Check Out Your Ancestors

[mso489]

My sister sent me a link to a history site on my great grandfather and his family, especially one of his adventurous daughters. He migrated from Springfield, Mass., and got into real estate on the shore of Lake Michigan north of Chicago. There's a book here, but it is quite amazing. He made a lot of money, lost quite a bit in the depression of 1873, then gained it back, and rode out the Great Depression, to some degree, though his kids' didn't all do so well. But what a crew. One of the daughters married for the first time when she was 70 and moved to an apartment with an elevator on Park Avenue in NY. I visited her there with a family group in the mid-sixties. There are so many stories. They sound contemporary, like People Magazine. If you are fortunate enough to have access to material on your family, and the patience to do a little digging, you may well be amazed. It's like an HBO series, a continual surprise.

 

[tuold]

I found out so many interesting things about my family through Ancestry.com, things my relatives never told me, probably because that in their day some things were scandalous then that are now mostly routine. (If you call five years in San Quentin routine)
One of the most interesting to me was finding out through my DNA analysis that I am 14% Eastern European. I had traced my ancestry to Scandinavia, Germany and England but I knew of no Eastern European ancestors. After a lot of fun detective work I found out my paternal grandmother had been given up for adoption after her birth parents immigrated from Russian Lithuania fleeing the anti Jewish pogroms there.
Tracing my wife's family back to colonial times, I found her 5th great grandfather was named James Monday. He got that name because he was found as a stowaway on a ship in New York harbor on a Monday. Apparently he either couldn't remember his name or didn't want to. The captain of the ship took him on as a cabin boy but never legally adopted him. He later wound up in Ohio with some land and became a successful farmer.
I think I've accumulated many stories like that one over the months I've been at Ancestry.com. I'll have to write a book someday.
The frustrating part of all this is tracing the story from just the facts and details. I know where everybody was at any given time but not always why or how they got there. Sadly, I waited too long to do this research. At this time in my life, there is no one older than me left to ask about family history. My nieces and nephews have shown no interest at all. Maybe someday they will. I would urge young people to get with your grandparents and take down an oral history from them. It will really help if you get involved in family history even if you aren't interested right now.

 

[madox07]

How nice, family story time. We know quite a few facts about my father's side of the family, dating back to the mid of the 19th century. This is mostly due to the fact that under Austro Hungarian rule records were kept pretty neatly. My great great grand da was a constructor, not a formerly educated one, but quite a talented individual. Stories go around our village that he was a very tall and strong individual. Our family plot in the local cemetery is very small, and when they buried my grand dad they found his grand father's remains. It seems that he had all teeth by the age of 78 when he passed - in those days that was a good sign of health. My great grand dad fought in the imperial army during WW1 in Italy. We have quite a few war stories in the family. My understanding is that he was also decorated for bravery and for being wounded, but the gold medals were used in making a necklace for my grand father's sister upon marrying. She died very young, and this artifact was lost to us. My mother was closer to what then was the Russian border, and they didn't bother as much with records over there, so I know very little about that side of the family. On my wife's mother side it seems that they descend from a family of lower Magyar nobility, but documents were lost. I suppose that we could find some records, but nobody speaks Hungarian in our family any more, which makes the task a bit difficult. On her father's side, they were all Romanians, and quite recently I found out that a friend of mine's great grand father - who was a Cossack officer in the Imperial guard of Alba Iulia, came from the same village as my father in law's grand mother. We don't have any online service that can aid us in finding out stuff about our ancestors, but one day perhaps I will undertake a quest to find out as much as I can and put together a family tree ...

 

[3rdguy]

Can you post the link please?
Thanks in advance.

 

[rist]

One of my maternal grandmothers cousins I believe was a priest or monk, he did a lot of family heritage research and I guess being a priest must be of great help as you have easy access to all the archives in the churches etc..

So the book of our family lineage actually starts with Charlemagne( his lineage being a Frank who were a northern European tribe that invaded what is now known as France and Belgium), apparently one of his grandchildren or great grandchildren became rulers of Northumbria I believe in the UK (I do not have the book with me at the moment so I am just writing from memory). This foreign ruling house was not very much appreciated and all of them were slaughtered except the queen with her kid. She was able to flee across the English canal to Belgium(though back then Belgium did not exist yet), eventually ending up in my little hometown which back then existed out of a couple of farms surrounded by endless miles of heather and sand, mainly occupied by poor sheep farmers. Her family became part of many folklore in my town, one of them is that they helped little gnomes who lived in the hills by supplying them with cooking supplies.

My paternal lineage can be tracked down to the 1500's, and we still live in the same village my ancestors back then did. Sadly, the old generation of villagers are almost all dead or the children moved out, so our dialect is bound to disappear with my generation. My 2 great grandfathers (one from maternal and one from paternal side) both worked in the coalmines, one of them being a prisoner of war during the second world war and the other one being an avid pipe smoker. I inherited his pipes and that is how I got started, I still got a pouch of tobacco from him, looks like semois or some burley to me.

 

[brightleaf]

An interesting family history story to read rist, thanks. I looked up the coal mining history in Belgium and am surprised at how big it once was. I like that your story ties in the the handing down of pipes and tobacco. You are very connected to your family and it's past.

 

[rist]

I forgot to mention I am actually named after my pipe smoking great grandfather, so the whole family agreed I should be the one taking care of his pipes. He could not read or write, so after his retirement (around age 40 due to his lungs being completely ruined by coalmine dust) pipe smoking was his favorite activity. According to my grandfather, he would close all the doors in the house so the room he was sitting in would be filled with smoke as he really loved the smell of tobacco in the house. He still lived to the ripe age of 80, back then the record holder of the family. My other great grandfather died at age 96, he got an heart attack as he was so afraid of going to the doctor for the first time in his life.

The flemish region I live in was extremely poor back then, most farmers only had a little bit of non-fertile land and would actually move down to the French speaking south to work on big farms for weeks and months on end, mainly to help harvesting beetroot and also grains which was very labor intensive. The only other option was working in the mines, which was quite dangerous and very unhealthy but was paid slightly better. My grandfather used to tell me that he used to ride his bike to the mines, which was a 2-3h ride, work for 48h hours and then drive his bike back home. The people of the past were really tough.
Now enough of stories, I could be writing all day! I am pretty sure that many stories of you Americans are much more interesting, as your history is much more diverse and adventurous than simple Belgian townsmen. I do know my grandmother has many cousins in the States as quite a few people from our town migrated there in the 1930ies I believe. And for all the Canadians here, in my town a Canadian/New zealand airplane was shot down by the germans, every year we still have a ceremony for them Canadians and New Zealanders that died in that crash at the local church.

And the first time my grandmother ate chocolate was from the Americans who freed our town from the Germans and gave it to the kids.

 

[elpfeife]

It is all good, Rist. Glad you posted that.

 

[workman]

Good stories. Besides things, stories are all we have. Btw, I read an interview with a genealogist once who said everyone in western Europe and most of America descends from Charlemagne, who fathered more than twenty children in the 8th century. Where I live (Faroe Islands) we still sing medieval ballads about the guy.

Anyway, love your stories.

 

[ocpsdan]

Here at Missouri Meerschaum, we have a Museum/ Retail Outlet. Since I started here I've always wanted to include more history about the Tibbe Family and their beginnings here in America (they are immigrants). I recently got access to original documents that were donated to the Missouri State Historical Society over the years (correspondences, business documents, historical accountings) stemming back to 1880. They easily span the course of 100 years of the Tibbe family.. and I have to tell you, those folks went through A LOT.
At my behest, the MSHS digitized all those documents for our use. For those of you who understand digital files, you'll know that a standard movie takes up ~2GB of data. The MSHS gave us 5.5GB 8O
I've been on a different world reading all this stuff.

 

[tuold]

madox07 wrote:

"I suppose that we could find some records, but nobody speaks Hungarian in our family any more, which makes the task a bit difficult."

I had a similar problem accessing Swedish records, which were hand written....and in Swedish.
One of the advantages of Ancestry.com's DNA matching service is that it puts you in touch with your unknown cousins out there who may have the family photographs and documents you don't, or who have already done a lot of the hard detective work.
I wish I had found a connection to nobility in my tree, but as far back as I have traced, we've all been hard working farmers and laborers. My ancestors fought as soldiers in every war America ever was involved in. One fought against my wife's grandfather in the Spanish/American War. Fortunately they didn't kill each other. Another barely escaped the Wyoming Massacre. That's the other benefit of doing this sort of research. It give you a direct connection to history.