Family History

Bill Walker's mother lived to 101, his Uncle Rufus to 102. "I rather expected to live a long life," says the 89-year-old Long Beach, Calif., resident. "I think it gave me a different view of aging, compared to some friends who had family members die in their 50s and 60s. They're looking for the grim reaper every day." Harriet Bennish, 56, has lived with no such easy assumption. She feels she dodged an early bullet -- an infected cyst, discovered shortly after her first pregnancy, that required the removal of a kidney.

It started with an advertisement that came in the mail last summer, trying to sell the Parrish family of Woodlawn a new manual on genealogical research.John Parrish, 50, hadn't thought about researching his family history. He didn't even know who his great-grandfather was and had never bothered to find out. But the ad made him curious.And so began an odyssey of self-discovery that has brought him and his brother William to the Maryland Hall of Records in Annapolis every Saturday since September.

A century ago, the Page family settled in Catonsville, founded a church and operated the neighborhood grocery out of the front rooms of a home on Winters Lane. Still, the family's 99-year-old matriarch, Eva Page Brooks - whose living room was once that family store - could not trace its history back more than a few generations. But thanks to the Internet and a DNA sample, the Catonsville clan has become the first black family - and the first Baltimoreans - to verify their descent from two 17th- and 18th-century settlers of Virginia and become members of a group dedicated to their legacy, the Page-Nelson Society.

A peer of the British realm travels to Harford County tomorrow to talk a little history, share a spot of tea and show off replicas of furnishings from Althorp, his 500-acre estate in Northhamptonshire. Charles Edward Maurice Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer and maternal uncle of the heir to England's throne, will hold court at Jarrettsville Furniture, where he will promote a line of high-end furniture that he helped design. The earl's visit will include a receiving line that meanders through rooms filled with precise reproductions patterned after furnishings of the earl's 165-room ancestral home, and an English tea. Spencer makes at least one trip annually to the former colonies to oversee design and production of the Althorp line and decided to add the Jarrettsville visit to his itinerary, said Alan Schrum, the furniture company's director of marketing.

LIKE MANY families, mine sometimes exaggerates the accomplishments of our ancestors. All of my Irish relatives, for example, claim to be descended from "Celtic ruling clans." None ever seems to hail from a "losing clan." On the German side of the tribe, the name Kasper is an indication, or so I have been told, that we are kin to kings. Another possible translation of "Kasper" is puppeteer. Given the choice between claiming we are descended from monarchs or from street-corner performers, we go the royalty route.

HOW DOES a child learn history -- not textbook history, but the bone-deep family stories that frame young lives? Aaron Maybin, 11, is a sixth-grader at Patapsco Middle School who reads books and listens to the speeches of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on tape. He entered a watercolor in the African American Youth Art Exhibition held at the Baltimore Convention Center on Feb. 12 and placed third. His entry, "Past Meets Future," portrayed a young, anonymous hero emerging from a group of black leaders -- King, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Kweisi Mfume and Nelson Mandela.

FINDING YOUR ROOTS is not something that interests everyone, but for Eldersburg resident Gloria Bartosik it has become a consuming pastime.Bartosik's search for her family roots began after a 1994 visit with her mother and sisters to Ireland, where they got a little taste of their Irish heritage.An Irish obituary of her mother's grandmother listed a host of surviving relatives whom Bartosik and her family knew little about. Wanting to learn more about these kin, Bartosik began her genealogy search.

SECOND SIGHT.Charles McCarry.Dutton.512 pages. $19.95. Not everyone likes Charles McCarry: His languid erudition, his easeful familiarity with the cities and cuisines of the known universe and his casual assumption that the reader himself has read a book or two tend to make him a refined taste as our popular literature turns more thumpingly obvious.VTC Moreover, his narratives are more dense than a plum pudding and usually richer. They swirl, they swoop, they interlock, they weave, they dip, they meld.

Dr. Leland Bates Stevens, a retired Northeast Baltimore family physician who once charged a half-dollar for an office visit and eschewed appointments during more than 45 years of medical practice, died of pneumonia Sunday at Beebe Medical Center in Lewes, Del. The former Towson resident was 90. Born on a farm near Kent County's Millington, he walked three miles each day to a one-room schoolhouse. "My father grew up with kerosene lamps because there was no electricity on the farm. He bathed in a tub by the fire, and he ate food his parents grew," said his daughter, Paula A. Sparks of Millersville.

I ONCE DREADED the ordeal of the home movie camera, but I've come to appreciate its power. Sometime in the middle 1950s, my parents acquired a camera and light bar from Service Photo, a Greenmount Avenue store that had a candy jar with free samples. From that day forward, we were good customers. The camera -- I think we tortured two models -- became a guest at all the requisite family events, the Christmas mornings, the snow storms, the First Communions and family outings. It's all pretty tame stuff, interesting only if you knew the cast.