Finding a Needle in a Haystack

(or how I got started researching the Pamment family tree)

Back in the old days, before there was the Internet, Ancestry.com, and hundreds of thousands of genealogical references available at the click of a mouse – we had to do research the hard way. Yes, I remember spending countless hours at the public library going through the telephone directories of England, Scotland and Wales to develop a list of Pamments who I could contact with family history questionnaires. But I’m getting ahead of myself here – let’s start at the beginning.

In 1981 I was serving in the U.S. Navy and stationed in London, England. I was contacted by my younger brother Jeff with a request to find information on our 2x great-grandfather Nathaniel Pamment who was from England and born about 1818. Until that letter arrived, I had no knowledge of my family tree (maternal or paternal) beyond my grandparents – so this was news to me! At any rate, Jeff had discovered Nathaniel Pamment while beginning to research our mother’s family in Michigan and was hoping that somehow I could find out more about him.

Knowing nothing at all about genealogy, I purchased a couple of books in London on how to trace one’s family tree. Both mentioned the Society of Genealogists in London – so off I went one dreary afternoon to begin what has turned out to be a lifetime adventure.

In 1981 the SOG was located in an old building with, as I recall, 3 floors and a basement and lots of stairs. When I entered I picked up a guide to the Library’s resources and paid for about 5 hours of research time. Off I went to poke around and see what I could discover. After about an hour of wandering from floor to floor, room to room, I was no further along and returned to reception to enquire about how one should get started. When I explained to the receptionist that all I knew was his name – Nathaniel Pamment – and an estimated birth date, she stopped me. She said without a birth place, I was looking for a needle in a haystack and that I might as well give up. Well, having paid for 5 hours of research time, I was not about to throw that away, so I asked her for a suggestion as to how one might find instances of the surname associated with place names. She instructed me to head down to the basement to The Great Slip Room which contained file cabinets with surnames on slips of white paper with county references.

As luck would have it, I did discover a handful of slips for Pamment and a few slips had county references to Cambridgeshire, so I headed upstairs to the Cambridgeshire collection. There I was confronted with shelves of genealogical material – one hardly knew where to begin. I discovered that there were several transcribed and indexed parish registers from various towns and villages in Cambridgeshire, so I started pulling these off the shelves, one by one, and checking the index for Pamment. By the way, this is probably the time to mention that my needle was probably much easier to find than a SMITH needle – after all, Pamment is a somewhat unusual name. After about an hour, while I had discovered the Pamment surname in another parish (but no Nathaniel), I finally hit pay dirt – the mother lode. There were so many Pamments in the index of this register that I was overwhelmed!

As I turned the pages of the Isleham Parish Register index, I spotted a baptism for Nathaniel Pamment in 1817. While I was certainly excited to have found a Nathaniel Pamment, I knew that I did not have confirmation that this was MY Nathaniel. After all, there could have been fifty Nathaniel Pamments born in that time frame. But I did learn his father and mother’s name, and using the remaining hours of my research time, I began to pour over the entries and sketch out a family tree going back several generations.

It was only over the next several weeks that the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place as my brother Jeff discovered new information about Nathaniel and his father Preston in Michigan. We finally had our confirmation. We had somehow found our “needle in a haystack.” I started with a handful of individuals on the tree (about 30) and 25 years later there are over 2,800. I have had the opportunity to discover new cousins in England, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand and the USA and with their help the tree has grown. I am so glad I ignored that receptionist’s advice to “give up.” I would have missed all the fun and excitement of the chase!

by Steve Novak, April 2, 2006