Oct 11
14
The Real Lessons of Genealogy
When I was in the third grade, I rode my bike to school, and all the way there my mind roamed the universe—castles and knights, cowboys, sports, outer space and comic book characters–but not one thought was given to school. I wasn’t interested in school. It was only an irritant and a constant interruption of all the things that were important to my 8-year-old mind. In fact, the only way to make the school day bearable was to cram every available moment with things that had nothing to do with school.
And I wasn’t alone. The hallways, the gymnasium, the playground, the cafeteria were all filled with people playing at the latest fad. These fads included yo-yos, tops, baseball cards, crystal radios, Davy Crockett coonskin caps, pea-shooters, and squirt guns. The school, on the other hand, employed an army of teachers and coaches and lunch ladies and hall monitors to confiscate our stuff and stifle our fun, which admittedly slowed us, but never stopped us.
I think it was right about the time that yo-yos started to lose popularity that one of the guys came to school with a blue coin folder. It was made of stiff cardboard, with kind of a leatherette finish and silver printing on the front. Inside were round slots with the dates and mint letters printed below them. He had already filled in about a dozen slots with pennies, because it was a penny folder. He said that once he found all the pennies and filled in all the slots, he could turn in the folder for $50 at the bank.
Fifty dollars! We were amazed. We asked him where he got the folder, and he said the corner Rexall store carried them. No surprise, there. They were the ones who carried the yo-yos with rhinestones on them, the wax lips, and the miniature squirt guns so small you could hide them in the palm of your hand. All through the week, the blue penny folders started to appear in my classmates’ hands. Whenever someone got change back from his milk money, a dozen heads would gather and peer over his shoulder to see the dates on the pennies he was checking.
It was a careful time, I remember. I didn’t dare spend a cent until I had scrutinized the date on it. Bus money, milk money, and candy money were examined with an obsessive intensity, while nickels, dimes and quarters were practically ignored. I hounded my parents to let me look through their change every night, and insisted on silver coins for lunch money, so I could get pennies back in change.
When I think about it, we must have been an irritating bunch, always fiddling with our pennies. The only redeeming factor was that we only had penny folders, Any other denomination wasn’t of much interest to us–even dollar bills weren’t as magnetic as a handful of pennies. Most of us filled in the easy spots of our blue folders pretty quickly, until the slots that remained were for the scarce coins. As we began to realize what an ordeal it would be to truly fill one of these folders, we started to get discouraged and became bored with the whole affair. But there was one kid who showed up at school with his folder completely filled. We were impressed as only third graders can be, and asked him how he did it. His dad helped. His dad had a coin collection. His dad already had most of the coins, if not all of them.
The kid was proud of his filled folder, but he had no stories to tell about collecting the coins. He didn’t even know which ones were the hard ones to find. He didn’t know about the zinc-coated steel pennies minted during World War II because of the wartime need for copper in ammunition and other military equipment. Or the 1909-S VDB penny designed by Victor David Brenner at the request of President Theodore Roosevelt, that is one of the most in-demand items among penny coin collectors. Even those of us whose folders were mostly empty knew about these things. So what did the coin collector’s son get out of the experience? I think he got out of it what he put into it. The only kid with a completed penny folder, and yet he hadn’t learned what the rest of us who hadn’t filled their folders learned.
I’m not 8 years old any more, and I no longer collect pennies, but I have developed an interest in genealogy which isn’t so very different from the fascination I used to feel for all those third-grade fads. And every time I see people who people who hire a genealogist to do the research on their entire ancestry, or the ones who grab the work already done by a relative and use it to fill out a decorative family tree to hang on the living room wall, or the home genealogists who never read the books dealing with the time and place where their ancestors lived, but instead flip straight to the index to look for family surnames, I remember the kid who had a fully-filled penny folder, but who had learned nothing about the pennies it held.
