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Eruname
Post subject: Ancestry Thread
Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 12:39 am
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Considering another thread is being hijacked I thought I should go ahead and get this started! Many people seem to be pretty interested in discussing this. I'd be interested to see what the Europeans could offer to this thread. It's obvious that Americans can have quite a few different backgrounds but I'm wondering if the same could be true for Europeans and how far back they can trace their family lines...oh and I can't forget the Australians since they are another country made up of a lot of immigrants!

My ancestry is mostly Scottish with a tiny bit of Irish. Although I remember hearing/reading that there might be some more to mix in like some Cherokee or other European nationalities, but I can't be sure of that. My dad always says I'm 1/64th Cherokee but I haven't seen the documentation to prove that.

The most I know about concerning my family is that supposedly one side of my family has been traced back to Scotland and is part of the Douglas clan. It seems the Douglasses have some interesting and possibly important history:
Quote:
The name is said to be derived from the Gaelic "dubh glais" meaning "dark water" but the origins of the line are lost in time. It is thought that a Flemish nobleman may have accompanied King David I on his return from England but the first documented Douglas was a William de Douglas in the 12th century in Morayshire. In time, four main branches of the family evolved -

The "Black" Douglases of Douglasdale in south Lanarkshire
The "Red" Douglases of Angus and Fife
The Douglas earls of Morton in Dumfriesshire and
A branch in Drumlanrig in Nithsdale in the Scottish Borders who became the marquesses of Queensberry.

The first Douglas to stride across the stage of Scottish history was Sir William Douglas who fought and died for William Wallace. His son, Sir James Douglas was a supporter and lifelong friend of Robert the Bruce. "Good Sir James" died taking Bruce's heart on a crusade to the Holy Land. The 2nd Earl of Douglas died at the Battle of Otterburn in 1388 as his army defeated an English force led by Prince Henry "Hotspur". In 1402 the 4th Earl was defeated by the same Henry Hotspur at the Battle of Homildon Hill.

The Douglas family grew in power and by the 15th century they were seen as a threat to the monarch. The 6th Earl Douglas and his brother was invited to the infamous "Black Dinner" at Edinburgh Castle with the 10-year-old King James II. They were seized and beheaded. The 8th Earl suffered the same fate in 1452, this time at the hands of King James II himself.

William, the 11th Earl of Angus became 1st Marquess of Douglas and was a supporter of King Charles I during the Civil War. A number of Douglas titles later devolved to the Dukes of Hamilton and the eldest son of the Duke is now given the title of Marquess of Douglas.
I have a question: what is the proper way to trace your lineage? Is the "correct" way to go through your father, then his father, his father, etc? The interesting thing to me is that really, there are infinite lines of family history depending on what parent you follow.

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LalaithUrwen
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 1:06 am
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Oooh! I'm first! :)

First, a big thanks to Idylle for his (?) great research in the redhead thread. That was terrific and a great refresher for what I used to know and very informative for what I didn't know!

Secondly, I don't know the proper way to research one's lineage. ??? I've just gone by whatever I can find. I do have a very nice computer program, though, that makes some awesome family trees and has quite a bit of space for adding info.

Also, I mentioned my Scottish ancestry in the other thread, but I'll repeat it here for good measure.

Comyn/Cumming(s)
Austin


Irish: Bohannan

English/Welsh/?: Hicks, Williams, Farr, Mills

German: Lindner, Rendle

(Although, interesting note here, when I recently checked the census records, my great-grandparents had marked Czechoslovakia as their birth country. ??? Were there ethnic Germans livings in Czechoslovakia around the turn of the last century?)

Hungarian: Hodovan, Bolvari, and Paytosh

French: Chambless

Native American: Well, there are no names specifically. I just know that my great-great-grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee.


More later!

Lali

Last edited by LalaithUrwen on Sun 19 Jun , 2005 1:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

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*E*V*E*N*S*T*A*R*
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 1:18 am
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I sure have been interested in finding out my family lineage these days, Eru. I'm a Hems, but the only other ones I can seem to find anywhere are from Victorian England. :P I used to feel unique about it, but now I just feel lonely.

Here's how the relatives break down, though:

-Dad's mother was Phyllis Ludbrooke (not sure if there's an 'e' on the end or not. Well, of course, two generations later, there is an *E*, but you know) from England.
-Dad's grandfather (on his father's side) was directly from England.
-Mom's grandparents (on her mother's side) were directly from Scotland. Andrew Clephan and Cecilia McGreggor.

I'm really glad to have such close European ties as to have stayed with my grandmother's sister when I was in London last year, and my other grandmother's family (from "the Old Country" as they call it) attended my grandfather's funeral in April.

If any of you Brits know a Hems, please tell me and I'll be forever greatful. :P




*E*

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MaidenOfTheShieldarm
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 1:30 am
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Good thread, Eru. I'll be interested to see what people post.

I only know half of my lineage. My great uncle loved genealogy, and did loads of research. When he died, my great aunt sent it all to my dad, so I've spent many happy hours looking through the seven boxes of reserach that he did. . . My dad's side are all Eastern European Jews. They came over from Lithuania, Russia, and Germany, and ended up in Detroit, where they apparently became rather important. One half, that is. My great grandfather and his brother both moved from Russia, I believe. My great grandfather came here. . . but my great grand uncle moved to South Africa. So now I've got lots of family members in South Africa and London. I've found names going back to 1776, but that's about it.

My mum, on the other hand, is adopted. All I know is my biological grandmother's name. Blanche Siegel. There's supposition that my grandad was Irish (apparently I look Celtic :suspicious: ). I'd love to find my mom's mom for her. . . Even though I'm Jewish, aparently my last name is Scottish. I looked up our family name, and it said that we were from around St. Andrews (w00t!). Not true, but hey, I'm willing to go with it. ;)

If anyone knows of a Blanche Siegel from Williamsburg, NY. . . let me know, yeah? :neutral:

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Riverthalos
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 1:32 am
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Chalk me up as one of 'em American mutts. Irish, Scottish, English, French-Canadian, Norwegian...it's an unholy mix I tell you. When people ask where my family is from I say Iowa (seriously, both my parents grew up on farms in Iowa). When they clarify (as my boyfriend did very early in our relationship) I give the list as fast as I can. When I did this to my boyfriend, he blinked a bit and asked how long my family had been in the US. "Since before it was the US," I replied. I be white bread....

My uncle does this as a hobby. He's traced as many branches as he could find and follow (at some point, the records get lost or sketchy) for both his parents. For his mother (my grandma) he had to pretty much quit with her father/his grandfather because great-grandpa Olsen cut off contact with the rest of his family. We know he was Norwegian, he worked on the railroads, and that's about that. He did trace her mother's line pretty far back - all the way back to Charlemagne. I'm not sure I belive that. I think he may have gotten lost. No way is my family royalty. He also says part of grandpa's (his father) family came over on a ship called the Mayflower. We've got two Scottish clans going in my family: the Pattersons and the McKays. Lowland and Highland respectively. My mother grew upo very proud of her Scotish heritage yet for some reason she never passed that on to us kids. I didn't find out about any of this until recently, as my family's going to Scotland and at Christmastime my aunt started telling us about the clans and then I did a quick Google search...

Thanks Mom. :P

My dad's cousin also does geneaolgy as a hobby. Not much to say about that branch, other than they were a bunch of frontiersman and one fo them allegedly married a Sioux, though it's not clear whether or not they had any children or if my father and his cousin are related to the children.

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The Watcher
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 2:01 am
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I think that tracing heritage does not preclude any family lines being traced, although those of us who have done it can attest how hard doing females can sometimes be if records are sketchy.

My patronym is a variation on Comerford, one that interestingly enough I found unique to my own gg grandfather, who somehow changed the spelling when he moved from Wolfe Island, Ontario to Freeport, Illinois in 1859. His parents had arrived around 1837 from Ireland to Wolfe Island, and we have several land documents and birth/baptismal records there of this generation. We know at some point the family was from the Kilkenny region, but do not know if the family was forced out during the Cromwellian purges. Comerfords were retainers of the Earl of Ormand, the Butler family, so they would have been highly unlikely to have survived unscathed during this period. The original spelling was De Quemerford, and I understand that there is a small village in Wiltshire England with that same name. What I have discovered is that the first Comerfords appeared over in the Kilkenny area in the 1300s as part of the English/Norman settlements that were taking place during this period, where the Norman kings conveniently granted Irish tracts of land to their favored lords and knights, and these households would then move across the Irish channel. Far from being conquerors, however, they soon intermarried into the native Irish and settled down quite happily until the arrival of the Wars of the Roses, where these Irish families were quite loyal to the House of York. This made these old Norman-English-Irish families enemies of the Tudors, and the tale just gets worse from there on down.

Anyway, I would love to pin down exactly which ship my ggg grandfather and grandmother came over from Ireland on, but I as of yet only have the N. American part of the tale, and the part of the tale that ends with the Cromwells. Obviously, this leaves a 200 year gap in between.

We did have some very modest castles over in Ireland at one time, and one ruined tower still stands, I have pics of it from when my parents were over there last year.

So much for this one part of the family. I can happily say that just six months ago I discovered a huge clutch of what would be my fourth cousins, people my father's family were entirely unaware of, living in western Minnesota. We have exchanged some family data and a few phone calls. These are the descendents of three sibs of the gg grandfather who changed his spelling of the surname, who had moved away at age 19, and was the oldest of this generation.

I have an interesting sidenote for Lali, however. For years, until my cousin and I started doing all of the genealogical research, my father, due to the odd spelling of his last name, and the red hair that ran in it, thought it was Scottish in origin, a variation of the Comyn/Cummings clan where the family might have lived by a river or such and added the "ford" onto it. How strange that this is one of your families, although it turns out just to be an interesting spelling coincidence.

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Lacemaker
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 2:58 am
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OOH, I love genealogy. I'm French Canadian and sorry to make you all sick but Fr. Can gen is the EASIEST bloody thing since records have been kept, and quite stringently at that, since 1621, and very stringently after the 1670's . So one of my sisters and I have already traced, in less than 3 years, over 1200 direct ancestors. We are now working on the more mysterious branches of the family tree.

As for spelling, well, as a church secretary in charge of old records dating back to 1851, I can tell you that spelling is highly variable and has only been "set" for about 100 years. That is because most ordinary folks could not read or write not so long ago, and the spelling of one's name was very much left to the whims and fancies of officiating priests, ministers, clerks and the like. They wrote down what they heard. Census takers are even worse.

Also, "reg'lar folk" have been celebrating their birthdays only in the last 60 or 70 years maybe. Before that, birthday parties were for the rich and/or aristocratic. Ordinary people were too busy to bother with such frivolities. So the age declared at censuses, naturalization or death records is to be taken with an entire shaker of salt in many cases. I have a gr-gr-grand mother who only aged 7 years every 10! :D She kept getting younger every census.

Hopes this helps and gives you extra clues!


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Ara-anna
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 3:18 am
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Ahem....be back later with everything

And you follow all lineage available.

I will type mine up and post it here, it will take me a while, both my mothers that I have done, which is quite lengthy and my fathers, which is quite short.

This is cool though.

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Lacemaker
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 3:34 am
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As for lineage, you can do a fathers-only line for the name you bear, or you can do the full fan (whole tree) I like whole tree cause I figure we needed "input" from all our ancestors to be here today :D

I especially like finding out trades of my ancestors: interestingly enough, I have quite a few "Interpreters to the Natives" in my background and I am a translator! I like finding links like that.


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laureanna
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 3:49 am
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Here's what I know about my 8 great grandparents:

Maternal Grandmother's parents:

Agnes Gonay, a Tlingit Indian of Alaska, territory of the USA, worked as a "house keeper" in a loggers' camp. By the time my ggp married her, she had children by two other loggers and was pregnant with my ggpa's first child. She had 5 kids total, including my grandma, and died in her late thirties. I suspect she had a pretty tough life. She was of the Eagle-Drum House, Kaagwaantaan Clan, but I have no information on her parents or siblings.

John Widmark, a Swede who ran away from home on a tramp ship, at 17 years old, and ended up in Alaska, and eventually married Agnes. He worked as a logger and day laborer. I have no info on his family of origin. When his wife Agnes died, the children were split up to live with Tlingit relatives or go to the Indian Boarding School in Sitka. My grandmother Lucy was around 12, and became a servant, which was common in Tlingit society for lower class citizens. She moving from household to household, helping to raise other people's children. I bear her Tlingit name, because she died about the time I was born.

Maternal Grandfather's parents:

Bertie Worland, a 9th-generation American woman, of mostly English ancestors including the surnames of Knowlan, Taylor, Montague, Buford, Rogers, Walker, Robey, Gough, Greenwell, Beavins, Twyman, Saunders, and James. Her tree is a bit tangled, especially where her ancestors were living in Appalachia. There are at least 3 sets of kissing cousins.

James Combs, a 9th-generation American of English and Scottish descent, including Hamilton, Beavins, Greene, Burdit, Graves, Wheeler, McAtee, Hart, and Kerseck. Also from Appalachia, and also had some possible cross connections to his tree, and to Bertie's. They moved west every few years (whenever things got going too well, as my great uncle said) until they ended up in Alaska. They had 8 boys, including my grandpa Ray, who married Lucy, and had my mom. I have about 300 first, second, and third cousins from this branch of the family tree.

Paternal Grandmother's parents:

Mary Honey, a woman from Dublin, Ireland, about whom I know nothing.

Eli Coulson, from Rochdale, England, about whom I know next to nothing. Eli and Mary met in New Jersey, and had 8 kids, including my grandmother Mary, who married John.

Paternal Grandfather's parents:

Flora MacDonald, born in Truro, Nova Scotia, of Scottish immigrant parents, for which I have only names. I know a little about her father's clan and her mother's clan.

Mac (surname omitted, because it is my maiden name), born in Truro, Nova Scotia, of Scottish immigrant parents for which I have no specific data, though I know something of his father's clan. They had only one child, my grandfather John, born in Massachusetts.

As for your question about lineage, Eru, it depends upon the context. In the Tlingit culture, I'm all Tlingit, because we have a matriarchal lineage - I am what my mother is. But I'm also a member of my father's Scottish clan, because as a Scot, I'm patriarchal. And just to confuse things, I have several Latino members of my family, by marriage, so I've always felt I was part of that culture, too.

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enchantress
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 4:10 am
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Mostly Polish here. My great grandmothers on each side spiced up the mix. Maternal Great grandmother - Austrian. My grandma's family was very in touch with that, spent lots of time in Vienna and all speak perfect German, including my mother... I screw up the german speaking line... :blackeye ( I used to speak it when I was tiny...now I understand lots spoken, can say a bit, but with reading and writing... meh)...
This Austrian great-grandmother's husband, my maternal great grandfather, was a Professor at a Krakow University... he was an engineer, an expert in gas systems and heating... the Nazis wanted him to work for them, helping with gas chamber design and manufacture. Several times he refused. He was taken prisoner and put in a concentration camp the day most of the Polish university professorship was seized. He spent a year in a concentration camp. He got out alive, though died shortly after of cancer. His wife, being Austrian and obviously anti-nazi, had no documents (because the other option was to declare herself as an Austrian and receive Nazi papers - Austria was forcibly annexed into Nazi Germany)... She stayed housebound for years, one of those knowing her husband is in a concentration camp... so that her broken Polish accent would not give her away.
Scary stuff...:(

Paternal Great grandmother - Italian.
Her family supposedly came to Poland from the Milan region, running from some Mafia vendetta :Q So the story goes... :P

War stories with my paternal grandfather too... he was involved in the Polish resistance movement during WWII... ambush warfare...
My mom's brothers were involved in the Solidarity movement that ended up bringing down Communism, years later...
A Polish family makes for eventful family histories... politically so....

Further back in my maternal grandfather's line there were some aristocratic Hungarians... some nobility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The rest, lots of Poles.

So Im traceably mostly Polish, with 1/8 Austrian and 1/8 Italian in the mix. :)

Last edited by enchantress on Sun 19 Jun , 2005 4:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

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LalaithUrwen
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 4:12 am
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Very interesting, everyone! :)

Beth, that's really cool! We were almost, sort of, kinda related. ;)

('Course, I believe we're all related, if you go back far enough. :P)




Lali (who needs to go to bed now)

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TIGG
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 5:08 am
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da TIGG is half Kiwi,Half Manx.

the Manx half is made up of Half of Viking descent and Half English of Gypsy origin.

The KIWI half is HALF KIWI (don't know the origin, probably English) and HALF English Farmers, (3rd Generation Kiwi).

While in Europe I plan on a visit around my ancestoral land ' The Isle of Man'... think tailess cat, non flying Bird, Vikings and roguish Gypsy, and that is a Tiggers heritage.

:devil:

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IdylleSeethes
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 5:10 am
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One of my many sisters spent several years tracing our ancestry. Somewhere on one of my machines I have her file with about 8,000 relatives in it. I'll dig it out and take a look.

Riverthalos,

Links to Charlemagne aren't that unusual. Generally, if you can tie back to European royalty, you are connected. There is a specious medieval chart for him that goes all the way back to Adam and Eve. We tie back to him in several ways, but the strongest is through the Valois who were the Royal House of France from 1328 (Charles VIII) to 1589 (Henry III) when the Bourbons replaced them after Henry's assasination. The line includes Francis I and Henry II. They were the King and Prince in Cinderalla. Henry actually married Catherine de Medici who brought da Vinci with her. He designed the staircase at Chambord for Francis.

The Watcher,

I'm sorry about what my ancestors did to your family and the rest of the Isles. We're connected to them through the Abingdon family. I wonder if you can connect to the Generals Butler from the first half of the 19th century. I have a friend who lives in one of their homes in Carrollton KY (1825). They fought on the frontier, especially the Mexican War.

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gimli_axe_wielder
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 5:29 am
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I'm a mut! Mostly German and Norwegian. There is some English as well somewhere in there... oh.. and a weeee bit of Polish :P:P :devil:

Most everything I know is from my maternal side. My grandpa likes to do this stuff. I got into it and went online searching and actually found out more stuff. He had some names but nothing more, and I managed to find some distant relative that had gone back even further and filled in a lot of the blanks. Basicly, our great great grandfathers were brothers or something to the effect.. Traced back to the city of Kent in England I believe, sometime in the 1600's. That was my maternal grandmothers side. My maternal grandfather's side is mostly German. My grandpa has been writing it all out, but I haven't studied it to much yet.

On my fathers side unfortunatly I dont have a lot of information. Both of my grandparents are dead and my dad doesnt know much. We have no contact with any other relatives so the story pretty much ends there for personal experiences for me. About 15 or so years ago some one back east decided to do a whole book and asked my dad to send info. It has some stuff tracing back to Norway, but unfortunatly my particular line is kind of an offshoot from a daughter or marriage or something way back when.

I find it all very interesting and try to pass on as much info to my grandpa as I can. He knows I like to know about it so he is still working it all out and writing it down for me. The unfortunate part though is that there isnt a lot of details other than names and a few dates here and there for the most part. We know the personal stuff from his grandparents and such, but everything before is pretty much lost except for some names and dates here and there. I have a lot of old photo albums, but no one really remembers who everyone is.

I bought a digital voice recorder a while back so that I could record my grandpa talking about his experiences in WWII. I've always been fascinated by history and until a few years ago, didnt even know he fought in the war. He has been a bit reluctant to talk about it, but in the past year or two he has seen the i really do have an interest, so he has started telling me little bits and pieces. now i just have to start recording him. he lives afew hours away so I dont see him that often.

I am also trying to record my neighbor. I also call he and his wife Grandpa and Grandma because for the most part they were my grandparents growning up. I never saw my real ones very much except for my Dad's mother. My neighbor was a fighter Pilot in WWII. He flew the P-38. One of the coolest planes every built I might add! He was shot down in the pacific and spent 9 days at sea before he was rescued. He's unfortunatly been moved into a home last month, so I am trying to get over to see him to start recording some of his stories as well. I have heard them a thousand times, but I'd like to have them in his own words. I do have one video someone made a number of years ago on his experience.

On a side note, very cool story I think. My neighbor spent years trying to find the Pilot of the plane that rescued him, but could never track him down. He knew his name and the city he lived in in the 1940's but that was all he knew. He highered private investigators and all to find him, but never had any luck. He became fascinated with teh internet and wrote down what he knew to see if i could maybe find someone that knew him or something.. with in 15 minutes I was talking on the phone with the guy!! I couldnt believe it.. I was absolutely speechless when I called and his wife answered the phone and started saying yes yes, that was him, yes he flew this plane etc.. :Q :Q I talked to him and told him the story and he said he did remember finding him and always wondered what happened to him. I passed his phone number on to my neighbor and I guess they had a long phone call talking. My neighbor couldnt believe it when I walked over.. It was so wonderful to see his eyes light up with excitement when I walked in and said I found him!


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Guruthostirn
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 5:53 am
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Well, I'd have to haul my sister in here to give a real description of our family history, but it's definitely only one sided: we still haven't gotten our dad to haul His family tree out of storage. All we know there is that my great grandmother on his mom's dad's side was from Wales...

As for my mom's side, as with many other Americans, I can trace at least one line back to one of the pilgrims on the Mayflower...don't know which one though. Like I said, it was my sister's work...along with our mom. We Were able to establish a complete family tree going back to the 1400's, but at that point there were some irregularities in the records: one version plopped us into royalty another century back, the other one I never really heard about...

Suffice to say, as far as I know, I'm exclusively Irish, Scottish (not much), Welsh, and a lot of English.

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gimli_axe_wielder
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royalty huh.. are we supposed to bow and kiss your feet or something??? :help:

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vison
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 6:03 am
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A few years ago my mum and I went to Grosse Isle in Quebec, a large island in the St. Lawrence near Quebec City. This is one of the places immigrants to Canada were "processed".

There was a terrible cholera outbreak on the ships bringing the poor Irish to Canada to escape the famine. Thousands died at sea, and upon reaching Grosse Isle. There is a lovely memorial on the island.

In the group that mum and I went with was a very old man from New York City. He was in his nineties and he was going there with his great-granddaughter and her husband to see the memorial because his grandfather's name was on it.

I tell you, we all cried when the old man put his hand on his granddad's name. There were about 50 of us, it was cold and windy, the rain lashing our faces, and we stood there and wept as the old man touched the name.

We all long to know our roots. It is part and parcel of being human, to want to touch our kin. I have 120 first, second and third cousins, descended from my granny Madeline who had 15 children! And that's just that bit of my family.

My Norwegian grandfather had a family in Texas before he ever came to Canada. He had a family with a native woman in the Alberta Rockies before he met my granny and had another 15 children. When he died, and my mum was going through his papers with her mum, they came across the name of his first wife and of the children he'd left in Texas. On an impulse Mum wrote to that branch of the family. My uncle replied, saying he thought he and his sons were the only ones!!! He was a bit surprised, but not horrified to find that rather than being the only one left there were 14 more in Canada, and actually more if we only knew where the native ones were (we can't seem to find them at all). He came to visit us and most of the clan was at the airport to meet him and we could spot him immediately, he was the absolute image of my grandpa, I can still see him, this tall handsome man, his soldierly bearing (he was a very high ranking military man). He was thrilled with all of us, but sadly his wife and children weren't so after that one lovely visit we never saw him again.

Families! We all have stories and the funny thing is, most of these stories aren't ever recorded, the bare bones of birth certificates and registries and census forms sure as hell don't tell the whole tale.


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Guruthostirn
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 6:24 am
That Weird American
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Location: Pacific Northwest U.S.
 
Yes Gimli...it's been seven hundred years since one of us might have been on the throne, and they didn't admit we existed, but if you'd like, you can gladly kiss my feet...

Then you can pay me $10 dollars an hour to trace Your family, and I'll bet you half of what I make that I'll find a king in your ancestors too...

Heck, it's 50-50 that on the right site I can trace you back to Jesus Christ (though how they figured that one was beyond me...maybe it's 'cause all the good resources are Mormon?)

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That crazy American Jerk...

"No stop signs, speed limits, no body's gonna slow me down..."

"You can run, but you'll die tired." -- What the archer said to the knight.


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The Watcher
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Posted: Sun 19 Jun , 2005 6:32 am
Same as it ever was
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Location: Cake or DEATH? Errr, cake please...
 
Well, as far as interesting stories go, I do have two that I know are true.

The first concerns my rumored to be quite feisty great grandfather, my father's grandpa, who was a railroad engineer who had moved his family to Milwaukee. At this point the family was still devout Irish Catholic, but my g grandfather became a founding member of the local chapter for the Knights of Pythius, a sort of pseudo Masonic/benevolent brotherhood. This was a strict no-no back in those days for a Roman Catholic, and the parish priest told him he would need to resign. Great Grandpa supposedly got quite put out by this, told the priest off in not so nice terms, and got himself excommunicated. It did not bother him one whit - he promptly joined the Congregational church just up the street and went merrily on his way. I hope I did not curse my youngest son - he is named after this man!!

The other concerns my great great grandmother, my dad's mom's grandmother. She was the wife to a man who first was a lead miner and then became a tavernkeeper in a small town along the Mississippi in western Wisconsin. She bore 13 children of whom 11 survived to adulthood, and the last four children were born after she was age forty - the youngest born when she was 48. I cannot imagine bearing children at this age, although I know it was highly likely. Anyway, she died at age 75 from severe burns that she incurred after her clothing caught on fire while she was outside doing her laundry in a large cauldron the way folks did things those days, in 1905. I once had a copy of the newspaper article that contained the sad tale and her obituary, but have misplaced it - my aunt does have another. I do have quite a bit of info on some of her children as well, and, given their humble background, many of them did quite well. She must have been an amazing woman - Eliza Ann McNabb Caskey - and I have often toyed with the idea of writing a semi-factual story based on what I do know of her life or what it must have been like.

Last edited by The Watcher on Tue 21 Jun , 2005 1:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Scientists tell us that the fastest animal on earth, with a top speed of 120 miles per second, is a cow that has been dropped from a helicopter.

Never under any circumstances take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

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Glaciers melting in the dead of night and the superstars sucked into the supermassive...
Supermassive Black Hole.

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