GENEALOGY WITH A PURPOSE
Solving the Mystery of Sophia Krapp — The Truth Is Out There
When tantalizing clues to an ancestor’s life unsettle family history.
I carry a secret envy of those who can look up an ancestor and find a complete biography or a handwritten diary. The one time I had luck with abundant public documentation on an ancestor, it happened to involve Italian gangster crime in Chicago. While that was a dramatic discovery, it wasn’t exactly the neat-and-tidy family tree addition that I was looking for. Instead, my years of genealogical research typically has me sifting through misspellings and confusing names, leaving me to grasp for straws and wonder, “Do I even have the right person?”
Like many who’ve been bitten by the family history bug, I know I’m not alone. We get a handful of paper clues, and if we’re lucky, we might get some oral history (which often can’t be proven) that adds color to a person’s life story. For example, how my great-grandmother Sophia supposedly saw a UFO when she was a girl — in the 1880s — before planes or weather balloons even existed. Or that she had a near-death experience (NDE) as a young adult — complete with the tunnel-of-light-talk-to-God thing, during which she learned her “work wasn’t done.”
