10,000 Maniacs may not be the best description of “Banister World,” but one of their albums In My Tribe certainly fits. I recently passed the 10,000 mark on my Ancestry.com Jerry Banister Family Tree – the work of a genealogical maniac. By definition, a maniac is “an obsessive enthusiast,” and certainly my efforts to solve the adoption puzzle can be described as such.

A vast majority of my 10,000 tribe members are dead people to respectfully protect the privacy of the living. Once an obituary is posted, you are apparently fair game in the world of genealogy. Some of these lives date back to the early settlers, so they have been gone for a long time. In many cases, they are only remembered by those of us that trace family lineage and add their contributions to our family trees. Otherwise, their tombstones continue to deteriorate or are overgrown by weeds until their memories are forgotten. Each one has played an important role in who we are today.

My tree, referred to by my wife as “Banister World,” is larger than most because I’m part of two distinct families – biological and adoptive. The Banister’s gave me life and the Johnston’s gave me love. There are only 44 Johnston’s on my tree compared to 243 Banister’s and another 95 Bannister’s. This includes Johnston’s on the Banister side of my family. My tree could probably be trimmed to this more manageable level, but my curiosity went far beyond these names.

Here’s the breakdown of other key family names in “Banister World:”

  • Legg 418
  • Hall 369
  • Greathouse or Groethausen 297
  • Foist or Foyst 232
  • Taylor 195
  • Penn 109
  • Emly 103
  • Sweany 94
  • Herndon 84
  • Hines 61
  • Anderson 59
  • Vanmeter 56
  • Williams 52
  • King 46

Including the Johnston’s and Banister/Bannister’s this list of dominant names only adds up to 2,557. This means that most of “Banister World” is comprised of smaller groups of family names that could include yours. In my overall quest, I did find John Penn, of Declaration of Independence fame and Jeff McShay a guy I used to work with in Indianapolis that went on to marry a Foist. I continue to search for a number of “close relative” DNA matches that include Terry & Fred Grimshaw, Phillip Legg, Winston Emly, Elsa Schneider, Larry Bogue, Benjamin Wilson, Charles Hines, Eva Alama, Donna Pearcy, Brenda Blessing, Sandra Dutton, Bec Taylor, F. Hines, Walter Wood, and Sandra Salas. Each of these connections I eventually hope to mark with a distinctive “DNA Match” on the Jerry Banister Family Tree. These are all people “in my tribe” as Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs sings about, that need to be added to The Tree.