Find Your Roots at This Branch

BURBANK —  At a long table in the quiet, narrow storefront between the Downtown Barber Shop and the Specialty Seal Co., Beverly Keeling chased the German schoolgirl back through the generations.

The girl, who died a woman in 1884, had been Keeling’s husband’s grandmother. She’d largely been lost to family memory because her widower had soon remarried.

No one knew, for example, from where in Germany this grandmother, Anna Juetting, had come. Her marriage license had listed her parents’ names but little other information about them.

Then, two years ago, while cleaning out the Illinois house that had been the family home for a century, Keeling and her husband came upon a schoolgirl’s autograph book that belonged to the young Anna. It contained poems and sentiments penned by school friends, some of whom had made note of their village, Detern, near the Dutch border.

Using German telephone directories kept on CD-ROM by the Immigrant Genealogical Society of Burbank, Keeling found numerous Juettings in the listings for Detern. She selected one at random and wrote a letter in English explaining her quest and listing the names of the girls in Anna Juetting’s autograph book.

Several months later, Keeling received a response from a German woman who confirmed that one of the signers was, indeed, buried in the town.

Through the Immigrant Library, she got in touch with a German genealogist. He eventually identified enough local Juettings and Juetting-sprung people, going back as far as the early 1600s, to fill 10 typewritten pages. Among those listed were people with the same names as Anna Juetting’s parents.

And now, in the society’s library, Keeling was poring over a German genealogical registry for the Detern area, trying to confirm, connect and date all these Juettings and divine their relevance to the existence of Anna and, by extension, to her own family.

“This gets to you after a while,” said Keeling, a 72-year-old retired nurse who lives in North Hollywood. “It’s like going to Vegas--you just can’t stop.”

The library where Keeling indulges her habit is a tidy, airy place at 1310-B W. Magnolia Blvd. It recently doubled in size when the society took over an adjoining room. The original room is lined with shelves of genealogical reference books, and the other contains microfiche and computer files. The visitor hungry for family history is likely to find a bowl of Nestle’s Crunch balls or a plate of tangerines set out to help fuel the search.

The library, staffed by volunteers and open to the public, must keep limited hours--Wednesdays and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. It receives an average of 50 search requests a week. Library volunteers will research a given source--say, The Original Scots Colonists of Early America or Passenger Arrivals, Port of Charleston, 1820-1829--for as little as $2, and pride themselves on reporting results in one week.

“Nobody around offers searches for $2,” said society President Barbara Freshwater of Sunland.

“It’s ridiculous. I don’t know why we do it--and I’m one of the volunteers.”

The thousands of reference works that crowd the library’s shelves range from Ships Arriving From Italian Ports to America, 1820-1910 to Early Connecticut Marriages to Dutch Immigrants in U.S. Ship Passenger Manifests, 1820-1889. They include Massachusetts Vital Records to 1850--all 84 volumes.

The library’s uniqueness, however, lies in its collection of German resource materials. These include, Freshwater said, “probably the most complete collection in the country” of Ortssippenbuecher, genealogical registries published by many German towns and regions. Each lists resident-families back to the first family member who moved to the locality and notes where that person came from.

Freshwater’s passion for genealogy was ignited 33 years ago, when she was filling in her daughter’s baby book, which included a family tree. Since, she’s managed to trace her German ancestry to the 16th century and her English-Scottish-Welsh lines to 800.

Library frequenters know that the famously clerkish Germans actually did not keep many records before about 1500, and many of those didn’t survive the devastation of the Thirty Years War in the early 1600s. Tracing family beyond then is usually futile.

Tracing English heritage to the dim past, on the other hand, is comparatively easy for most Americans. William the Conqueror ordered landownership records kept soon after conquering the island in 1066. Moreover, Freshwater said, “most of us hook into the noble lines at some point, since so many of the lesser sons of the nobility, who didn’t inherit the family estates, emigrated. Once you hook in, then you can just rip right on back because the records for the nobility were so well-kept.”

Genealogy now ranks with coin collecting and philately among the most popular hobbies in the United States.

A small irony attends all this historical identity-seeking. In researching our genealogies we’re no doubt fundamentally motivated by the conviction that our existences and those of our forebears and progeny are unique and uniquely matter. And yet the records we must depend on--the means through which Barbara Freshwater can identify forebears of 1,100 years ago and Beverly Keeling can pin down the origins of Anna Juetting--weren’t kept to honor anyone. They were kept primarily for purposes of taxation.

In other words, if we’re able to trace our heritages, to England, Germany or anyplace else, we can be sure of one thing: We come come from a long line of taxpayers.