Got to be birds flying higher

I ordered two marriage certificates this week and one of them turned out to be not my relative despite the similar name.

I feel obligated to research my not-relative's life, however. I know it was the style at the time in 1919, but dang, a 27 year old widowed man marrying a 16 year old girl has me going O.o

I'm going to assume marriage was a path to citizenship or he needed a maid/mother for the kids :S

On our recent trip to Ontario I received some genealogical information about my husband's family. Like my own family stories, it's a jumble of names and relationships! One of his uncles mentioned "going on the computer and finding out someone had already done the work" for his maternal grandparents and it was true! It was delightful to see hubs's family tree light up like a Christmas tree. It turns out hubs is Irish (which I knew), French, Scottish and...German!

Hubs has no interest genealogy, which I think is a shame since it's always so fascinating. In one visit I learned so much more about his family than I did in 24 years of knowing him, LOL!

Ancestry did a big update recently and I'll keep checking back to see if they're still working things out. The little bit of Swedish and Welsh on Mom's side disappeared and the West Asian countries on Dad's side got lumped into Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean.

It seems like more electoral voting lists were also released or added, because suddenly I can find more of my relatives that way too, including my parents.

The voting lists are cool because a quick scan showed my maternal great-grandmother, who we'll call GV for now, was quite the busybody. Lady did not stay put for very long! It seems she lived with her youngest son and his wife from 1968-1972 and went where they went. I didn't meet her and Mom doesn't have anything nice to say about GV. Regardless, I can't imagine my MIL living with us for more than a year at most :-D

When you hit a genealogy roadblock, there's only one thing to do--get started on other family members!

I created a family tree for a friend which I recently deleted as it was giving me his hints, but he was still amazed that his family tree could be traced back to Swiss dukes and duchesses. He started off on his own and I'm kinda happy about connecting someone to their past. The fun thing was that his family tree was well-documented, so it was easy to verify more recent names and places with him and keep going backwards.

Hubs, alas, has no interest in genealogy, or, rather doesn't feel the need to know. Well, I do, dangit! One of his cousins already did some of the pre-work on Ancestry, so it was easy to know I was on the right path. Hubs maternal grandfather's ancestors are solidly from Yorkshire, England. It goes back to the 1400s, so I'll have to research what the area's history.

Now, usually if you enter enough information into Ancestry, it starts coughing up all sorts of hints, but it's not doing so for my FIL family, even though his mother has a fairly unique name. I feel a challenge ahead, LOL!

So this week I focused on my great-grandfather's brother Andrew. The death certificate confirmed that it was his grave I found on Billion Graves with the death date worn away. He was born in 1886 and had a lot of kids with his wife, Nancy. Nancy is on Find A Grave and has a matching headstone to his.

I used Family Search to try and find information on my great-great-grandparents family and it did cough up a record from the 1916 census that I hemmed and hawed over. The ages and names were not quite right, but it is my family. Andrew would have been 30, married and not part of the household at the time. Andrew had seven children and as always, I have loads of cousins :-D

I guess my Genealogy Week isn't over just like this cold isn't over. The vital stats/provincial archives got back to me and I discovered that my great-grandmother was only married for two weeks before her new husband contracted some sort of virus and died. He's documented in a big local history book called Pride in Progress. The entry is so brief--he was born, worked on a farm, married my great-grandmother, died and is buried in St. Michael's.

Like the other marriage certificate, this one is mentioned on Ancestry, but my great-grandmother's last name was so mangled that never in a million years would I know it was the same person.

I only knew my great-grandmother and grandmother when they were old; it's so hard to imagine them as excited young women with their first husbands. But I think I can imagine, sometimes. Who would I be if he had lived? Would I be here? So many existential questions :-)

I also spent lunch looking up on British Columbia death certificates which are freely available online up to a certain year. It feels a little ghoulish, but they're so full of handy information like birth date, death date, location, spouse, form of burial, etc. There are some relatives I'll never find on Find A Grave because they were cremated. I won't upload the death certificates to Ancestry; that just seems like a bit much, but I did discover that one of my grandfather's brothers and my grand-great aunt's family both lived in Vernon about the same time. Wouldn't it be funny if the two groups interacted? The place where my great-uncle died is still standing as well and it's so...weird...but interesting at the same time.

Granny loved collecting obituaries and at the time I thought it was a little weird, but now I realize just like me, she was trying to organize her family tree :-)

I'm still not over this cold or feeling much better. I only had enough mental energy to trawl through Newspapers and save matching articles to Ancestry. Today I learned my great-grandfather's sister's daughter's husband (that's the husband of my 1st cousin 2x removed) was a prominent naturopathic doctor here in Calgary. He was frequently quoted in newspaper articles on nutrition, plus he was part of a public speaking club and the Cosmopolitan Club (a service organization). It's funny to think I saw his name in the paper and had no idea we were related. Had I known we had relatives here, Mom and I might have had coffee with him before he passed in 2005. My cousin passed away in 1991 alas. Their children are still alive and I'm unsure if I should reach out to them at the moment.

Ancestry's hint system coughed up a gravestone for my great-grandfather's sister, even though I searched Find A Grave pretty thoroughly. And although I looked through the provincial death indexes previously, during my second look, I found the death date I was missing for one of my great-grandfather's brothers. Find A Grave doesn't have all the graves btw--Family Search pointed me towards BillionGraves. A grave is listed that matches the name and locale, buuuuuuut the death year was worn away by time or weather. I may be spending another $5 on a death certificate to confirm it's my relative :-D

My family tree had many gains this past week, which was super exciting. After forays into my great-aunts families, and I'm unsure why, but looking at the same old data suddenly made things click. My grandfather had nine siblings, and I put extra effort into clipping all the articles I could find about them from Newspapers.com

Although there isn't a lot past 1950, there is enough to give an idea of central Alberta's rural life. My grandfather's surname isn't uncommon, but when paired with the place, it becomes easy to find family members. I had to get a little creative with my searches though as they often used their middle names as first names.

It seems my great-grandmother, my grandfather's mother, was quite the social butterfly, or at least understood the power of getting your name in the newspaper. Although my mother doesn't regard her fondly, I sense my great-grandmother had a lot of character. Whether that's good or bad, I'll let you decide :-D. But her busybody nature was a gift to the future.

I also made some gains on my grandmother's side of the family. I called Mom and we went through birth and death dates together, which really helped. Then, she confirmed the married name of one of my great-grandfather's sisters, which allowed me to link three obituaries.

My great-grandfather's side of the family is a bit of a mystery, as is his wife's. When looking at scanned documents, one is suddenly aware of the whisper space between facts.

If you're Ukrainian in a time when Ukrainians were unpopular, you might say that your family is Polish. Or maybe, you want to impress the census collector because they're a government agent and don't want to identify yourself as Ukrainian. Or maybe between the 1916 and 1930s, the borders shifted and you no longer find yourself Polish or Ukrainian according to a map.

It's really funny how statistics and records raise more questions than answers. And speaking of that...as I well know, there is no such thing as perfect records. Eventually, everyone's genealogy search ends up at the Department of Vital Statistics, and that's where I'm heading this month.

Sadly, the provincial archives consider online records simply to be scans of printouts or ledgers, which are not searchable yet. You have to guess a little, find the appropriate year and/or initial, and then scroll through giant PDFs to find your loved ones.

Earlier records, of course, are handwritten and not so easily skimmable. As Granny was born in 1923, my great-grandparents must have been married between 1920 and 1923. I searched both the lists of brides and bridegrooms but couldn't find a match.

However, that doesn't mean the record doesn't exist; I just have to ask an expert. It's super cheap to get a digital copy of a birth, marriage, or death certificate. At about $5 a scan I don't mind spending a bit of money on the wrong person :D

Ancestry sent me an email earlier this week that my sample arrived at the lab in Ireland and I should have some results in 6-8 weeks.

Just a note to self to sign up for Geni.com, which I found out about from an LJer.

Apparently it's handier for European connections and I should be able to import my data. The site doesn't look very fancy, but who knows what I'll discover next?

steorra, have you tried this site?

I think there's something fascinating about having ancestors and current-day cousins in an area that no longer exists. After plunking in as many relatives as I could think of, I let Ancestry's black box magic do the work of suggesting hints and I found my relatives in another family tree. Apparently my great-great-grandparents were from Galicia which no longer exists. This helpful map from Wikipedia overlays it with modern Europe, which is perhaps where some of the confusion of their origins comes from. My great-great-grandparents and my great-grandmother were probably not up and up on shifting borders back in the day.

Looking at the map, it feels good to find a place to point at--but then, I wonder--where they from the Polish side of Galicia or the Ukrainian side? Sigh.

By CMS Green - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link