My (Grand)Daddy spent over a decade of his retirement working on our family history. Several years before he passed, he lamented, “I’m not sure what’s going to happen to all of this when I die.”
Grandma: Oh, it’s all going to Karma. She’s the one who really cares about it. We decided a long time ago.
(Grand)Daddy: Nobody told me!
Grandma: (laughing): Well, you’ll be dead!
Daddy started shipping me binders and binders of material.
Towards his end, I tried to get my mom to get him to send me the electronic copies of everything, but his growing dementia and her luddite nature prevented this.
Me: Have Daddy send me the electronic files.
Mom: Let me write that down. Electronic files. Where are they?
Me: On his computer?
Mom: On top of the computer?
If you’re picturing that scene from Zoolander, you’re close. She has never sent or received an email or even a text.
(It’s not an age thing: her father was fluent with technology.)
The electronic files didn’t show up, but Dante and I tried to get what we could off of his computer when we were home for his funeral. We got less than we wanted (the autobiographical stories he wrote, for example, are completely missing) and more than we wanted (I hope you, dear reader, do not come across your grandfather’s porn).
I’ve been working in fits and spurts in the years since.
My (Grand)Daddy had found we were descended from an illegitimate son of a Duke, many generations back. The tree sort of stopped there, though I was excited, because a Duke meant there would be documented family going back quite a ways: and there was. This Duke was related to John of Gaunt, who’s related to most of the royalty in Europe, past and present. I was spending an inordinate amount of time manually adding people to the tree, until it occurred to me that someone must have done Queen Elizabeth II’s tree that I could graft on to mine, since we’re cousins. The only one I found, though, is kinda silly. It claims Jesus is my 55th GG, via a baby he made with Mary Magdalene (his dad is listed as Joseph . . .). I would just cut those branches off, but whoever made the file included all of the relevant myths. Odin (Woden) is a GG too, for example. Leaving them in is a little nod to my (Grand)Daddy, actually. At one point in the tree, when he reached the end of the knowable in his brother-in-law’s line, he inputted someone’s parents as Hagar and Horrible and Mrs. Horrible.
As I worked, mom’s side grew exponentially. My dad’s side stopped at his parents. My grandfather hated my father, so he didn’t spend time on that. (There’s also a family member whose wife he hated so much that he refused to add her at all.)
I started working on my dad’s side last Fall. I found the Native America grandmother he had mentioned, though she was way far back in the tree, when I’d been told she was my great-grandmother (I’m not sure if my dad was mistaken when he told my mom about this or if my mom was mistaken when she relayed it to me). Soon enough, my mom and dad’s trees started merging. One of my most recent immigrant GGs is Angus Anderson, from the Isle of Skye, Scotland in the early 1800s, on my mom’s side (he settled in Bay County, FL). I found an Anderson living in the same place on dad’s side now too. I really missed my (Grand)Daddy in that moment. He would have been thrilled to find that.
In the 1300s, though, my parents’ trees became incredibly intertwined. Any given GG from there back links to both sides of me, because of two families whose kids married each other.
Sir Richard FitzAlan (b. 1313) and Lady Eleanor of Lancaster (1318) had Lady Joan FitzAlan (1348) and Sir Richard FitzAlan (1348).
Sir William de Bohun (1312) and Lady Elizabeth de Badlesmere (1313) had Lady Elizabeth de Bohun (1350) and Sir Humphrey de Bohun (1342).
(Sir William de Bohun and Lady Eleanor of Lancaster were 2nd cousins).
Joan FitzAlan married Humphrey de Bohun. Their progeny eventually marries into the Holland line, including a bastard son whose progeny ends up in Jamestown and eventually leads to Bessie Holland, my great-grandmother (my (Grand)Daddy’s mom), who taught me to play solitaire and knitted my sweaters and let me have the cherries out of her Manhattans.
Richard FitzAlan married Elizabeth de Bohun. Their progeny eventually marries into the Howard line and then the Norris line, including some that end up in Jamestown and eventually James Dean (Skip) Norris, my dad.
I have to actively not let myself just do this all day, since there are papers to grade and classes to plan and conferences to prepare for and friends to see and emails to answer and journal work to complete and meals to make and books to read and queues to watch.
I’m eventually going to post some of the cooler things I’ve found, but I do need to let you know that I know the following:
I’m really privileged to be able to do this: to have some ancestors who weren’t separated from their homes and families in ways that destroyed the knowledge of their lines.
All of this is really specious. I’m counting on records to be accurate that probably aren’t and children to be the offspring of fathers who biologically might not be.
For example, my son’s biological father discovered his father wasn’t his biological father after my son and I did our Ancestry DNA tests.
Thus, this is all a kind of ancestor fan fiction once you go back enough.
But it’s still fun!
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