--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > My brother is a genealogy freak, and has long > been obsessed with tracking down our ancestors. > This has been complicated by the fact that our > father was adopted. He was literally found on > a doorstep in 1918, the year that the flu > pandemic that killed an estimated 100 million > people worldwide started, so we have assumed > for some time that his parents died in that > pandemic. > > He was adopted by a Quaker family, but grew up > fairly irreligious, and passed that along to me. > So did my mother, who was a Presbyterian in name > only. She tried to send me to Sunday School, but > I was literally kicked out after a few weeks for > asking the Sunday School teacher where the woman > who supposedly married Cain in the Land of Nod > came from. > > Anyway, my brother just got back from a field > trip to Philadelphia, where he tracked down adop- > tion and census records that hint that my father > was the son of US-born citizens (which spoils our > hopes of getting a "grandfather clause" EU nation > passport), but that *their* parents were most > likely from Russia, and spoke Yiddish. > > So cool...I'm Jewish. Oy veh. > > Not really, of course, since as I understand it > Jewish lineage is valid only if passed down matri- > linearly, but it's fun to play with a whole new > concept -- being at least partly descended from > Russian Jews. > > Mix that in with the established Scot-Irish > heritage on my mother's side, and my gene pool is > kinda like the result of an unlikely ménage à trois > between Sean Connery and Maureen O'Hara and Golda > Meir. :-) >
Cool, I'm waiting for a website where you just type in your name and birthday and it gives you a list all the way back to Adam. As it is I haven't had any luck, a shame becasue you never know what mysteries are lurking in your genes. I'd be most fascinated to find out my maternal lineage but my nobody knows exactly where my Great grandfather came from, all we know is that he's from the Scottish Highlands and came down south to fight in the "great" war and had to lie about his age and whereabouts otherwise they wouldn't have let him into the army. Amazingly common behaviour apparently, he could have been 14-15 even. Trouble is he hardly ever told anyone where he was from and none of the family know, so it's a dead end.
