

But the Internet has changed the way genealogical research is done. Although it holds just a fraction of all the archived documentation, it allows us to get a jumpstart on our endeavor, and to piggyback on the work of more dedicated family historians who’ve been doing this for years.

I quickly found an incredible amount of history on various branches of my family tree, mostly through my paternal grandmother. I joined ancestry.com and gained access to dozens of other family trees researching the same lines. At the time, I didn’t realize that much of it was incorrect (with glaring errors such as children whose dates of birth preceded that of their parents, or individuals living to be 832 years old!).

Before long, I was hooked. I began the arduous task of confirming facts, and after several weeks I deleted the entire family tree on ancestry.com since it was so filled with mistakes. I started from scratch, accepting and incorporating only those facts that seemed most “provable” (except for the branch that supposedly shows I’m a direct descendent of Charlemagne — I decided to allow myself the luxury of that conceit for at least a while).

I concentrated first on the Bigham line and quickly discovered the frustration of hitting a brick wall … followed by the elation of breaking through it.

During my work — which has been going on for less than a year — I’ve come to realize that even more than constructing my “pedigree,” I’m interested in social history.  I want more than a list of names and dates. I want to know how these people (or people like them, who lived in the same time and area) lived, worked, played, and prayed. What was life like for them? What did they eat for dinner and wear to weddings? How did men court their lady loves, and how did the women raise their families? What were their strengths and weaknesses, and which of each of those were passed on to me?

Luckily, I have nieces and nephews (and even a great-nephew … with more on the way I expect!) and I hope some of them will grow to be interested in what I find out. If not, then I’ll enjoy the journey and not give another thought to the destination.

I’m the first to admit that I am a rank amateur when it comes to genealogy, and I do not in any way profess to be an “expert” on the topic, any more than I am an “expert” in the Bigham family history. But I hope that what I lack in skill and knowledge I will make up for with enthusiasm and 40+ years of writing, editing, researching and organizing source material (essential skills for my profession). I also hope that my experience in creating websites (a more recent part of my business) will allow me to present the information I gather from a variety of sources into an interesting format.

Our family is a large and diverse one and it is my hope that this site will also serve as a platform to share the ideas and stories for many of my new-found “cousins.”