Hank Jones's path has taken him from the bright lights of Hollywood soundstages to the solitary carrels of research libraries. He began his first career—as a successful character actor—by auditioning for The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show while he was still a student on the Farm. That led to a 25-year stint in show business. “Most every sitcom of the ’60s I was on,” Jones says, ticking off familiar names like The Love Boat, Mork & Mindy and The Patty Duke Show. “I never got the girl. I was always somebody’s best friend.”
He developed a penchant for his second career, genealogy, even earlier. When Jones was 8, he found a trunk of yellowing photos and papers in his parents’ basement in San Leandro, Calif., and began pawing through. As a young adult, he’d occasionally delve into family history as a release from the unpredictability and pressures of acting. Plus, he got to play another character. “You get to be Sherlock Holmes,” he explains. “That, for me, is the charge.”
Since the early 1980s, Jones has spent most of his time in his detective role. His area of genealogical expertise is the 18th-century migration of a group called the Palatines, who came to the United States from an area along Germany’s Rhine River. “Hank realized that if you took someone from a certain village in the United States and looked at who witnessed their children’s baptisms and who their neighbors were, you could find their villages back in Germany,” says fellow genealogist David Martin. “Nobody else had paid any attention to that, really.” Jones has published five books on German immigration and has been named a fellow of the American Society of Genealogists (membership limited to 50 worldwide).
Jones, who lives with his wife, Bonnie, in San Diego, also writes about how a sixth sense—call it coincidence, luck or intuition—aids genealogy researchers. When he began looking at the Palatinate migration, he didn’t think he was descended from any of the 847 families he was studying. Jones selected one person at random, a Dieterich Schneider, and began researching. He has since finished gathering information about 600 of the 847 families. And it turns out that Jones is related to one person—the same Dieterich Schneider.
Jones canvassed his colleagues, asking if they had experienced anything similar. More than a thousand people responded with specific stories—a book falling off a shelf and opening to just the right page; a researcher putting off a visit to his ancestors’ grave site, then happening upon a reunion of previously unknown family members when he finally did decide to go. Many are included in Jones’s Psychic Roots: Serendipity & Intuition in Genealogy (Genealogical Publishing Company, 1996) and its sequel, published in 1999. “This is in no way negating proven research techniques,” Jones emphasizes. “You just follow hunches, and see if facts back them up. Sometimes, they knock your socks off.”
