Packed boats bobbing in New York harbor. Covered wagons cutting the plains. A land bridge spanning an ancient path. Slave ships filled with fear. All these forces carried people to the place that has become our country, where their stories became part of the American stew.

In the Cary area, which for decades has attracted farflung transplants, those stories are especially diverse.

And some locals like Sarah Sheffield are finding a connection to the past by finding out more about their family’s history. They are scouring marriage deeds, land documents and old family diaries. They’re doing genealogy research and finding a fascination with the past.

“When I jump into something I usually jump in full force,” said Sheffield, 57, who has been researching her family history for about a decade.

So far the retired Town of Cary employee has learned that her mother’s Scots-Irish side immigrated to Pennsylvania in the 1770s. Her father’s side is proving a little harder to pin down, though she thinks they could have been Huguenots.

Sheffield loves the “challenge of the puzzle.”

“I think it kind of fills in that gap, that sense of connection that people need,” she said of family research, noting that the connection can be especially appreciated in a transplant-heavy community like Cary.

Sheffield and other family history buffs are lucky. Wake County has several resources for family research. For those with a North Carolina past, Wake County possesses a free-standing public library devoted to historical documents and family research.

It’s called the Olivia Raney Local History Library, and in the about 10 years since its opening the Raleigh building has seen a host of people use the facility to research their North Carolina roots.

“We have a variety of people who come in,” said Marie Jones, an assistant at the library.

The library specializes in Wake County history but contains information — marriage deeds, land transactions and other court documents — on every North Carolina county.

If you’re looking to find out more about your family tree, Raney is a good place to start, though the first stop should be your own family, Jones said.

“Ask questions, lots of them,” she said.

Once you’ve exhausted relatives you can start perusing the documents that the library houses — you’d be surprised how much information you can glean from a will.

Of course, these days you don’t have to visit a library at all for your detective work, one reason Jones thinks more people are getting interested in researching their family history.

They just hop on the Internet and at their fingertips are tons of information at sites like an cestry.com and rootsweb.com.

She’s used both to research her own family, which has roots in Germany and Ireland.

Sheffield uses the Internet as well. In fact a family research group she belongs to — the Cary-Apex Genealogy Forum — had a discussion devoted solely to the topic of Internet research.

The group meets monthly at Cary’s Page-Walker Arts & History Center and also goes over specific geographical research areas, like the Tidewater region of North Carolina.

Sheffield also volunteers at a family history center run by the Church of Latter Day Saints in Apex.

The Mormon religion devotes a lot of time to family history research because followers of the religion believe that dead family members can be baptized, according to PBS.org.

Sheffield is not Mormon however, and the center is open to the public.

“It’s all about good research,” she said.

After the research is when the stories start coming. Sheffield has written a few essays about her ancestors, which she hopes to compile in a book for the family. The history she is finding isn’t exactly dramatic — she’s mostly related to bankrupt farmers — but it’s rich.

Not that it’s easy. Her father’s surname, “Nabers,” is proving difficult to track, and often names that are Anglicized after an immigrant’s arrival in America can be hard to track.

When you do find the stories they will be worth it. It will be a connection to the American past, Sheffield said. “They really are the American story,” she said of her ancestors. “We’re all the product of survivors.”