Anybody doing genealogy?

Interesting note about graveyards. My grandfather was buried recently outside a small, rural town in north central Illinois. There were 12-15 tombstones with my mom's family name in one area of the cemetery, some going back to the 1800s ... but my grandpa's sister, who died at 1-1/2 of a childhood disease in the early 1930s, was in a different spot.

Apparently infants/young children had their own area of Catholic cemeteries, at least back then.

And yes, like many Midwestern towns, there was the Catholic cemetery and the cemetery for everyone else. Two separate groves of trees, about two miles apart, breaking up the flat farmland.

 

Actually, my Ancestry.com research disproved my "famous" ancestry. (A "special" part of the family believes that one of my great great grandfathers was Jesse James.)

I'm planning on starting the DAR process this summer. I think I have at least two (one on both Mom and Dad's side) who fought in the American Revolution. That application is intense though.

I go through spurts of doing a lot of research and then I leave it untouched for months.

 

While she was alive, my mother always pooh-poohed the whole idea of the DAR and like organizations, at first dismissing them because of being elitist and snooty and to some extent racist. When she was young in the 30s/40s the DAR got in several highly publicized kerfuffles because they wouldn't allow black performers such as Marian Anderson to appear at functions.

She also said several times we were probably not eligible anyway because most of our family's ancestry came from Ireland in the 1840s/50s.

But, doing my digging a few decades later, I find now we're more than fully qualified; all 4 males in one of our GGGG-GF "pods" were documented as having marched in uniform in the Revolution. (All you need for DAR/SAR admission is one, fully documented.)

But dues for the DAR and SAR are not dirt cheap; it's more than a $20 annual magazine subscription. So we'll probably be satisfied with saying "we could get in if we wanted to." Wooohoo.

 

Some fresh news on this front: a month or so ago, I had the spare change sitting around, so I decided to spring for the AncestryDNA test.

I'd seen some online horror stories that test processing took months on end, but barely two weeks after I mailed in the little spit-filled test tube, I got my report:

84% Irish
10% British
3% Finnish / Russian
>1% W. European
>1% Scandinavian
>1% Iberian (Spanish-French)

.... None of which is very surprising, since I had already known I was 7/8ths Irish.

The one English branch of the tree I have really traced back lists some ancestors back in France in the Middle Ages, and my mother's family always had some lore about Spanish Armada sailors contributing to recurrent outbreaks of black hair.

My father's side is mostly red-haired Irish from the NW side of the island, and numerous sources say that side was heavily hit by Norse marauders coming across the North Sea in medieval times, so that's probably where the Scandinavian / Finnish/Russian blood comes from.

They came from the land of the ice and snow, of the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow!!

Anyway I now have a bunch of 3rd-6th genetic cousins also participating in the program so I can start trading emails from them.

And on the other hand, Ancestry now has a copy of my DNA on file. Prepare for the Attack of the StarClones.

 

Why not: AncestryDNA emailed me with "updated analysis" of my DNA test from 2015 and reported that now, I test out as 100% Irish/ Scottish.

Which is a little curious, because I have one great grandparent branch which was pretty firmly documented way, way back as being mostly English.

 

My brother found some papers in my late dad's collection sent to him by my aforementioned LDS ancestors. Family tree has been traced back to 1175, in Devonshire, England. My branch came to America in 1633, landed in Dorchester, Mass., and then moved to Barnstable before successive family members moved to Connecticut and then to Cattaraugus County in the Southern Tier of NY, where I began in 1954.

Just discovered tonight that veteran actor Jeff Fahey was born in Olean in the same era as me and my brothers.

 

An uh-oh moment on the genealogy front: AncestryDNA informed me of the name of a second cousin (or first once removed) whom nobody in the family (on either side) appears to know.

My guess is either, 1) some kind of testing glitch, or 2) one of my uncles may have had some fun on the side.


It would actually be kind of cool if they turned out to be the child (or grandchild) of my uncle who was shot down in WWII in 1944 -- it would be nice to think that something survived him.


Hmmm. This person's DNA ethnicity readout, compared to my family's 100 percent Irish-Scottish, comes back as 60 percent Irish-- and 39 percent English. My WWII uncle was stationed in England for six months prior to his fatal flight.

 

Fees for genealogy records from the government could go up nearly 500%. An effort is underway to stop that - CNN

 

Claiming James is practically a birthright of folks born in the midwest and mid-south. My own damn family has had brushes with that horse shit.

 

So what I'm getting here is we are related. If not by Jesse James, then by the crazy.

 

You should reach out and contact them.... probably?

If they were adopted, they might be reluctant to get in touch with a biological second cousin. I haven't done it myself but I've been told that looking at a computer screen full of random names is daunting. (And if they've just found out that a parent isn't their genetic parent, the damage has already been done anyway.)

 

OK, I checked with aunts and uncles on both sides (they're in their late 80s but still on the ball) and nobody knows of any 1st cousin offspring with any name similar to this.

So I sent off an instant message and presumably I should get an answer soon.
If they're adopted or the child of an adoptee, presumably they're ready for some unexpected results.