Neat Things About Family History
When you start researching your family tree, you might expect to find names and dates and places of birth.
Some people might expect to find heroes and heroines in their ancestors.
I know I got excited when I found a link that seemed to lead to William Wallace (think Braveheart.
) I am not sure exactly what link there is, if any, to William Wallace.
But it is exciting and, well, just neat to think of the possibility.
The reality is that there are heroes and heroines in all our histories.
Finding them is neat.
Finding out things that you always took for granted are not exactly as you thought they were.
This can shatter some old fixed ideas that you have about your family and yourself.
However, learning about some things that are different than you expected is like discovering a deeper and more exciting aspect of your parents or grandparents than you ever imagined.
My grandfather, born in 1888, was a serious man.
When I was pregnant with my first child, Grandpa would not say the word pregnant.
He did not think it was an appropriate word to use in mixed company.
He could manage "expecting" as is when are you expecting the baby? I grew up in a very proper household and felt like such a rebel when my life did not follow the approved and correct path.
It caused me some serious angst.
Imagine how I felt when in doing the family history, I discovered Grandpa's great aunt Janet, born in 1821 and recorded as never having been married, had a daughter in 1865.
I discovered this in her father's will where he left the family farm to his son John with the codicil that along with the farm, John had to accept the responsibility for providing a home for his sister Janet and her child.
That's what it said in the will "and her child.
" In 1894, Janet and her child moved to Massachusetts from Prince Edward Island.
Her daughter met and married a man in Massachusetts and had a large family.
Janet was listed on the marriage certificates as a widow.
She was a brave woman to change her life like this.
I was looking into my husband's family.
His family had come from Scotland to Prince Edward Island and stayed pretty much in the same place for a couple of hundred years.
So I thought.
It was neat to discover that some of his ancestors were Quakers who moved from Nantucket Island to Prince Edward Island in 1763.
They had been whalers at Nantucket but with the unrest after the Seven Years War and the bubbling revolution brewing in the American Colonies, being a fisher was difficult.
British ships accosted fishing boats.
This made life difficult for those ancestors.
However, Uriah Coffin had already been to Nova Scotia.
At this time, the British government was looking for settlers for Prince Edward Island.
They were anxious to populate their newly acquired property with grateful settlers.
Uriah and his nephew and their wives and children moved north to a land that was thickly forested and underpopulated.
These are small samples of the interesting lives our ancestors lived.
Some people might expect to find heroes and heroines in their ancestors.
I know I got excited when I found a link that seemed to lead to William Wallace (think Braveheart.
) I am not sure exactly what link there is, if any, to William Wallace.
But it is exciting and, well, just neat to think of the possibility.
The reality is that there are heroes and heroines in all our histories.
Finding them is neat.
Finding out things that you always took for granted are not exactly as you thought they were.
This can shatter some old fixed ideas that you have about your family and yourself.
However, learning about some things that are different than you expected is like discovering a deeper and more exciting aspect of your parents or grandparents than you ever imagined.
My grandfather, born in 1888, was a serious man.
When I was pregnant with my first child, Grandpa would not say the word pregnant.
He did not think it was an appropriate word to use in mixed company.
He could manage "expecting" as is when are you expecting the baby? I grew up in a very proper household and felt like such a rebel when my life did not follow the approved and correct path.
It caused me some serious angst.
Imagine how I felt when in doing the family history, I discovered Grandpa's great aunt Janet, born in 1821 and recorded as never having been married, had a daughter in 1865.
I discovered this in her father's will where he left the family farm to his son John with the codicil that along with the farm, John had to accept the responsibility for providing a home for his sister Janet and her child.
That's what it said in the will "and her child.
" In 1894, Janet and her child moved to Massachusetts from Prince Edward Island.
Her daughter met and married a man in Massachusetts and had a large family.
Janet was listed on the marriage certificates as a widow.
She was a brave woman to change her life like this.
I was looking into my husband's family.
His family had come from Scotland to Prince Edward Island and stayed pretty much in the same place for a couple of hundred years.
So I thought.
It was neat to discover that some of his ancestors were Quakers who moved from Nantucket Island to Prince Edward Island in 1763.
They had been whalers at Nantucket but with the unrest after the Seven Years War and the bubbling revolution brewing in the American Colonies, being a fisher was difficult.
British ships accosted fishing boats.
This made life difficult for those ancestors.
However, Uriah Coffin had already been to Nova Scotia.
At this time, the British government was looking for settlers for Prince Edward Island.
They were anxious to populate their newly acquired property with grateful settlers.
Uriah and his nephew and their wives and children moved north to a land that was thickly forested and underpopulated.
These are small samples of the interesting lives our ancestors lived.
