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I solved one of those 'back-burner' mysteries that had been haunting me for a few years. I was sure that there was a relationship between my g-grandfather and two families that lived about 100 miles away. They had the same last name but I couldn't find any evidence. The other families came to the USA thirty years before my g-grandfather. My family members travelled back and forth and even married folks in that distant community....but I couldn't find anything that showed a family link.
I put it aside and worked on other things....until yesterday. More and more newspapers are being digitized and posted online. Those old small-town newspapers had lots of little newsy items printed each week...who was sick, who was travelling, who was visiting. I did a search and found several local news items that mentioned my relatives visiting 'cousins' in the community and listing names. So, finally, I can put this to rest. My g-grandfather was the brother of the two guys that came over thirty years earlier. I figured as much but it is good to find something to confirm what I was thinking.
When I started reading your post I thought, "I wonder if there was anything in a local paper." Sure enough.
This could be called a recent discovery. A lady at work and I look enough alike to be sisters and we always joke about it. She is from Northcentral Alabama and I am from Western North Carolina.
She brought in her family tree, and sure enough in the late 1700s a line of her ancestors lived in the same county where I was born and I grew up knowing people with the same surname.
A relation, maybe - my lines aren't all filled in. But more than a coincidence.
This could be called a recent discovery. A lady at work and I look enough alike to be sisters and we always joke about it. She is from Northcentral Alabama and I am from Western North Carolina.
She brought in her family tree, and sure enough in the late 1700s a line of her ancestors lived in the same county where I was born and I grew up knowing people with the same surname.
A relation, maybe - my lines aren't all filled in. But more than a coincidence.
It'd be fun for both of you to be DNA tested, though if the connection is far enough up the tree, you might not be able to pick it up with DNA.
Found out my great grandmother's maiden name and her hometown. Found a couple of immigration documents too, one of them documented her as a 4'6 man. Quite a typo I must say...
Her husband's origin has my interest lately. I looked up his surname on EllisIsland.org and all of the others with his surname are from Russia, yet he was from Poland. Also found his draft card that he signed around 1940, kind of strange because he was about 55 at the time though maybe the rules were different for immigrants that spoke German...
I've been trying to find information about my great-grandmother. She and her husband were living in Cuba when my grandfather was born. My father had sent me her name as Maria Yslas e Quinveges, but I have no other information about her. I knew my great-grandfather had left the Basque Country in Spain to move to Cuba with his siblings and parents, but I don't know if he brought his wife with him or if he met her in Cuba. My grandfather has two cities listed as his birthplace, Cienfuegos and Bayamo, Cuba. Last year, I contacted cathedrals in both towns, but neither could find any record of his birth. I was hoping that information about his mother would be listed on it. I've been looking online for the name or word "Quinveges" but have found it nowhere, until the other day when someone in a Basque genealogy group suggested that it might be Portuguese, as they do have the name "Quimbegas" and the "e" between her surnames rather than a "y" is Portuguese rather than Spanish. So that gives me another direction to look in. Getting records out of Cuba isn't very easy!
Lets see most recent discoveries I have made in all of 2013:
1. I can claim for membership to Sons of American Revolution through several of my ancestors
2. My bloodline has been in every single American War
3. The Pirate Captain Henry Morgan is a 1st Cousin 11 times removed
4. An old family tale of having native american blood is true (although to far back to make a difference)
I'm new to doing this myself (though my father has figured out the family lines of him, my mother, all inlaws, etc.). But my mother had been bugging me to write a book about my GG Aunt, who was a medical missionary in Persia around the turn of the century.
So I started reading materials she had collected over the years, and got hooked on the story of a fellow missionary who married a Syrian Christian woman -- to the horror of his colleagues -- but then, after starting a family with her, saw her murdered by a servant.
In trying to follow up on this minister, his two children by the Syrian woman and his family by the next wife, I discovered that, entirely by coincidence, he and the family all wound up in my hometown, many while I was still living there in the 1960s and '70s. The Syrian woman's son died there shortly after I graduated from college and moved away.
Have found that at least one of our French surnames in NH came from Quebec.
Potato pickers? When I was a boy spending my summers in Kensington, NH in the 1950s, they were treated like gypsies. Hopefully, they have prospered. Yes, I also picked potatoes, but couldn't keep up. In those days, I was a "striker", a kid who gets loaned out to another farmer in return for some goods or services provided by the farmer. While prohibited by the 13th Amendment, it flourished among Yankee families around where i lived.
Potato pickers? When I was a boy spending my summers in Kensington, NH in the 1950s, they were treated like gypsies. Hopefully, they have prospered. Yes, I also picked potatoes, but couldn't keep up. In those days, I was a "striker", a kid who gets loaned out to another farmer in return for some goods or services provided by the farmer. While prohibited by the 13th Amendment, it flourished among Yankee families around where i lived.
Have found that at least one of our French surnames in NH came from Quebec.
If these are people who lived in NH it's very likely any French surnames would have their origins in Quebec. Or Canada's eastern provinces that once formed Acadia (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island).
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