Denmark, Prussia and medieval England are just a few of the countries where Durangoans have traced their roots. They’ve searched across the country and the globe while exploring every aspect of their genealogy.

“It’s like a treasure hunt,” said Jeannine Dobbins, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who is tracing her 36th line back to an ancestor who contributed to the American side during the War for Independence. “This will be my first female ‘patriot.’”

Members of the Daughters of the American Revolution probably have been doing it the longest – 120 years since the organization’s founding in 1890 – but they have been joined by millions of Americans who are trying to learn more about themselves and their ancestry. More than 10 years ago, Time Magazine reported that genealogy was one of the four most popular hobbies on the Internet, and it has exploded since then.

“It’s historical research but your own history,” Lynn Constan, current regent of the Sarah Platt Decker Chapter of the DAR, said. “It turns almost into an addiction.”

Constan spent eight days in October in Missouri with a sixth cousin whom she discovered on a genealogy message board.

“She knew who her ancestor was, and I knew who mine was,” Constan said. “Her father’s DNA and my brother’s DNA were a perfect match.”

Julie Pickett understands how addictive learning about one’s family can be.

“I just wanted to know,” she said. “I was just dabbling at first. I didn’t get serious until about three years ago. I just like visualizing these ancestors’ daily lives, wondering why did they transmigrate from one place to another?”

Deciphering clues

When Pickett says she’s serious, she means it. She’s given up amenities like cable TV to pay for her genealogy work and spends three to four hours a day on her computer doing research. She has created a family tree on the website ancestry.com that includes 3,800 people and goes back to the 1600s.

“I’m very fluent in Google,” Pickett said, referring to the Internet search engine. “If they offered a degree in Google, I’d have it.”

When she’s not working on projects like mapping and researching the Animas City Cemetery, she volunteers as a resource for people looking for local information at www.raogk.org – random acts of genealogical kindness – and www.findagrave.org.

One branch of Pickett’s family immigrated to the U.S. from Denmark, and parish records from across the Scandinavian country are online going back to the 1600s.

“I come from very poor stock in Denmark,” she said. “My great-great-grandmother was orphaned and lived in a poor house. The next thing we knew was that she and her sister were in the U.S. We don’t know how they got here or who sponsored them, but there they are.”

While Pickett doesn’t speak Danish, she found a website that shows handwriting samples – old-fashioned penmanship can be difficult to decipher – and translations of common genealogical terms in a number of languages. As a last resort, there’s an online forum where Danish volunteers will translate the hard-to-understand documents.

“I have hundreds and hundreds of bookmarks,” Pickett said about her computer, “folders for newspapers, cemetery resources, all resources for every state.”

Kathy Szelag, who puts in about 25 hours a week volunteering for the Animas Museum, including helping people with genealogy quests, has worked with Pickett on several projects.

“She has an attention to detail that’s unbelievable,” Szelag said.

Szelag got started in the genealogy field as an act of kindness.

“I went on to the La Plata County message board on ancestry.com and saw all these people asking Henry Ninde to help them with local questions,” she said about the avid amateur historian who died in 2006.

She began doing the research herself. Her only disappointment is that she can’t investigate her own family’s history.

“My sister’s been doing that for 20 years,” she said. “There’s nothing left for me to do.”

Where to start?

“Start with what you know – with your parents, grandparents and so on,” Pickett said, “Beyond that, I don’t think there’s any one way to approach it.”

Documentation is important.

“Don’t assume,” Pickett said. “Even older books of family generations, they’re a great place to start, but they need documentation.”

Pickett learned that the hard way.

“My father thought that his grandfather was the only one from his family who came to America from Prussia,” she said. “I thought I’d have to find them in Germany, but it turns out all of them came to the Detroit area.”

Constan also has found that some sources of information can be apocryphal.

“Sometimes you see lines that are crazy, like women giving birth at 75,” she said.

The Daughters of the American Revolution has strict documentation requirements to go with its applications and 33 genealogists on staff at the national headquarters to review them, averaging two hours to verify an application.

In addition to the standard documents – birth, marriage and death certificates – wills, deeds, pictures of tombstones, census records, the Social Security Death Index and pensions from wars beginning with the Civil War can all provide information to fill in a family tree. Old newspapers, particularly obituaries, are an invaluable resource.

Pickett is looking forward to 2012, when the U.S. government will release the details of the 1940 census. Congress passed a law to withhold census information for 72 years after it is collected to protect peoples’ privacy. She hopes it will help her find descendants of those great-aunts and uncles who immigrated to the U.S. from Prussia and settled in the Detroit area.

Genealogists in 2082 won’t learn much from the 2010 census.

“This year’s census was so disappointing,” Constan said, “because they didn’t ask any real questions.”

Perhaps the biggest frustration is trying to find out women’s first names when they were Mrs. John Smith or the daughter or widow of Mr. John Smith.

“When I die, I’m going to have a few things to say to some people (in the afterlife),” Dobbins said. “I have a will that says ‘to my two daughters.’ You couldn’t write their names down?”

Where it can lead

“Some people begin collecting lineage societies,” Dobbins said. “One woman in Colorado is descended from a witch, another from a pirate, and there are societies for both. I qualify for the Magna Carta Dames and Barons through Henry Corbin, who was in the Virginia House of Burgesses. That research was already done by someone else.”

Dobbins may not have the most lines back to patriots in the Daughters of the American Revolution, but she’s up there.

“There’s a woman in D.C. who has 48,” she said. “I saw a woman with one bar, but it was one of the best. She was descended from Benjamin Franklin.”

Interestingly, in Daughters of the American Revolution terms, George Washington isn’t technically a “patriot” because he didn’t have children. Martha Washington, however, is, because she had children from her first marriage.

Other people’s research can shorten a project immensely.

“I had some second cousin who had already proved down to my great-grandfather,” Constan said. “So I only had to prove my genealogy back to him.”

People who haven’t been bitten by the genealogy bug may have a hard time understanding the obsession.

“A lot of people don’t get it when I get really excited because I found out something cool,” Pickett said. “But my husband’s really supportive. He walks around cemeteries with me a lot.”

abutler@durango herald.com