Category: One Faeryfox’s Genealogy Journey

Hi again. So, while I keep working to find out who Rebecca is on my family tree, I decided to go and work on my dad’s mom’s side of the family. Overall, this one is fairly relaxing. I found a dead end on one part of the tree, where my 4th Great Grandmother Elizabeth McPherson Ray has nothing on her but a birth and death date. No parents, no hints, no nothing. But at least there seems to be no question on whether she belongs there.

But, this is also the side of the family where my paternal great grandparents were related to each other on both of each of their parents and closely. See, a couple of generations further back, two Houser brothers married different women, and a Coble/Kobel pair of siblings married two other people, then the children from those matches married cross-ways – the two Houser cousins [both girls] married a son of the Kobel sister, and the other the son of the Kobel brother. Then, those two pairs produced a son and a daughter who married each other, and my paternal grandmother was the product, along with a bunch of other kids. She was the youngest, near as I can tell, certainly one of the youngest.

So, yup, that seems to be the big scandal, genetically speaking, on that side of my family. Actually, to be fair, either the two House brothers, or the two Kobel siblings, were half-siblings. I’d have to spend almost as much time finding which again, because I’m working from my direct ancestor family tree right now, but there you have it.

Next week, there will probably not be a blog post; I’ve a con that I’ll be selling my stuff at next weekend, so I’ll probably be frantically trying to get everything together, or having a nervous breakdown. But join me the week after for more adventures in Genealogy.

Hi guys, the last week’s research has been fairly quiet, but since I currently need to catch up on the first couple of weeks of research, from before I decided to blog about it, this works, right?

Okay, so the first tree I did, I found all sorts of strange things, like passengers of the Mayflower [which I guess isn’t -too- weird, for that small bit of English & Irish, which in my case is more like English and Scottish]. So, in case I was getting things confused on the tree, I decided to switch to working on a tree that is just direct ancestors. I do eventually want to find out all my relatives, but when one side of a tree looks like a metro area phone book? Yeah, too confusing for now.

So, I start just filling in my new tree using hints on ancestry and I’m working back and forth, and I’m working on English/Scottish ancestry, you know, the part I didn’t know I -had- until a few weeks ago. Yeah, that. So, I run into ‘Grey’, and I don’t think anything of it, which is weird, when it comes to it, one my favorite parts of history. Anyway, I notice one died on Tower Hill … Okay, I know what that means. But why did he lose his head? So I keep tracing up. And this is where I’m like WTF?!?! Because for most of the tree I’m trying to double check connections and even looking people up online because apparently I’ve hit the part of my tree that apparently has historical figures in it.

About the time that I hit having Henry the VII as a many times great grandfather, though, I’m convinced I made a wrong turn. Cool as that could be, or as distressing, and this is where I hit a major dilemma. There are two here. One, I want to go back as far as I can, but I also do not really want to be related to people responsible for innocent people dying because they can’t grow up and get along. Yeah, mutually exclusive, at least right now, maybe with time travel…

So, what does all this have to do with Rebecca? Okay, according to 23&me, my English/Scottish ancestor would likely fall in the 2nd to 4th great grandparent. In addition, looking at other family trees of people who are patently related to me have a problem. Some of them are wonderfully kept and detailed out, but have Rebecca as being a Bryant. Some of them have my 2nd great grandfather’s name wrong, but they have Rebecca as being a Brandt, or a Barndt. Yes, I’m well aware that names change spelling. But this seems to be where things get weird.

See, the people those well done charts show as Rebecca’s parents were people of note in Massachusetts; her supposed father was worth a million in the beginning of the 1800s. We’re talking serious wealth. Her supposed mother was the daughter of one of the big scholars of the times. Rebecca is put down as being born in 1804, her parents didn’t get married until 1807, and there is NO record of her as their daughter.

And this is where my dad’s notes come into play. When he died in 2000, my mom gave me his box of genealogy stuff because she had no interest in any of it, so it came to me. Stupid me, I really hadn’t looked in it since he died, and my computer long ago corrupted the FTW file. He was actually trained in this stuff [I found all that in the box too]. He has her as Rebecca Brandt. And this is where it gets weird.

See, I supposedly have at least one full blooded English ancestor [or scottish] in that region of my tree; somewhere at the 2nd to 4th. Brandt looks like a German name, which is what my dad figured. But Rebecca pretty much deadends there, but she isn’t showing up as a recorded member of the Bryant family either.

And that’s where the puzzle comes in. I have -no- other candidates for a British Isles ancestor in that generation, none. My mom’s side is a wash, I am 99.99% certain of that. Her side of the tree might dead end a whole lot soon, for now, but its all because the trail ends in Eastern Europe. My dad’s side is almost entirely German descent, so, its makes it tricky.

Anyways, this is one mystery that is going to be come back to later. Might as well work on less troublesome branches for now. But I’ve been asking myself; do I just not want to face the truth, and if so, what exactly IS the truth here.

Hi, decided to do a log where I can chart my progress through figuring out my family tree. The plan is to do a blog post a week, at least, a blog post a week for this particular topic. This week we start with my DNA test results, learning some very new to me things, and me getting back to trying to rebuild my father’s work on our family tree [my computer corrupted my copy [and I think the only copy] of all my father’s work].

So, a few weeks ago, I got back my results from 23&Me, and got a few shocks. Before anyone says anything about different interpretations from different sources, I -know- this, but the shocks at least on one side, were confirmed by my mom. My dad dies in 2000, so all I have are his notes [more on this later].

So, before this test, I’d always thought my dad was mostly German/French [but German, again, explain later], with maybe some traces of Irish. My mom thought he might have been half Eastern European because she was convinced my grandmother’s maiden name was her married name [again, explain later], but nah, she was good old-fashioned Pennsylvania Dutch, like most of my dad’s side of the family.

And I always knew my mom was half German and a quarter Czechoslovakian and a quarter Yugoslavian Rom [What? I’m old.] So, imagine my initial shock of learning that I wasn’t mostly German with a chunk of Slovak, but… well, look at this image.

So, its not in here, but apparently I’m more Polish than anything. No French, but vaguely German [as I saw in my family tree, my German ancestors came from pretty much every part of Germany except the part I expected, which is well, currently in France], but then there is the British & Irish. I’m like, yay I’, part Ir…. nope, all English and Scottish, and it can pinpoint the areas my small amount of DNA has come from.

Then well, the strangeness of the Spanish & Portuguese, the Greek & Balkan, the Scandinavian and the Italian… And who knows where the last 24.5% is from. I mean, it could be from my Great Grandfather, the one who was a bit swarthy, and who told my moms stories of sleeping under wagons, and cooking chicken on the run [First, you steal the chicken….]. Unfortunately, he died when I was five, and we’d already gone back to W Germany the year before, so I very vaguely remember him, but its very dim.

So, I called my mom that evening and find out that ‘Oh, my dad’s parents were from Prussia, and my grandmother spoke Polish.’ Like, gee thanks, mom, I could have known that -years- ago. But to be fair, my mom didn’t know those grandparents well; her mother hated her in-laws, and her father died when my mom was 18, so…

So, part of what I’m getting at is, I really only knew my immediate family and my mom’s mom and mom’s mom’s mom. I met some of my dad’s aunts and such, but that’s a story for a different post.

This is the first post in a series of blog posts where I spend time talking about the ‘fun’ of trying to piece together my family history, and figure out who I really am. I think in a few posts, you’ll understand the ‘fun’ being in quotes. My mom’s family is going to be tricky to track down because all of her grandparents came over from non-English speaking countries, but at least its tidy. My dad’s tree is a tangled, complicated, headache of a tree, that seems to ALL go back to the 1600s, in the US.