I always feel that Evangeline Adams introduced me to genealogy. Her Pluto conjoined my Moon, and as I researched her life, I uncovered many government and church records that provided key information about her. After that, I more easily researched other families as well as my own. Pluto unearths things and can be relentless in its action. It kept me focused on genealogy research for a long time.
The National Archives had their records center on Varick Street in downtown Manhattan in the 1990s, and I spent some time there. It was a quiet, library-like setting with helpful clerks. You’d first search for a name in Soundex listings, which phonetically accommodated different spellings. That would lead you to particular Census records, all originals scanned onto microfilm. As I scrolled through the wide microfilm rolls on the big old microfilm viewing machine, it was exciting to find Evangeline and her family in Andover in 1890 and Boston in 1900 Census records.
Chatting with an adopted woman who was searching for her birth parents, I realized that I could find my own family records, too. I returned another day to find my father’s family in Manhattan and Brooklyn and my mother’s in central New York in the early 20th century.
With home-loving Cancer on my fourth house cusp and its ruler, the Moon, prominent in the first, I’ve always found family stories compelling. But I think that Saturn in the 9th trine my Ascendant gives me the ability to find old records. To my mind, Saturn, ruling old things and permanence, as well as the Moon, are key significators for genealogy.
I still remember an old astrology book describing Saturn careers having to do with “goods of the dead,” one of those ultra-specific key phrases that left me shaking my head. It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I took a part-time job with an estate lawyer. He had Saturn in Cancer and handled wills and court proceedings for heirs, marshaled decedents’ assets and distributed them. Goods of the dead, I realized one day with a start.
But the best part of the job for me was access to Ancestry.com, which helped us create family trees and prove family relationships in court. I did much of the genealogical research for many estates over fifteen-plus years, regularly proving ancestry to first cousins of the decedents.
I was in the Kings County Surrogate’s Court record room one day waiting for the clerks to bring me another old file, when I realized that some of my own ancestors’ records might be there, too. Transiting Pluto was close to conjoining my Saturn at the time, and it opened up an entirely new set of records to me. I quickly looked in the old fashioned card catalog and found the index card that was created when my great-grandfather died in 1936, and the clerks pulled the file. My grandfather had been the executor, and it was fascinating to see the will, so similar in language and format to that used today, with all of my grandfather’s siblings’ information and releases included. Saturn also relates to consistency and tradition, which still exists in many court papers and proceedings.
Saturn rules our ancestors, and the Moon relates to our family connections. Both also have to do with cemeteries, another wonderful place to dig up family history. We found a photo of my great-grandmother on the family monument she had purchased 100 years ago in Holy Cross cemetery in Flatbush, just a few miles away. 
These, too, are what they used to call “goods of the dead.” Some of the old associations are still valid today.