more roots
Jan. 16th, 2011 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutWell, that was a learning experience. I learned a phrase in Dutch that I sort of could have done without forever: levenloos geboren. As I was tracking up the tree, I was looking at the marriage record for a woman which included her parents names, but I was inexplicably unable to find the woman's birth record -- which was really, really unexpected. So I tried finding siblings, by searching for the birth records in which her parents were the parents. And I found a series of records with no name on them, which was really odd, until I looked down in the other information section and used google to translate levenloos geboren. Since this was all a hundred and fifty plus years ago, really not a big deal, but what a sad thing for that couple. I'm assuming the woman I was looking at was adopted, and her actual birth record is somewhere associated with a completely other set of parents -- possibly with a different name as well.
When I hit a bunch of walls in the Dutch database, I switched over to working on my mother's side, which is sort of a pain, and I really can't do a decent job without digging up a CD of genealogical information for the Mennonite side. The paper tree is terrible: full of errors and way out of date. It was good enough to hook up with other people in that clan, but their data isn't great, either.
On my maternal grandmother's side, I didn't even know her parents names. I did, however, get ridiculously lucky: I found the marriage record for my maternal grandparents and it had my maternal grandmother's parents filled in. That tied in with someone else's tree on ancestry.com, and while Irvine Douglas/Irwen didn't go anywhere at all, my maternal grandmother's mother is still going strong in the early 18th century. I now know of ancestors that were so thoroughly on the wrong side of the Civil War that they named a baby after Robert E. Lee. In 1867. I'm not sure what I think about this.
My mother got married at 19. _Her_ mother got married at 19. _Her_ mother got married at _12_ [ETA: Wow. Huge braino. 22, actually] to a 13 [23, ditto] year old and then they apparently moved from the middle of one nowhere to the middle of a different nowhere. No wonder there's no collective memory of our distant family for that quarter of the family. Worse, I just found out that one of my mother's uncles was living in Seattle until his death in 1981. I don't think I ever met him. I don't know whether my mother even knew he was there, but I doubt I care enough to try to find out.
Still on the list of walls to bash my head against: attempt to track down the children of my paternal grandfather's brother, who also came to the US. R. would also like me to track some of his tree.
When I hit a bunch of walls in the Dutch database, I switched over to working on my mother's side, which is sort of a pain, and I really can't do a decent job without digging up a CD of genealogical information for the Mennonite side. The paper tree is terrible: full of errors and way out of date. It was good enough to hook up with other people in that clan, but their data isn't great, either.
On my maternal grandmother's side, I didn't even know her parents names. I did, however, get ridiculously lucky: I found the marriage record for my maternal grandparents and it had my maternal grandmother's parents filled in. That tied in with someone else's tree on ancestry.com, and while Irvine Douglas/Irwen didn't go anywhere at all, my maternal grandmother's mother is still going strong in the early 18th century. I now know of ancestors that were so thoroughly on the wrong side of the Civil War that they named a baby after Robert E. Lee. In 1867. I'm not sure what I think about this.
My mother got married at 19. _Her_ mother got married at 19. _Her_ mother got married at _12_ [ETA: Wow. Huge braino. 22, actually] to a 13 [23, ditto] year old and then they apparently moved from the middle of one nowhere to the middle of a different nowhere. No wonder there's no collective memory of our distant family for that quarter of the family. Worse, I just found out that one of my mother's uncles was living in Seattle until his death in 1981. I don't think I ever met him. I don't know whether my mother even knew he was there, but I doubt I care enough to try to find out.
Still on the list of walls to bash my head against: attempt to track down the children of my paternal grandfather's brother, who also came to the US. R. would also like me to track some of his tree.