On Oct 8, 2008, at 2:26 PM, Hugo wrote:
--- 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.
The largest database of world genealogy is kept by the Mormons in
Utah. A couple of years ago we were contacted by a forensic
genealogist and an estate attorney from Utah. Apparently we had a
lost relative who had died with no children. These people had tracked
down the entire family tree--a hundred or so people--and distributed
the estate based on available records and "forensic genealogy."
Pretty amazing to see, as they forwarded to us the entire family tree
on this side of the family.
