BROOKINGS – After 40 years of tracing family roots, Fayriene (Yule) Schafer, 74, of White, is the only remaining charter member of the Brookings Area Genealogical Society. She says the times have been changing – for the better, at least when it comes to researching family histories.
Honored at the society’s annual meeting and anniversary gathering at the Brookings Public Library on April 29, Schafer reminisced about how researching family histories has changed.
“At the beginning, there were no computers. All correspondence was done by writing letters and then waiting impatiently for the answers. Everyone was equal in this and so when you had a problem you took it to the monthly meeting and usually there was someone there who could help you.”
Driving Schafer’s interest in Brookings’ area genealogy were her local ties to the community. Born in the Brookings hospital, she spent most of her life in White, except for a short time working as a nanny in Prescott, Ariz., and later in Sioux Falls.
After two years in Sioux Falls, she came back in 1974. She raised her two boys until they graduated from high school in White.
Meanwhile, she worked at a local restaurant, at the mushroom factory and at the White Leader newspaper as a copy editor. It later became the Tri-City Star, where she stayed until she retired in 2009.
Collecting material on her own family
Looking back to 1977, Schafer recalled how about nine people started the Brookings Area Genealogical Society in the old 4-H building, now the Brookings Arts Council.
“Somebody here in Brookings decided that we should start a genealogy society; I can’t tell you who. They put a notice in the paper and I went.”
She said she had always been interested in genealogy.
“I had started working and collecting stuff on my own family before (the society) started.” And her ties to the area were strong.
Her parents are Don Yule and Berda (Breault) Yule. Her father was a city engineer in Brookings; her mom was a homemaker in White, where Fayriene graduated from high school. Two sons both live in Sioux Falls, and she has two grandchildren. Her first husband died and she remarried Ed Schafer, who worked at SDSU for many years. He had five children.
“I have a lot of great-grandchildren,” she said. “Now there are some great-greats coming up out of his family.”
Schafer doesn’t see much interest in genealogy in upcoming and newer generations.
“I don’t understand why,” she said. “Because when you ask them, there’s no interest. I don’t know how old they have to become before they begin thinking about this.
But sometimes an interest in genealogy does come later in life: “Because they have children, and they want to have some background to tell these children.”
However, she noted that as members of the society die, there aren’t new members coming in and keeping their numbers steady.
“There’s no more joining.”
Schafer has been active at both a personal level for the genealogy of her own family and on a larger scale for this part of South Dakota. She has compiled four history books of her family and assisted with four additional family books.
For her husband’s family, she has traced his Schafer ancestry back to the 1500s.
“I finished his. I was in correspondence with a man in Markgroningen, Germany. He researched in Germany for me and I researched in South Dakota for him. That’s how I got that information, way back then,” Schafer said.
“I went back and did some German history of how they lived there, how their houses were laid down and how their churches were. If a family would read that, they would understand where their forbears came from.”
She has shared her own genealogy with her own children; they have been given books that trace their ancestry.
She added that her husband’s Schafer family roots in America go back to 1907.
As to her own forebearers, Schafer traces her maternal grandfather to Canada and her paternal grandfather to Scotland.
“My uncle did that book and I helped him with it, only he did most of the work on it.”
‘You wrote letters’
For all the ancestral information that has found its way into her genealogical volumes, Schafer relies on one key approach that has many avenues.
“Research,” she said. “Anything and everything. Back in those days when I started, you never had computers. You couldn’t go on to Ancestry.com and other places to pick this stuff up.
“So you wrote letters. You got a person’s name and you wrote a letter to them asking if they would give you information about their family. And that’s how we did a lot of it back then. When the computers came in it was much easier.”
Today websites like Ancestry.com, which come with a cost, allow any interested person a place to do some genealogy research. While websites can be helpful to genealogists, there is much that can be learned from local societies
“A lot of people think that they can find everything they need online,” Schafer said. “You can find a lot of stuff that way, but there’s a lot to be learned from a local society. And the local societies are preserving our heritage. We’re doing a lot to collect and organize and make retrieval available.”
But that ease of research and collection of data isn’t enticing younger people to join genealogy societies.
Schafer said that when BAGS started 40 years, it had about 52 members. And at one time in the early days of the society, membership peaked at 70-plus. Today BAGS has 21 members.
Contact John Kubal at jkubal@brookingsregister.com.
