tuesday April thirteenth
Hello, my name is Sally and I am an addict.
After a pretty long hiatus, I recently renewed my interest in my father's family. Part of the decision was prompted by Pop's passing, and the ensuing need to figure out where he had been over the last eighty years to satisfy the estate settlement requirements of Finland. The good news is we - my siblings and I - were able to cobble together a timeline that spanned the years from Pop's graduation from Admiral Farragut's Military Academy - (interesting choice Pop) - to his death in Finland.
There only four years between high school and when he married Mom, that we have absolutely no documented knowledge of where he was, or what he was up to. And quite possibly we will never know.
We have canvassed the greater family, and have come up with only a few stories about the wonderful times various friends and relatives enjoyed spending time with Pop. I could be satisfied with that.
BUT, I know that after marrying Mom, the newlyweds set off for the midwest where Pop worked for an airplane manufacturing company. They lived in TX, OK and CA over the next six years. Most of what Pop was doing was clouded in "proprietary information", that the company is hesitant to talk about even now. My big question is - with what training was my father capable of contributing to this unmentionable work? I know Pop was a resourceful and amazing tinkerer, which provided well for him later on, but I still wonder about those four years and just what he was up to then.
This is where the addiction comes in.
I can't let go of this.
I need to have answers.
I started serious family research back in the the early 2000's when Pop decided to celebrate his birthday in Nova Scotia, where our family lived for a while before coming to America. Or, as we now know, returning to the States. I spent many happy hours in the Queens County Historical Society library reading about my relatives, making copies of pertinant information, and several hours searching through graveyards in Mill Village where a lot, but not all of my family were buried.
This has become an obsession. I am now a card-carrying member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. I spend hours reading history books, searching databases, scanning thousands of records and tromping through graveyards. There are good days where I find where my great grandparents are actually buried, or we find the town where part of the family migrated to, had lots more family and, luckily for us, were well known enough to be written about in the town's historic accounts. And there are a lot of days of fruitless searching where nothing new is found. Arggh.
Oh how I wish I knew that I would have this addiction back when the people who were able to tell me family stories were alive!
Sadly, there are few family gems that I recall. The most provocative is one great aunt admonishing all the new family members to, if asked, reply that they came from western Massachusetts, not Nova Scotia. And this was pretty recent - in the past 100 years or so. Well, the family blended into the society of Melrose fairly well and went on to be upstanding members of the community. As far as I know. Pop was the last of his generation to pass on. Families scattered. Grandparents died before we were born, we weren't close to our aunts, uncles and cousins... you know...
On the up side, I have met relatives online. Not the close, played-with-as-a-child type of relative, but a name on a family tree kind... certainly connected, but in a remote and distant way. Still, we are crafting a relationship, helping each other out with ideas of where one might go next to find more information about the connection between one generation and the next, or the whereabouts of a missing brother, or the gems already discovered.
It reminds me of the old Scottish way of sussing out a friend or foe ... in the first moments of an encounter, sufficient time is spent seeing who one is related to... and by the end of the conversation each party knows exactly where they stand in relation to the person they are speaking with. Compared to that, I know very little of my heritage. Every day, however, brings me a step closer to being able to recite my lineage when called upon...
I have another mystery. Of course. The family line starts - as far as we know it to be true - in 1653 with the birth of our ancestor - possibly in Inverness, Scotland. I say possibly, because so far, no one knows his lineage. This mystery ancestor could have made it all up on his way to the new world. A fresh start. A new identity? Running from, or running to?
I wish I could channel him and ask him a few questions.
What made my family travel around so much? First, the oldest ancester sails to Connecticut in the later part of the 1600's. Then makes his way to Boston and marries and settles in Salisbury MA. Has a child, or two and moves on to Concord, MA. Has a couple more children and decides to move the family to Lyme, CT. He and his wife live work in CT and have still more children ... twelve in all. The next generation - stays on in CT for a while, then gets wanderlust, or is in some other way prompted to move on - some to NH and VT, some on to Canada. It starts to get really confusing at this point - and it is only the early 1700's ... my newly found relative sent me a chart of the family that she had ... it must have a thousand or so family members... but it did not have my particular branch, so I ammended it and sent a copy back to her.
Unfortunately there was a real dedication to recycle family names in the greater family. LOTS of the same names pop up in every generation and in every sibling's family of every generation. Makes it difficult to keep people sorted out. And the size of the families! I think the family record belongs to a woman who had 17 children... this was back in the 1700's.
I started a historic timeline last week to accompany the dates and names of my family members. I needed to put my family into a larger perspective, and now I have a better idea why they made some of the choices they did in where they lived, and what they did for a living. And I'm still in the 1600's!
Did you know the first UFO sighting was back in 1644? Yes, on Jan 18, the 1st reported UFO sighting in America was made by perplexed pilgrims in Boston.
Well, it's time to go sort out a few family members. Even during the typing of this blog entry I found a mistake in my tree...
After a pretty long hiatus, I recently renewed my interest in my father's family. Part of the decision was prompted by Pop's passing, and the ensuing need to figure out where he had been over the last eighty years to satisfy the estate settlement requirements of Finland. The good news is we - my siblings and I - were able to cobble together a timeline that spanned the years from Pop's graduation from Admiral Farragut's Military Academy - (interesting choice Pop) - to his death in Finland.
There only four years between high school and when he married Mom, that we have absolutely no documented knowledge of where he was, or what he was up to. And quite possibly we will never know.
We have canvassed the greater family, and have come up with only a few stories about the wonderful times various friends and relatives enjoyed spending time with Pop. I could be satisfied with that.
BUT, I know that after marrying Mom, the newlyweds set off for the midwest where Pop worked for an airplane manufacturing company. They lived in TX, OK and CA over the next six years. Most of what Pop was doing was clouded in "proprietary information", that the company is hesitant to talk about even now. My big question is - with what training was my father capable of contributing to this unmentionable work? I know Pop was a resourceful and amazing tinkerer, which provided well for him later on, but I still wonder about those four years and just what he was up to then.
This is where the addiction comes in.
I can't let go of this.
I need to have answers.
I started serious family research back in the the early 2000's when Pop decided to celebrate his birthday in Nova Scotia, where our family lived for a while before coming to America. Or, as we now know, returning to the States. I spent many happy hours in the Queens County Historical Society library reading about my relatives, making copies of pertinant information, and several hours searching through graveyards in Mill Village where a lot, but not all of my family were buried.
This has become an obsession. I am now a card-carrying member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. I spend hours reading history books, searching databases, scanning thousands of records and tromping through graveyards. There are good days where I find where my great grandparents are actually buried, or we find the town where part of the family migrated to, had lots more family and, luckily for us, were well known enough to be written about in the town's historic accounts. And there are a lot of days of fruitless searching where nothing new is found. Arggh.
Oh how I wish I knew that I would have this addiction back when the people who were able to tell me family stories were alive!
Sadly, there are few family gems that I recall. The most provocative is one great aunt admonishing all the new family members to, if asked, reply that they came from western Massachusetts, not Nova Scotia. And this was pretty recent - in the past 100 years or so. Well, the family blended into the society of Melrose fairly well and went on to be upstanding members of the community. As far as I know. Pop was the last of his generation to pass on. Families scattered. Grandparents died before we were born, we weren't close to our aunts, uncles and cousins... you know...
On the up side, I have met relatives online. Not the close, played-with-as-a-child type of relative, but a name on a family tree kind... certainly connected, but in a remote and distant way. Still, we are crafting a relationship, helping each other out with ideas of where one might go next to find more information about the connection between one generation and the next, or the whereabouts of a missing brother, or the gems already discovered.
It reminds me of the old Scottish way of sussing out a friend or foe ... in the first moments of an encounter, sufficient time is spent seeing who one is related to... and by the end of the conversation each party knows exactly where they stand in relation to the person they are speaking with. Compared to that, I know very little of my heritage. Every day, however, brings me a step closer to being able to recite my lineage when called upon...
I have another mystery. Of course. The family line starts - as far as we know it to be true - in 1653 with the birth of our ancestor - possibly in Inverness, Scotland. I say possibly, because so far, no one knows his lineage. This mystery ancestor could have made it all up on his way to the new world. A fresh start. A new identity? Running from, or running to?
I wish I could channel him and ask him a few questions.
What made my family travel around so much? First, the oldest ancester sails to Connecticut in the later part of the 1600's. Then makes his way to Boston and marries and settles in Salisbury MA. Has a child, or two and moves on to Concord, MA. Has a couple more children and decides to move the family to Lyme, CT. He and his wife live work in CT and have still more children ... twelve in all. The next generation - stays on in CT for a while, then gets wanderlust, or is in some other way prompted to move on - some to NH and VT, some on to Canada. It starts to get really confusing at this point - and it is only the early 1700's ... my newly found relative sent me a chart of the family that she had ... it must have a thousand or so family members... but it did not have my particular branch, so I ammended it and sent a copy back to her.
Unfortunately there was a real dedication to recycle family names in the greater family. LOTS of the same names pop up in every generation and in every sibling's family of every generation. Makes it difficult to keep people sorted out. And the size of the families! I think the family record belongs to a woman who had 17 children... this was back in the 1700's.
I started a historic timeline last week to accompany the dates and names of my family members. I needed to put my family into a larger perspective, and now I have a better idea why they made some of the choices they did in where they lived, and what they did for a living. And I'm still in the 1600's!
Did you know the first UFO sighting was back in 1644? Yes, on Jan 18, the 1st reported UFO sighting in America was made by perplexed pilgrims in Boston.
Well, it's time to go sort out a few family members. Even during the typing of this blog entry I found a mistake in my tree...
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