Family histories, trees, stories, etc., compilation

Double J · Mar 21, 2010

Great thread. I love genealogy and family history.

Herbert Anchovy · Mar 21, 2010

It's a consuming activity that can become an obsession. When I started dealing with graveyards and death certificates and medical histories, I had to take a deep breath and walk away for a little bit. I went from not knowing to knowing too much.

YankeeFan · Mar 21, 2010

Lee Jackson Beauregard said:

It's a consuming activity that can become an obsession. When I started dealing with graveyards and death certificates and medical histories, I had to take a deep breath and walk away for a little bit. I went from not knowing to knowing too much.
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Like, stuff you wish you didn't know, or it just became too big an undertaking?

Machine Head · Mar 21, 2010

Lee Jackson Beauregard said:

It's a consuming activity that can become an obsession. When I started dealing with graveyards and death certificates and medical histories, I had to take a deep breath and walk away for a little bit. I went from not knowing to knowing too much.
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I hear you. I found things I didn't expect.

Herbert Anchovy · Mar 21, 2010

What MH said.

When you see cardiac arrhythmia pop up several times, you're pretty much investigating your own likely cause of death.

Bouts with alcoholism. Extramarital affairs. Vague criminal histories. Things that aren't so rosy or tidy.

93Devil · Mar 21, 2010

Starman said:

About 17-18 years ago, I briefly lived in my paternal grandfather's hometown.

At that time, I knew just about nothing about my family history. I knew vaguely somehow I was supposed to be descended from John and John Quincy Adams on my mother's side, and other members of her family had been big wheels in the lumber industry; that was about it.

I really didn't even know the names of my great-grandparents. None had been alive when I was born and my parents really didn't fill in many details.

My grandfather's own dad had died suddenly when he was 7 years old, so he had only a few memories of him. His mother remarried a year later so he was brought up by a stepfather. There wasn't really much "family lore" that got handed down on my dad's side.

So when I lived in my grandfather's hometown, I did a little digging in the clerk's office and old microfilm, and traced back at least two generations. That was farther than I had been, but still a pretty limited amount of genealogical information.

My brief foray into genealogy kind of petered out shortly after when I moved to another town and a job that took a lot more of my time. So over the next 17-18 years I would kind of half-assedly do google searches once in a while, but nothing organized. About 7-8 years ago I signed up for Ancestry.com's trial period, but immediately afterward we had convulsive changes at work (new management, new front-end system, etc etc) and once again it went on hold and basically I just kind of lost interest.

Then a couple months or so ago, out of a clear blue sky I got an e-mail from a guy with the same last name as me. I had never heard of him before. He asked a couple questions on family history and quickly we figured out we were third cousins.

I reactivated my Ancestry.com membership, and I don't know if I was doing things wrong when I was on 7-8 years ago or their search engines have been turbo-powered or what, but all of a sudden, my family tree started going bang-bang-bang and stuff literally started pouring in.

Found all the great-grandparents. Found all the GG-grandparents. Started working on the generations before that. In genealogy, Google is definitely your friend. Found out I am almost certainly NOT related to the Adams presidents, but we pretty much figured that anyway.

Although in the course of discovering that, I found that rather than being 15/16ths Irish as I had believed, in fact I was 100.0000 percent purebred Irish. (Score one for ethnic purity.) Found out my maternal GG-grandfather was indeed a lumber baron -- there are about a half-dozen towns or landmarks named after him in northern Michigan and Canada, and in the 1870s-1880s, he had holdings worth several million dollars, wihich would be a lot more now (unfortunately, none of this massive fortune has filtered down to me).

Kept banging the Google tree and finally made the jump across the Atlantic back to Ireland. I still never knew my GGG-grandparents' names, the last generation in Ireland who sent their son off alone in 1847, but eventually a few clues turned up and we nailed it down. From not even knowing their names two weeks ago, now I know they had 6 kids, of whom my GG-grandfather was the oldest. We know one more, a younger sister, came to the U.S. several years later, but we're not sure on the rest. We know my GGG-grandmother lived in Ireland until she died at the age of 83, so our guess is at least one or more of the kids stayed too.

Just yesterday, I was digging through an old box in my attic -- a box which had been passed over, intact and unopened, from my parents' house after my dad died in 2001 (and it had sat for years there, too). In the box, I found some dusty old documents.

And some pictures of my grandfather as a young man in his U.S. Army WWI uniform in 1918. They showed him at his camp in Texas, and at a visit at his sister's house. One of the pictures was a shot of him and his mother (my G-GM) -- who I had never seen before.
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Great stuff and thank you for sharing.

My last name is a phonetic spelling from Ellis Island of my original last name. My grandpa just did not know English to correct the officials working. Just like the scene from The Godfather II. There is no one in the world with my family's last name.

I may give the ancestry.com thing a whirl after your story.

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Family histories, trees, stories, etc., compilation

Double J Active Member

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