Your Geneology....

Everyone's family trees are so interesting! It's really amazing to read about. I mean in some way we all trace back to great people. Anyone we know could be related to us! I always loved geneology. But My family history is kind of boring and hard to trace lol. My great grandmother and father on my father's side were Romanian Gypsies. We tried to look it up farther but Gypsies are nomadic and really are without country. :confused: My mother's side is a little more interesting. Her father and her grandfather were in the Russian Bratva (The MOB! :eek: ) Didn't really want to look farther after that. LOL. I might have to put that Cher song on my family tree (Gypsies tramps and thieves. LOL)

Kitten
 
Hey, Kitten, don't be upset about the Mob connections. My Mom came over on the boat (literally) from Italy with her family. Her uncle was in the mafia, and one of her brothers followed in his profession. when visiting, we were never allowed to ask where he was.

My Mom's family still in Italy own and operate a winery that has been in the family for over 300 years.
 
Hey redsquirrel! I know mob ties aren't as frowned upon as they used to be. I helped my one friend dig into her past. She was adopted when she was a kid so we had to dig up her birth certificate. Her mother's family were all mobsters of the Italian variety. We couldn't find her father for the longest time and when we did he turned out to be in the IRA. Which is tant amount to the Irish moffia. It was fascinating really. It made me feel better I wasn't the only person I knew that had that kind of a thing in their family tree. I get what you are talking about with your uncle too. My grandfather was the same way. We'd always ask him to tell us stories about where he'd been and he'd just smile and say "I haven't been anywhere Голубушкаs (My dears in Russian. Pronounced [ga-LOO-boosh-ka])."

Kitten
 
I gotta tell you that I love the Hatfield and McCoy thread. But I don't think I ever wanted to slap my mother across the room more on the day she said to me with a big fat smile "Isn't genealogy fascinating. I'm so interested in it I'm looking up mine". So now you will get a very personal story from me. I was told until I was 17 that my brother and I had the same father. Then one day my brother said to me "If we had the same father then mom would be getting social security checks for you and not just me". I never paid attention to that sort of thing. So I asked my mom and she told me my fathers name and that he was sent to Viet Nam right after she found out she was pregnant with me and he never looked her up when he came back. Then when I was 33 my grandma went to a nursing home and as we moved the last of her furniture my sister said "oh my gosh look what I just found" and handed me a stack of letters from my father to my mother while he was in Viet Nam. A few years ago it dawned on me that there's no way she had just found that because my grandma was as blind as a bat and my sister went through her whole apartment two years before that looking for a ring that grandma thought she lost but had actually given it to my sister long before that.

So after reading the letters, learning alot of personal information about my father and making a longer story short I thought why in the hell would I want to learn any more about a man who was separated from his wife, had three children, and picked up a hostess in a topless bar and knocked her up (my mother). So yeah I really wanted to slap my mother for that comment, my sister for hiding the letters till grandma was so far gone with Alzhiemers that I couldn't confront her, and my grandmother for being so controlling that she decided to keep those letters from my mother and me.

So for my own genealogy I have zero interest. But the Hatfield and McCoy stuff is absolutely cool.
 
You know for me it was much more of a head trip than a heart ache. Only a bunch of selfish nutcases would do the things they did. I am glad I'm not a selfish nutcase.
 
They supposedly will give you a short period of time "for free", but yes, there is a charge to "belong".
The thing with the census sheets, is that at times, they have asked for parents names, and where the parents were born. So this can help get names of ancestors, the ancestors' siblings, etc.
The Latter Day Saints have taken on a huge job of accessing and storing recordings. I believe their site is free, and I think it is LDS.org
I have found info there....you can only be there for 45 minutes, I think (at least they used to have that limit as so many folks would be trying to get on)
 
I don't pay for Ancestry. com ...I just use their free stuff (which isn't much) ever so often something good will pop up free. I got my tree there I edit it see where the "hints" come from and try and look them up elsewhere if not free .. cause sometimes the hints are free but mostly they are not.
 
Also, on ancestry.com, there are periods of time where they will make certain records free: military records on Veterans Day, Civil War records one April (150th anniversary?), etc. If you allow them to send you emails, you'll be notified when they do something like this. It's usually a weekend or maybe a week where certain records are free. Once you find them, you can attach them to a person in your tree, but when the free period is over, you won't be able to access that record anymore, even if it's attached to someone in your tree (well, until you pay for a subscription, I suppose). So, be sure to download a copy to your computer if possible, or copy/paste into a word document. That way, you won't lose what you found!

I found a Civil War record that showed when and where a relative was captured and imprisoned, and subsequently it showed when he was released (after the war had officially ended)... something like "upon oath of loyalty." I'd have to look at the document again for the exact wording, but basically he was a Confederate soldier who had to take an oath of allegience to the Union once he was released, even after the fighting had stopped. Very interesting!
 
Yes, that is how I found the enlistment record for a great great grandfather (maybe another great in there, lol) from Indiana into the Union Army. I copied it as you are right. You won't get access again unless you do the subscription route. I think I got 1880 census and 1930 census the same way. Found that when my grandfather deserted his wife and 4 kids, he did not go immediately to Florida (where he was living when he died) but was in a boarding house right there is the same town. Shame on him, lol.
 
Poirot LOL My Great Great Great Grandfather was married 3 times, two were sisters.
 
I LOVE searching into my geneaology. My dad had an ancestry.com account for awhile (a paid one) and he looked into my mother's side a lot for me. I look forward to the day I can look into my grandmother's family a bit more. My great-grandmother (from my mom's mom's family) was 16 when my grandmother was born and my grandmother never knew her father growing up and was adopted by her step-father. All I know of her biological father is his name... (they later did meet and he paid for her to go to nursing school. She never met her half-sister though whom was disabled in some way...that's all I've ever known about them...)

But my dad's dad's family, we can trace back to when they arrived in America from Poland...in the late 1800s/early 1900s. His mom's family is of Irish decent (and some English I suppose). My grandmother is very Irish proud. Her mother was married four times. My great-grandfather was the first marriage, then he went from being a Methodist pastor to an atheist. They divorced and then my great-grandmother married a guy whom my grandmother grew up calling "Daddy John" I believe they divorced and she married a guy and then he died and she married a fourth guy. Or something like that.

My mom's dad's family is Scottish and French with a tiny bit of Spanish in there. My great-great grandfather's name was Pedro and he was born in Spain. That surprised me. (his father was French and his daughter, my great-grandmother always considered herself French and nothing more)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top