before the new year starts

I am up to over 1700 people on my Ancestry.com site! yipes. And there is a lot more English blood in there, though it being 600 years in the past may negate it a bit.Other than having to correct - or guess at correcting- a lot of misinformation in some of the oldest listings, I am somewhat unimpressed by this continued line. I think it is a lack of trust of the info. I know from researching for more than 20 years that something so very complete that far back may also be very wrong. Now, one reason for such exactness may be the presence of two Lord Mayors of London in the same family line. Now, from what I can tell, the title isn't royalty in anyway but rather something to do with the business community. More as I figure it out.

Continuation

meeting new distant relatives has sparked a search mode in me I guess, and I have taken the online family tree from a little over 100 people to nearly 600 now. I decided to go forward and add in my sibs spouses and kids and the next gen after that. I have added on my sister-in-law's side an immense amount and I know there is further to go. That whole line has done a great job of upkeep and research. Of course it helps when your family pretty much stayed put in the same area of the country for many generations. Several of my sides seem to have mor than a little wanderlust. I guess it is genetic.

Today I came across another whole huge batch of photos to scan into the computer. I am happy to say that siblings are now inheriting the scanned stuff, getting still more things out of my hands, so one bad accident wouldn't destroy it all. I am also pulling pictures out of frames, and albums, the paper of which is all acidic and not good for the also acidic papered photos. Once I have all the frames tossed out (no recycleable sadly) my library will be a lot less cluttered!

I do have one small problem facing me, and I am torn. I have a lot of letters that mom kept over the years, and I don't know whether to scan them in, and captur some of her personality, or to destroy them, as she had once said she herself would do.
I did think of one thing: these are not letters she wrote, but received (with a few exceptions) and they are not her voice but smeone else. In the case of my grands, I can see keeping them. I don't think I can justify keeping those written by people I didn't know, or barely knew. I would just like to somehow capture the personality of Jeanne M Dupre Douglas, so it doesn't just become facts and figures, like too many of my family. That's one of the reasons I admire Cndy's line: they have stories about people long dead. They haven't forgotten the idea of roots. IT being that I have never felt like I had any real roots anywhere, I am bit envious.

Ah well. Other chores call. I will scan and contemplate another day.

Adventures in Family Research

Been too long since I stopped to contemplate the family research biz. And trust me- it could be a business easily. Many folks would willing pay someone else to do the research I have been doing out of personal curiousity.

Don't ask we why I am obsessed with knowing where I came from back in the 1800s, 1700s.....These people were long gone before I was even a consideration in the world, much less a reality. I have a feeling that knowing where I come from might tell me where I am going. It is probably not true, but hey....

There is a story I feel the need to relate though. My grandmother had written down a story that she told me was relayed to her by her biological father, Herbert Hopkins. Someone in the family apparently felt the need to escape France in the Revolution days. A pregnant female was supposedly smuggled out of France to Cuba in an empty wine cask. Claim was that she was of minour royal blood, and that her husband was not so lucky. He ended up beheaded. Either this woman's child or her grandchild possibly was injured in a horse riding accident in Cuba which required a trip to the US for attention. That child/grandchild stayed in the US, marrying into a well-established French line here, and made a whole mess o' kids. The Guion line has been an obsession for years, partly so I could figure out the story. My uncle Marcy vehemently refutes the whole story as unprovable- family here say. If he had his way we would all end up nothing but names and lists of dates attached to those names. I hate that- absolutely hate it!
Ok we aren't all Cleopatra in a past life, but the idea that there might be even a smidgen of romance to the family story is not a sin. And now, uncle Marcy, I may have found the person who moved here and married into the extensive and well-researched Guion line. Her name was Clara, and she was mother to Josephine Beck Guion, who mothered Herbert. I know the Guion line is well documented because I have now run into several living Guions. They figured heavily in the shipping industry of this country, and the family is huge. They have a book that traces the family back further than we know the Dupre line, and the Guions too were Huguenots.

So...Josephine, and Herbert, forgotten as you may have seemed to your child/grand child Marie, and worse- her progeny- your story is slowly coming to light. Maybe someday I will be able to travel out to California and find a place to leave you some flowers.

Filling in the Holes

Been an interesting couple of weeks for me. Some serious searching online has brought me knowledge of family members who are still little more than a clump of facts, but I am getting there. I have a feeling it will require a trip to Dubuque and Cedar Rapids physically on my part to get to the root of some of this. I am not certain my grandfather Dean ever even had a birth certificate. Can't seem to find anything online about birth records of any consistency before about 1910.

Oh, and speaking of that- the US Federal Censuses (censi?) need to be combed over very clearly. I have found multiple misspellings of family names, first names, and conflicts in birth years from one decade to the next.
I don't know when they started to do a census, but it took awhile to get even close to perfecting it.

I did have one interesting thing drop into my lap. I work in a joint Tricare/VA medical clinic. I heard a name being fractured by people trying to pronounce, and in the process of trying to get his name right, may have found a whole other family connection. The Guion side of the family (Diddy's grandmother, Josephine, one of the two women she was named for) is something of a mystery. Well, it was anyway. I now may have a connection to the Guion (originally spelled Guyon) family line going back as far as 900 C.E. (current era.) The gentleman says he has a book he will bring to let me see. I hope to track down a copy of same, for my own sake.
Guion is not a common name, and supposedly all the family line can be traced. Now here's a kicker for me: the possible royal lineage of that family line may be finally provable. Herbert gave Diddy reason to believe that the Hopkins/Guion side of the family had royal French blood. I may be able to exonerate him; Diddy's own child never wanted to believe the story, as the facts within it were unprovable.

This has been an interesting month for me. A lot of the holes in my family's history are filling in slowly. On the scale of the time I have invested in this search, it seems to be swift, but it isn't really. What does really blow my mind personally is the potential number of people I have added to the family line, the number of relatives that could be out there, in just a 12th of a year.

whoa

Ok, I always thought being named Orange had to be an unusual thing. I have been looking for a person I thought would stand out like a sore thumb, and have found tons of both males and females named Orange.

I think I am going to name a kid Purple, just out of spite.

Seriously, this man was supposedly my great grandfather's brother, which I cannot verify yet. If this is the fellow, it will be hard to tell. I found the same name, with the same wife, but different kids, in two seperate censuses. They also lived in decidedly different places. Ironically, the WIFE is exactly the same- birth place and name. Go figure.
Ah well. This is the frustration and fascination of family research.

Success in small steps

This has been in an interesting day for me. Since my early 20's I have been researching my family, with several holes in the history that no one living seemed to be able to fill. Today, I put some putty in some of those hole, which means little to anyone else in the family.

Sallie Dupre was my grandfather Marcy's mom and died soon after giving birth to her tenth child. Her life was pretty much a mystery. I found her birth month today from a census done before she passed. Ironically, I also answered another big question today- what happened to my maternal grandmother's father after the divorce? Seems Herbert went back to California, eventually. That is where he is listed as having died. Now, with his social security number, I may be able to track down more about him. I find this research to be frustrating and interesting at the same time. Ultimately, all 95% of us ever end up being to this world is a handful of facts and maybe a few old photos. I wish there was a better way to preserve something of personality, of the who behind the face.

And we all long to feel connected, to something, somewhere. Having been separated from my siblings before my formative years, I have felt out of touch. Not so strangely, there are times when the long dead ancestors seem more real to me than living blood. Such is the curse of military life, and the modern age of moving and traveling so very much. We lose touch. I guess some part of me is attempting to sew up those perceived holes.

I also just found the death announcement of the second wife of Marcy Dupre, Zenobia, or Miss Nobie, as she was referred to by the Dupre kids I managed to know. The number of misspellings in the census and other such records is mind boggling, and a bit scary. Much can be lost or overlooked for a it. I only found Herbert's death announcement because I happened to know his birth date. His middle name, and his mother's maiden name- Guion- were both incorrect. It was luck and diligence that let me put the puzzle together.

I do have a touch of wistfulness about some of this- I wish I could share what I am fining with the grandparents now long gone. Part of my g-mom, Diddy, dearly loved her father Herbert. I think she would love to have some idea of what he did with himself after being asked to leave his young family. She was only ten years old. Closure is good for everyone.

Enough for tonight, though. I am tired and comtemplative.

Oh the Insanity!

Not quite a month into this and I am finding myself feeling bogged down! Of course, every time I opened the books to do research in the past I felt the same way. I ended up finding exhilaration after the fact, when I had time to slow down and look at what I had accomplished.
Nephew Aaron started up a Gallery on his server, to which I have been adding quite literally hundreds of family photos. It is a private site for now, but if the family eventually feels comfortable with the idea, we could, I suppose, go live for the world. It might be a way to find other arms of the family. I've begun to realise how many we already have actually!
Let's see...from memory, family names and lines.....Dupre and Douglas, obviously. Moore, Hopkins, Larner, Hawley, Hill, Guion, Naasson, Mueller, Shepard, Lundgren, Le Tourneaux, Du Maresq,Machen, Lowe,McClain, Kertcher,Johnson,Starkey,Monistorie.....I suspect that's only scraping the surface.
I read an article about a year ago that almost made me sad, and yet gave me a lot of insight. Essentially, the further back one goes the greater number of potential relatives, and that number can easily spread into the thousands, if not millions. By this premise, millions of people could be related to, say, Genghis Khan, or Elizabeth the First. More accurately, there is solid evidence in this that we are in fact much more closely related to each other than a lot of people would like to believe.