Addicts' Hunt Pedigree

■ gul iLUIULjy 3CIHUI Addicts’ Hunt Pedigree N. C. 0*p*rtm«nl •f Cultural Reiourcel “Look at me,” Ted Bragdon said. “I’m supposed to be on vacation in Raleigh, visiting friends. But —isn’t this terri¬ ble? — every chance I get, I sneak over here." Across the table, Mrs. Frank 6. Moody nodded. "It’s an addiction." “That’s right,” Bragdon said. "It’s like being a dope addict." But it wasn’t anything like drugs that brought the two together: it was their pedigrees. Both had come long distances — Bragdon from Maine, Mrs. Moody from Ala¬ bama — to spend the gray Jan¬ uary afternoon in the genealo¬ gy section of the N. C. State Library. There, among the stacks of tax lists, census lists, revolu¬ tionary rosters, diaries and deeds, Bragdon had asked Mrs. Moddy “Are you by chance re¬ lated to the Maine Moodys?” and two “addicts” were off on their favorite subject — genealogy. They are not all that unusual. In 1975, the genealogy section served 12,244 patrons, who used its facilites in person, over the telephone and through the mails. The volume of mail the section receives has doubled in the past two years. The state even has a genea¬ logical society, organized only a year ago but already boasting more than 700 members, ac¬ cording to one of its directors, Dr. Lenox D. Baker. Dr. Baker, a retired surgeon, says genealogy takes up as much time as a full time job. “I work at it day and night,” he said. “I spend every spare moment doing this,” Bragdon said. “I have other interests — I ski, I travel. But genealogy is my first love.” Bragdon’s search for his family has been unusually suc¬ cessful. In the last two and a half years, he claims to have turned up more than 7,000 Bragdons across the United States, all apparently descend¬ ed from one man who emigrat¬ ed to what is now Maine in 1632. Mrs. Moody — who was trac¬ ing her family “only” to the 18th century — was at the North Carolina library with her husband, a Birmingham doc¬ tor. They were putting in a few eight-hour days at the genealo¬ gy room as a “vacation” be¬ fore Dr. Moody had to attend a medical meeting at Pinehurst. "We really' enjoy it," Mrs. Moody said. “I’ve been doing genealogy for the past 10 years. ... We have an Airstream trail¬ er and once we spent two weeks in the genealogical library in Columbia (S. C.). We were there from morning till jiight, every day. And it was open eve¬ nings and Sundays. It was wonderful.” Why the growing interest in genealogy? Why such a blue- Geneolociy jool blooded hobby — and for many people, a profession — in a his¬ torically non-aristocratic nation? “Maybe it’s because Ameri¬ cans have such a rootless, mo¬ bile society,” suggested David Bevan, chief of library infor¬ mation services. “It gives peo¬ ple a sense of security and of belonging to know where their ancestors lived and what they were like.” Lee Albright, head of the genealogy section, thinks peo¬ ple also get involved with genealogy — and stay involved — because it’s fun. “The people you find in the records,” she said, "become more real to you than some of the people you see in the eleva¬ tor every day.” The old records certainly show more personality than the sort of computerized remains we leave our descendants now¬ adays. Leafing through a volume en¬ titled “Abstract of the Wills of Edgecombe County, 1733- 1856,” for example, you find John Flanagin. He may have died in 1793, but it still raises eyebrows today to read that he split all his property between p^igree^ofj^brary. his wife and his mistress — "provided they live quiet and contented together" in the same house. People hunting for North Carolina family histories soon work their way out of the genealogy section, for it con¬ tains mostly secondary sourc¬ es: transcribed and published deeds, wills, census records, published archives and so on. To obtain original docu¬ ments, or to verify the pub¬ lished pieces in the genealogy room, you must go to the state archives. These are the "real" records — handwritten, yel¬ lowing documents from all over the state — stored and guarded in the same downtown Raleigh building that houses the library. To do any out-of-state re¬ search — for example, if your family came to North Carolina from Virginia — you would re¬ main in the genealogy room, for it also contains extensive published material from each of the original 13 colonies as well aS some material from at least 20 other states.