- My mother used to tell me, "Molly, don't forget your kinfolks."

And she came up with a list one day that one of her cousins had put together.

"Now, Molly, here's your kinfolks.

You need to remember who they are."

"Mom, I don't give a hoot."

Well, after a time passed, and people began to die off, I began to think, "Oh, where are those kinfolks?

Who are they?

Where did I come from?

How do I find all of this?"

So I began to do a little search.

- [Narrator] For eight seasons, the hit PBS series Finding Your Roots has taken millions of viewers on a journey of discovery.

Host Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his research team have delivered their trademark books of life chronicling lost histories of well-known guests.

Now Panhandle PBS adds to the tradition.

Join us as Amarillo genealogists stitch together the past from the paper trail their ancestors left behind.

Follow along as they share their discoveries, and help you learn how to find your roots.

- As a kid, I was, I guess, nosy, and I've been doing serious research since I was 13 years old, but it started by listening to my mama talk.

- [Narrator] Here's a tip, always listen for family stories.

- I think I was born wondering what my ancestors did.

I've traveled many places of where they were, and walked in their steps.

And my mother, my grandfather, and everybody have always told stories about what the family did, and where they were at the time of the Revolution, and where they were as they moved westward.

- I started asking questions of my mom.

Well, all my grandparents were gone, so I didn't have grandparents go to their house like a lot of my friends did, so I wanted to know what my grandmother was like.

Did I look like her?

What did she cook?

You know, everything that a kid might ask about a grandparent they didn't have, those were my very first questions.

I learned a lot of things about myself.

I learned that I looked very much like my grandmother.

My mother happened have her corset and one of her old raggedy, thin dresses.

I would call them dirt farmers in our parlance today.

She was a good cook.

I am a good cook, and an even better eater, so I would tell you that I learned that I was very much like Mary Etta Stevens.

As a kid, I imagined the stories until I got my mother to tell me how it really was in Turkey, Texas - [Narrator] Tip, ask questions and take detailed notes.

- First thing you need to know is who your parents are, and then just start continually going back.

Who were grandparents?

Where did they live?

Where were they born?

And various things like that.

- [Narrator] Collect your ancestors' birth and death dates and locations, as well as the places they lived.

You can find generations of history in family Bibles.

Publishers in the 17 and 1800s printed and sold large Bibles with blank pages for recording the birth, death, and marriage information of a family.

- Looking at census tells you many things, but you still have to go into Bible records, books, and research material.

- I chose today to talk about my mother's line, and she was a Martin, and so she said Grandmother had a Bible that was really old.

This Bible goes back, very far back.

It's, well, it's in the 1800s.

You know, they used Bibles to keep records in back then.

Some of it was written in pencil, some in ink, some in blue ink, some black ink.

- [Narrator] If all the Bible entries look like the work of one hand, they may not have been recorded at the time of the events.

Verify the information you see with other records.

- Here, it tells that somebody moved from, they went to Mineral, Texas, and it just tells so, and somebody married so and so, or he got sick in a certain place, and they got ready to move somewhere, but then the history was the ancestors.

- You start with what you have at home.

It might be the family Bible.

It might be an old photograph that's laying around.

Hopefully, you can figure out who it is.

Most of the time, these really old ones, you don't know 'em all.

But you put the story together by gathering visuals, putting more facts with it, substantiating.

One big thing I would tell people about genealogy is don't be happy with one piece of proof.

If at all possible, get more than one piece of substantiating proof for that fact you think you've got, because just think about it.

If you get it wrong with, let's say, Great Grandma, if you got it wrong, and she's the wrong Great Grandma, everybody prior to her is exponentially wrong, and it jumps up into the hundreds real quick - [Narrator] Always look for more than one source of proof for the facts in your research.

- My mother's family, I have discovered came all the way from Spain, related to the king of Spain, went to the Canary Islands, came down to Veracruz, Mexico, and then up through that to Brownsville, Texas is where my mother grew up.

So it is been fascinating, and I know some Spanish, and so I can look at the papers that I find, the baptisms, the marriages, certificates, and I know what they mean, but there are also so many places that can translate things like that from another language.

- [Narrator] Church records can be good resources for providing dates and places of births, marriages, and deaths, as well as the identity and relationships of family members.

They are especially important for researching relatives who lived before governments began keeping such data.

- So I have relatives that fought with Santa Anna at the Alamo.

I also discovered that I have relatives that fought on both sides of the Battle at San Jacinto.

And so, you know, things like that are interesting for me to pass down to my children so that, hopefully, they'll get interested in genealogy too.

- [Narrator] Military records can give you information such as a family member's rank and dates and locations of service, plus other biographical details.

- I am a reference librarian at the Amarillo Public Library, but my specialty here is genealogy.

So this is what actually got me the job here at the library were these books.

I walked in with proof of what I wanted.

I don't have a masters of library science.

My masters is in photography from Georgia Southern University when I taught at my, both my alma maters for a while.

- [Narrator] As part of her master's degree program, Wallace had to create a photography show and write a book.

She designed the book, and shot and edited each photograph.

- And I was required to take out every highline, high wire, trash can, car, in modern downtown Savannah, many, many hundreds of hours to produce the look.

Here I am walking through history, loving every second of it.

I don't exactly call myself a genealogist like I do today.

For sure I've earned it now.

- [Narrator] Wallace and co-author Barry Sheehy carried out the research.

- So many research stories, and then no matter where you look in the book, at this point, we were doing about 300 historic structures in Savannah, Georgia.

- [Narrator] But their editor suggested one chapter deserved to be its own book.

- So as you can see by the title here, this is about slavery in Savannah.

This one was interesting, because the William Wright slave ledger.

I had looked for six years for this ledger.

It was supposed to be at the Savannah Public Library.

We tore that library apart, me and my friends, and one of them's a retired librarian from there, and Sharon and I looked and we looked, but I found it by accident, and this is how nerdy I am.

I'm not really this nerdy, guys.

I was reading an index for entertainment one night.

It was the Georgia Historical, comes out with a quarterly, and I was reading the index.

What kind of person does that?

Don't I have something better to do?

Well, it got me the William Wright slave ledger, and I called my co-writer.

I think Barry, I know he was in Canada.

I'm not sure if he was in Nova Scotia where he lives now, but I called him at midnight to tell him we had the William Wright slave ledger.

It cost us a few friends, and made us a lot more.

This ledger tells the names of old Savannah families who were purchasing slaves, how much they paid for them, so a lot of good history, fun times, fantastic research.

- [Narrator] For many, one goal of genealogy is membership in Daughters of the American Revolution, or its counterpart, Sons of the American Revolution.

Members are women or men who have been able to document that they are descendants of a patriot of the American Revolution.

Two DAR chapters operate in Amarillo, the Esther McCrory chapter, organized in 1911, and the Molly Goodnight chapter, which was formed in 1925.

- My family, my mother and my grandmother have proven 35 ancestors who fought in the American Revolution, and so either patriots who were just supporting the war, or actual soldiers.

Each one of these bars indicate the soldier or patriot it that I went in under, 'cause you have to prove every line back to the American Revolution, both male and female line, names and things from documents, wills, census records after 1850, because census before 1850 had, it only gave the man's name.

- [Narrator] US census documents from 1790 through 1840 generally name only the head of household, but they do report the age of each household member.

- I worked for 10 years on my mother's side of the family, the McClungs, and the Mayfields, and I've got the notebooks to prove I've done the work.

All I ended with was tea-drinking loyalist, and I wanted in DAR, Daughters of the American Revolution so bad with some of my friends, so I worked and worked, and got nowhere, and I'm in the best place for research right here in this library.

- [Narrator] Wallace credits Maples and a friend at the national level of DAR for helping her find a patriot on her father's side of the family.

They researched a last name in her family tree that she hadn't thought to pursue.

- So I look up Wofford, and all I get is this, W O F F O R D English variant of W O L F O R D. That means gotta turn a page or two to get to more than not even a full sentence, where I learn that W O L F O R D, which mine is a variant of, is 100% habitational name.

- [Narrator] A habitation name is derived from the name of a place where an ancestor once lived.

Descriptive names are drawn from nicknames an ancestor may have had, and occupational names referred to names related to an ancestor's work.

- The interesting part is everybody did something different, and it's interesting to find that, and what they did, where they lived, and how they lived.

- All I learned by looking at this is confirmation.

Old English goes way back, and it's a habitation name right smack in the middle of England, as far as the Wolfords were concerned.

So I have all kinds of good resources.

This is nothing.

This is just where you get warmed up.

- [Narrator] Senora Fansler's quest for a place in DAR started with her grandfather's mother, Laura Germany.

- So I started going back and finding as much as I could about Laura Germany.

Lo and behold, somebody else, and I still don't know who, they had gone ahead and found that information.

So that took care of those two generations, and here is my patriot, Irish John Germany, who was born in 1717 in Ireland.

Okay, he was one of the Sons of Liberty.

- [Narrator] Sometimes the work of other researchers will link up with yours, providing you with missing information about a bloodline.

- And I traced back, and he was born in Cavan, Ireland.

This was some land that was given to him from President John Quincy Adams, which his signature is right here.

- [Narrator] Military records might include bounty land warrant application files, related to claims based on wartime service between 1775 and March 3rd, 1855.

And if your ancestor served in the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, early American Indian Wars, or the Mexican War, a military record search might reveal even more biographical details.

- So this is from a series of books.

This one is Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives, volume three.

Sounds prestigious, doesn't it?

Well, it was great news for me, because there is a whole great big long paragraph, extends onto the next page, and sorry, and all the way down about what turned out to be Colonel Wolford, Colonel William David Hollingsworth Wolford, slave owner of Wolford's Fort and Settlement.

And he really ranges from middle Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, before he works into Cherokee Territory, and the property he's granted for his service is actually on the border, and it's contested.

So when I say Wolford's Fort and Settlement, please know that they're here to fight the Indians.

They're here to round up the Cherokee and the Creek.

I don't have a photograph of him, can't tell you what he looked like, but I have a good, real good image of, he started an iron works company.

I can tell you what land he owned in what turned out to be what counties, the names have changed over time.

I can tell you so much about a man I never even thought I would need to get something that I wanted.

Well, photography was invented in 1826 in France.

The tintype started being mass produced in the states, 1850 1860s, certainly during the Civil War, so these are roughly 150-ish years old already, meaning the container that they're in is about 150 years old.

Tintypes have no tin in them whatsoever.

They, at the time, were thin, as you can see, very thin iron plates, and they're more appropriately called a ferrotype, but you can tell by looking at any photograph, look at the hairstyle, the bow tie, the way the sleeves are on the men and women's jacket, the jewelry that they wear, everything about that picture is a hint for that story that I'm fleshing out.

- [Narrator] Treat photographs like documents.

Examine the fashions, props, backgrounds, and ownership history of photos for clues.

- These were in my category of dirt farmers.

They must have been able to afford a ferrotype, which wasn't expensive by today's standards.

They even bought the album that's in it, but consider this.

The way these people are dressed is going to be fairly different from the way this set of people is dressed, which they're obviously more wealthy, but they still wanted to preserve some bit of history themselves.

So they might not be tracing genealogy the way I am, but they sort of were, because they're in this album in the order that they happened.

So this tells me something very important about the men, women, and children in these albums, even if I don't know their names - [Narrator] Here are five types of 19th century photos you might run across in your research.

Daguerreotypes are images on silvered copper plates that were used from 1839 to the early 1860s.

They are very reflective, and can look like a mirror when turned at certain angles.

Ambrotypes are images created on glass that were used for about 10 years starting in the mid 1850s.

They often came in small, hinged cases.

Popular from 1856 into the 1890s, tintypes actually contain no tin.

They are images printed on iron plates.

Cartes des Visites, known as the first pocket photos, were introduced in the 1850s.

They are small images mounted on thick cardboard.

Whites and highlighted areas in the photos usually have a noticeable yellow or yellowish brown stain.

And cabinet cards, introduced in the 1860s are similar, but larger, possibly with a photographer stamp on the reverse side.

- This particular camera was my grandmother Conrad's camera.

It was bought in 1913, and had traveled with her on many trips.

The trip picture I'm showing you was my mother in the foreground, and they had traveled to California by way of Denver, Arizona into California, in 1924, when it was a one lane road between here and there.

This is the camera that she used, and continued taking pictures until in the '50s.

It's a Kodak, and it's one of the streamlined ones, with more technical material in it than the ones before.

That was my mother's side, and this was on my father's side.

So they both had cameras, and they both wanted to record the history of the family.

This camera is a box camera.

Came out in 1900s early, and this one was probably bought several years after that.

But my grandmother took pictures at functions of family, and we have boxes of pictures on both sides of the family.

This is my father, Glen Maples, and my sister in this picture, was taken probably around 1943.

She was looking and taking pictures of everything we were doing.

- This is a scrap book that was kept by my grandfather on my father's side, William Malva Stidham.

He was born in 1882 in Iowa.

He collected Christmas cards, greeting cards, pamphlets that were given out to people, and then they moved to Fort Worth.

He was raised in Fort Worth until high school.

I've got his report cards from Fort Worth.

Alex Hog was the superintendent of schools there, and he's known now as the father of education in Fort Worth.

But this is when he was nine or 10 years old.

He's got a lot of political cartoons in here, and drawings of the battles, or what was going on in the politics behind the Spanish Civil War, and it only lasted for a few months.

Right after that, we noticed that in this scrapbook, he's moved from prints and drawings to photographs.

And photography was not made popular until 1900 when Eastman Kodak came out with the Brownie and the film strip.

Here's a picture of the first automobile that he encountered, or be knowledgeable about.

The thing that amazes me, and I think this is 1904, 1905, two of these are electric cars.

In about 1904, we see baseball cards.

And baseball cards, they were given in cigarettes to stiffen the package, where they wouldn't crush the cigarettes.

He graduated from high school in Denver, and we saw his interest in photographing, or getting photographs of the wild, especially of Colorado in its early stay ages in the early 1910s.

And the thing that amazes me about this scrap book is that it tells a story of him growing up, and the country growing up.

- [Narrator] What has genealogy given you?

- Oh, history, history, things I wouldn't have known before that.

My grandfather, great-grandfather worked, fought in the Civil War.

Found out that he was an assistant to the doctor in the Civil War, that they came over on ships, and that they had, they were pioneers when Oklahoma was Indian territory.

It was just amazing.

- Always, you're gonna have good new, fresh questions.

The harder you dig, the more you uncover, the more you want to know, that you're still seeking answers to.

- It's part of the history of the country, and a history of the world, really, because many of my ancestors came from Europe prior to the American Revolution.

I have some that have come the 1700s, and we've proven them back to the Magna Carta in 1215.

You're following a trail of where they lived, where they went to, and when they came to the country, and they all just kept moving west.

- I am the oldest of the grandchildren.

Both sets of grandparents had already passed away when I was born.

It gives me a sense of who I am, and where I fit into history, where I fit into the history of Texas, and just an appreciation for things that I learned about history in school.

You know, you read things in books, and you see the pictures, and you go, "Oh, well, that's nice.

Oh, well, they fought a war."

But when it's personal to you, it means so much more, and that's what genealogy does for me, gives me a sense of who I am, really.

- [Narrator] Like Elaine and David, most of us have cherished family heirlooms, but these treasures passed from generation to generation don't come alive unless their stories are told.

So Panhandle PBS is introducing Shadowbox Stories, a new digital series.

Think Finding Your Roots meets Antiques Road Show.

Here's a sneak peek.

- This is, I don't know if it truly is a Tom Mix doll, but when I was a little girl, my uncle played with his Tom Mix doll all the time.

He was about nine years older than I.

His full name was Lowell Macy Stark, and he was born a twin to his sister, Lillian Maxy Stark.

Tom Mix was the original cowboy, and he made hundreds of films.

They were silent films, hundreds the films through the 1920s.

My grandmother made the original clothes, and that's what he's dressed in.

He had this little gun here on the side, and I looked at Tom Mix pictures.

I never saw him wear a hat like this, but this is probably the only kind of hat my grandmother could make.

So he just loved the doll.

He was a great guy to me as I was growing up, a very attentive uncle, but he was never a very well person, and couldn't find out exactly what was wrong with him.

He just didn't feel well, but in fact, he actually did die when he was 32.

So that's his story, and this is his doll.

- [Narrator] You'll find Shadowbox Stories this spring on the Panhandle PBS website, and the station's social media channels.

(dramatic music)