Recently, I was chatting with someone interested in finding information on some of her ancestors listed on her family tree with only the year of birth and the year of death, but she couldn’t find out anything about them.

It reminded me of the poem Linda Ellis wrote entitled.The Dash. My friend’s ancestors were real people who lived for a specific time on this earth, having a career and a family. But all she knew about them was their name and perhaps the date of birth and/or death.

While researching my father’s maternal family, I came across many ancestors that were merely a name and date, but I wanted to know how they spent their ‘dash.’ So what did I do? I started by figuring out where they lived if nothing more than the country. Then I checked to see what was happening in history at that particular time and especially in that specific place. Did they live in England at the time of the Black Plaque? Did they immigrate to Lower Canada in the early days of our country? Was there a war going on at the time? Did they live under the rule of a tyrant?

By trying to find out as much as possible about the times and the places, I could at least get an idea of what life was like for that particular ancestor. I checked the web for pictures of the area and the times. What kind of clothes would that person have worn? What was the major industry in that time and place?

The thrill of discovery kept me pursuing more and more. I tried to find out what was going on in the world at that time. For example, some of the things I learned about my father’s mother, who was born in 1875 and died early in 1914, led me to questions such as:

• Since she seemed to enjoy reading, did she ever read the first Sherlock Holmes story, published in 1887?
• How would she feel if she had read in the newspaper about Jack the Ripper in London in 1888?
• What was her response when she learned about the sinking of the Titanic in 1912?

The first motion picture was shown in 1895, and I wonder if she had ever had an opportunity to see one. She never got to vote, as this did not happen in Manitoba until two years after her death, but I wonder if she would have been for or against women having the right to do so. She died shortly before the beginning of World War I, but I wonder how much she knew about the political climate that had led up to it.

We may never know exactly how our ancestors spent their time during the ‘dash,’ but for many of them, we can get a pretty good picture of what life may have been like for them. By learning what society was like at the time, the political climate in which they lived, the illnesses they may have faced as well as how those illnesses may have been treated, and the everyday struggles during their lifetime, we can begin to have a greater appreciation for them and for the influence they had, be it ever so minor, on who we are today.

Now, my father’s maternal family tree is not just a list of names and dates on a piece of paper or in a computer file; it is a book of stories of what I learned about the lives of individuals. The book ends with a chronological list of family members and what was happening during their ‘dash.’