Great-Great-Grandpa Joe

The goal sounds simple: Identify my Rogers native soil in the Old Country, whatever Old Country that might be, and visit it for a 70th birthday coming-home celebration.

Provided, of course, I make it to 70.

I have about three years to track my roots and make that identification. After several years of sporadic efforts, the prospects are not looking good.

The research has been educational, though, in the sense that it has provided me with a bounty of information on how to get nowhere, slowly. With that in mind, I offer the following hints for anyone of immigrant background considering a similar quest:

Don’t come from early settlers. Tradition argues that the earliest arrivals provide the most social status. On the Mayflower, say.

But if your ancestors were from less distinguished stock, it can make for an arduous and tangled-roots search.

Better to be first- or second-generation Americans. With family ties relatively fresh, you’d probably reap the bonus of having cousins Over There who could be baited into welcoming you back for a room-and-board visit.

Failing that...

Narrow your family parameters. By the time you go back five generations, there are 32 people who had a fundamental role in your existence (most of whom, on my tree, are as yet unknown). Every previous generation further doubles the number, with every single one of them providing a potential rabbit hole of frustration.

I decided to limit my search to the patriarchal line – that is to say, male Rogerses of direct descent. Which is fine, except you should ...

Have a family with unusual names. I would have thought Rogers would be obscure enough, ranking a measly No. 66 among surnames in the most recent U.S. census. But Rogerses (and their misspelled variant Rodgerses) sprang up like veritable toadstools in the historical landscape from Virginia to Mississippi and all points in between.

Further complicating that, they all seemed to show a distinct lack of imagination with first names. So far, starting with me, my direct male ancestors have been named Joe, Lewis, Joe, Lewis and Joe.

You’d think the previous one might have been a Lewis. Apparently not.

Be famous. Even mildly. ?The TV shows “Finding Your Roots” and “Who Do You Think You Are” are itching to trace the family histories of celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker or Dr. Oz, which somehow always manage to be inspiring, heart-warming or revelatory. Or all three. (Your great-grandaunt invented Bisquick! Einstein was your cousin!)

Not at all famous? Sorry. So ...

Join an online genealogy site. I am a member of three. Some are free, some have relatively nominal costs. They can serve up access to millions of records like wills, deeds, lawsuits, censuses and family memoirs that can keep you busy for hours on end. The net result of a day’s excavation might be the discovery that a distant relative sold a cow to a neighbor in 1826.

But the sites also provide a number of already completed family trees done by other members, one or more of which may include some of your folks. Or all of them, if you ...

Have a family member who’s already done all the work. This is what I keep hoping for. Unfortunately, no one so far has been any better at Rogers research than I am. And sometimes, they’re worse. So...

Don’t trust other people’s research. You’d be surprised how willing some people are to disregard inconvenient facts just to bridge a gap in their lineage. For example, claiming a father-son relationship despite the clear evidence that said father died well before the supposed son came into existence. So you should ...

Expect disappointment. As a general rule, whatever looks like a breakthrough today looks like a waste of time tomorrow.

Prepare to be sidetracked. No matter how you try to focus on the matter at hand, it will sometimes be impossible to resist chasing an entertaining factoid.

Just the other day, for example, while on the trail of a potentially pertinent Rogers, I came across one named Meshack. Who was the son – and this is what I mean by impossible to resist – of a Shadrack Rogers.

All of which led me to a third, in whom the biblical trio was completed: Shadrack Meshack Abednego Rogers. No relation, but hey. You take your smiles where you can.

Take a DNA test. Shoot, I’ve taken two. So far, they have served to confirm chiefly that none of my forebears had to learn a new language when they came to this country.

If push comes to shove, and I start running out of time, I could modify my search parameters and include the Fitzgerald line on my mother’s side.

Temptation already exists. Existing trees on one of the genealogy sites track my Fitzgeralds back to County Galway. Or perhaps County Kerry. Or County Cork. Or...

Pretty cool.

So far on the Rogers line, the Old Country is Wilcox County, Alabama. According to The Encyclopedia of Alabama, it “is home to the nationally renowned Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective? and the? ?Freedom Quilting Bee?.”

No offense, Alabama. But I’m hoping for someplace a little more fish and chips than chicken and dumplings.

Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville. He can be reached at [email protected].