About

Why Polynose?

What’s the story behind the name Polynose? In fact you might even wonder what is a “Polynose”?. Well when I was a young kid, my grandfather on my Mom’s side had a massive Maple tree in front of his apartment building. Each spring the tree would shed these little propeller type things which would fall from great heights and land on the ground under and further away from the tree. When I asked my grandfather what they were, he said they are Polynoses. He would pick them off the ground, crack them in half and split the little bulbous portion with his thumbnail. The inside was sticky and he would then take the split portion and press it on our noses. By now you are probably wondering what the heck that has to do with genealogy. Wellll, these Polynoses (also called helicopters and whirligigs), officially known as samaras, are actually the fruit of the tree (aka potential descendants). The samara is actually aerodynamically designed by nature to provide lift through the propeller type structure to jettison it as far away as possible from the canopy of its parent tree. This action gives the seed inside the greatest opportunity to get out into the sunlight in hopes of growing a new tree…with new branches of its own.

My own family story is much like these Polynoses. My ancestors spread out all over the globe for many reasons; some due to religious persecution, some career opportunities, and many others for a better opportunity for the next generation to have success. This makes researching the family history much more interesting but at the same time much more difficult due to foreign languages, access to records, and discerning fact from fiction. I have had incredible success in my approaches and hope to share them with others.

When I started working on my own family tree in the 1990’s (pre-www) it was very hard work and you really had to Love it. Weekends spent at the LDS Family History Centers in dark rooms looking through microfilm for your ancestor was the norm, pre-kids of course. A clue found would lead to another piece of information required which meant ordering another film from Salt Lake City and waiting for its arrival. It meant joining Family History Societies in far-off places just to access their microfiche of church records. It was Hard Yards as my Aussie friends like to say! But it was still addictive.

Fast forward to today, using one of the myriad family tree sites, people can enter in a few names of grandparents or great-grandparents and their birth or death dates and all of sudden leaves are waving and you are going back in time, generation after generation. Awesome right? You may even come away with some wonderful photos, a few birth certificates and possibly a Royal Family line or two (I’m not kidding). For sure you will have a lot of names in boxes that form a tree of some sort. If you are lucky the tree is all gnarly with “crooked branches” and “Polynoses” floating through the wind to land in places far from your hometown.

You start talking to family, eyes start glazing over annndddd…yup You Have Lost Them! Now what?! You see the tree is just the start. It’s your roots! However, it’s the true (and sometimes inaccurate) stories about those names that makes their lives more interesting. Why did your ancestors move? What did your ancestors do for a living and do those jobs even exist any longer? Were they involved in the community? Did they do something special? Were they leaders or just plain hard workers that persevered through tough times? You have now uncovered the hard part, finding out those stories. That’s where Polynose comes in. Through my blogs and experience I hope to show examples of how you can find the color in your family’s history that makes it much richer. And if inspiration isn’t enough, I can help you break through those brick walls and find the information you are looking for to turn your tree into a FAMILY HISTORY that is worthy of being passed down from generation to generation.

Bob Power is a Professional Genealogist with 25+ years experience building Family Histories of families spread across the globe. He has travelled the world with his family, visiting 5 of the 7 continents. South America and Antartica are next on the list. I hope you enjoy my Blog and please don’t hesitate to reach out if you are looking for some specific help. I’d be happy to help you out!