I think it comes from the fact that I never knew any of my Dad's side of the family.
He was an adopted only child and by the time I was born his parents, my grandparents, were deceased. The rest of this side of the family was pretty much "dead" to him as I was told a hateful bunch.
In any case, I always wanted to know my grandparents and even if I could find out who my Dad's biological parents were. I know very little other than what orphanage he was adopted from and the conflicting information that his biological parents may have been Jewish immigrants. I only recently found out about the conflict that they may not have been. Hard to say really.
I found this when I was doing some research awhile back. It is the census of 1940 that included my Dad and Grandparent's names. Cool, huh?
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| 1940 census with my Grandparent's names and my Dad |
On my maternal side there has been much research done as my Great-Uncle is a huge genealogist. He has done extensive research including going to Scotland and England for information. All of this was handed to my cousin who has done much research too. I managed to secure a copy of all of that for myself. That was rather easy.
As with all families, there are some interesting tidbits including stuff that you may not want to have known but found out anyway even though it was a hush, hush, secret. For example, my maternal side of family (grandfather side) name was probably supposed to be something else. This was due to a issue that arose!
Unrelated to the aforementioned my family comes from back country hillbilly folk and we are also on the Cherokee Indian rolls so this may give you a slight insight to the background and to some secrets kept.
Again, I find it all fascinating and for sure, one big scavenger hunt for that right piece of the puzzle.
9 comments:
Hi Naila, I love your A to Z button. Very nice. I didn't realize how lucky I was to have both sets of grandparents for most of my young life. Now if I can remember all the lessons they taught. Great post.
It's so fun to do this. I had a great great uncle that was high in the Mormon church so my genealogy is pretty way documented all the back to even before Christ - on my great grandmother's side.
Trying to decipher the cat scratchings of the old census takers is really a task.
I did a family tree on Ancestors.com and when my cousin found out about it she jumped in and put what she knew and we passed the word. It's huge now! Love yours and I too have one of those census and I have a list off a captain's Log of passengers and my grandparents name is on it when they arrived at ellis island from Sicily.
Sounds like you have some challenges ahead. Good luck sorting all that out.
such beautiful thing to find your family genes. :)
Saying Hi! Visiting from A to Z
Genealogy is fascinating. I think my dad's side of the family immigrated sometime in the late 1700's from either Austria or Germany (I feel bad about not remembering for sure, but it's been years since that discussion came up). I've also been told that on my mom's side, we're descendants of William the Conqueror. I haven't confirmed this for myself, but he has lots of descendants running around, so it's perfectly possible.
-L.G. Keltner, minion in Captain Alex's Ninja Army
http://lgkeltner.blogspot.com/
http://warpednerdiversity.blogspot.com/
I have no idea about my father's side - he left when I was young and we never had further contact with anyone on that side.
But my mother's side has been researched quite a bit by my cousin. It's fascinating to see where you come from --- and realize with our Scottish, Irish background there was pretty much no way I was Not getting freckles. LOL
I love researching this stuff. Don't know about any skeletons or anything. I think we've basically just been mostly farmers all the way back to Ireland and Scotland.
Hi Naila. I really find this interesting. Going back into time kind of where you re-discover your past history...Well written. Happy Blogging.
This is very interesting. I had done a very quick genealogy, nothing came up that was riveting. My aunt, though, has been doing it for many years and found some very interesting tidbits about a few of our ancestors. I may start doing it again; it's always good to know from whence you came. :D
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