Walter Cronkite , news commentator: Shortly after the turn of this century a woman who represented herself as a genealogist advertised for anyone bearing the name Cronk, Kronk, Kronkhite, Cronkhite, or several other variations to get in touch with her immediately. She claimed to have knowledge of a longlost will in the Netherlands leaving a considerable estate to the seventh son of the seventh son of one of the original Krankheidt settlers of Manhattan. The ensuing excitement culminated in my grandfather calling a meeting of something he formed called the “Krankheidt Heirs Association.” The convention was held in St. Joseph, Missouri, and, as family lore has it, was a rousing conclave of misfits until it disbanded in confusion when the “genealogist” skipped town with the accumulated registration fees.

Don E. Fehrenbacher , historian, Stanford University: Genealogy is primarily a matter of written records, but it can be enriched by memory and oral tradition if we only take some trouble at the right time. I spent many boyhood hours in the company of my maternal grandmother. As we sat in the shade of an old box elder tree, she sometimes talked about her childhood in southern Illinois. About her father, who left his farming and school-teaching and family of four to enlist in the 73rd Regiment of Illinois Volunteers and was killed at the Battle of Stones River in 1862. About her mother, who, after the war, tried to homestead in Kansas with her children and died there within a year. Grandmother remembered most vividly the orphans’ sad trip back to Illinois by covered wagon.

I listened politely enough but not with the passionate attention that I gave to the daily baseball broadcasts. I seldom asked questions; I made no notes. It was not until much later, when I began to teach college courses about the Civil War and the westward movement, that I fully realized how poignantly my own ancestry personified those two great chapters of nineteenth-century history and how much opportunity had slipped by me under the box elder tree.

William Manchester , author: My mother belonged to one of the First Families of Virginia; my father was a New England Yankee. Late in life his last surviving brother became interested in genealogy, digging in the records of, among other places, Little Compton, Rhode Island. He found that Thomas Manchester, the first of our small but plucky clan, arrived from Yorkshire, England, in 1638, and three generations later, on August 16, 1723, in Little Compton, Benjamin Manchester married Martha Seabury, a great-granddaughter of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens. That put my father’s family’s roots in Plymouth, where, I had believed, the colonies had started. I mentioned it to my mother. In a voice like a bearing about to go, she replied, “That was in 1620 . We were in Jamestown in 1608 .”

Wallace Stegner , novelist: In my