Rick Curran got to know his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaddy by reading a Bible and doing a bit of research.
Curran studied his gene-alogy and discovered Joseph Pope was a tailor who called present-day Burlington County, N.J., home after leav-ing Linconshire, England, between 1670 and 1680.
Curran was thrilled to learn of his past and continued to pursue it with passion.
"Genealogy is an interesting part of our history, a personal

Grand Strand
Genealogy Club

- What I Family-history program for youth ages
7 to 16
- When I From 10a.m. to 2 p.m.Oct. 23
- Where I Chapin Memorial Library

part of our history," says Curran, vice president of the Grand Strand Genealogy Club, founded in 2002. "It's exciting. So once you find out what you want, you want to learn more. You don't usually find generals or famous people in your family. Mostly you find pleas-ant little people doing their job and bringing up their family."

"We move around so much that people become discon-nected," says Lee Oates, a club member who also is a reference assistant at Chapin Memorial Library. "So when you do all this searching and find out you have these family members, it brings you closer together."
Others say tracing ancestral lines to solve genealogical mysteries fills voids and makes some feel more whole.
Knowing who you are and where you're from, they say, mentally empowers folks and contributes to their overall well-being.
"Your future is dependent on your past," says Bunny Rodriguez, a local oral historian and Gullah-Geechee expert. "If you don't know your past, you can't move on the future. The past gives us the strength we have and the strength we need."
That's one of the reasons

The Sun News 
Myrtle Beach, S.C.
Sunday, September 26, 2004

l ived by swiping cotton swabs in their mouth and then mailing the sample to a lab. Four to six weeks later, they have an ancestral link never before known..
"There are a lot of gaps in people's family history, and people want to fill in the miss-ing blanks," Paige said.
Bert Ely, a geneticist at the University of South Carolina, said DNA certainly is a tool, although not the most import-ant one.
Family records, such as Curran's Bible, public records, census records and genealogy Web sites are among the vari-ous tools people use to patch together their past.
"The truth of the matter is that we all have lots of different ancestors," Ely said. "And they come from a lot of different places, and we come from lots of different lineages, no matter who you are."

> Contact JOHANNA D. WILSON at
jwilson@thesunnews.com or
626-0324.

Lee Oates (right) laughs as she and Gail Reynolds talk about genealogy research in the reference section of Chapin Memorial Library in Myrtle Beach. Oates is a reference assistant at the library. She says researching genealogy can help bring families closer together.

Kittles collaborated with historians, anthropologists arid linguists during his 10 years of research compiling the data-base.
African Ancestry Inc. has almost 2,000 clients, 95 percent of whom can learn in which parts of Africa their ancestors