Genealogy - Page 2 - Cyburbia Forums

Zoning Goddess · 2008-01-26, 07:02 PM

I'm adopted. My genealogy pretty much consists of me and my son.

mike gurnee · 2008-01-27, 06:49 AM

Found a relative who was a sargeant with the Maryland Line in the Revolution. He had emmigrated from England 2 years before the war. What would motivate a person to rebel so soon after leaving the mother country? Oh, I later found that he sentenced to death or "be removed to the colonies for life".

I was closing in on another relative, but ran into a problem. In a male-female-male line, they all had the last name. Did the female assume her maiden name after a divorce/death? Not. The female moved in with her married sister. Her brother in-law gave her "comfort"--to the tune of four children. (it was in KY).

My g-grandmother apparently had my grandfather 7 years after she was widowed. How can that be? Oh, did people do that kind of thing in the 1800s? (this was NJ)

Not quite the blue blood stories I had heard in childhood; definitely more fascinating.

Linda_D · 2010-03-11, 07:29 PM

I'm an historian by training and avocation (you might have noticed that from my posts). I have always loved local history since my days as a student assistant at the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society back in my college years, but I kind of shied away from geneology because I just never thought that my family had much history. No bluebloods in these veins, just hard-working, persevering people. Polish and Italian peasants turned immigrant farmers/laborers in the US aren't very important -- or so I believed for a long time. Maybe they aren't in the grand scheme of things, but to me they are very important. I am who I am because of choices that my parents, grandparents, great grandparents and back made long before I was born -- and that's true for every person.

Moreover, I'm a "roots" person. I need to know where I came from. Walking the same farmland that my father walked as a boy or visiting the house where my mother grew up is very awe-inspiring to me. Before I die, I want to go to Italy and Poland and walk the same streets where my grandparents and great-grandparents walked.

Recently I've had considerable success tracing some of my Polish relatives' roots. I had successfully traced my Dad's Italian family back to Cugnoli, Italy, but I couldn't find any trace of my Polish grandparents except for their 1930 census record. Well, I finally discovered my grandfather's WW I draft card, so I knew his exact birth year (1892) and the exact year he came to the US (1910).

Using that info, I started plowing through the surnames beginning with Kos or Koz looking for a Kasper Kos--- or Kasper Koz--- born in 1892 and coming to the US in 1910. Bingo. I found him in the Ellis Island database with a misspelled name. Now I know that he entered the US on May 31, 1910, that he was from Piskozyn in the Russian part of Poland, that he could read and write, and that this was his first time in the US (and he never left). Oh, and he also had $20 in his possession when he landed.

My grandfather's older brother and two sisters also came to the US/Canada. The brother and one sister settled in the Buffalo area. The other sister settled in Toronto. Two of my cousins (one from Canada) and I are trying to find all the pieces so we can figure out how the family split up. It's like working on a jigsaw puzzle.

Whose Yur Planner · 2010-03-12, 09:21 AM

My families emigrated from Germany and Sweden in that 1880-1910's era when a lot of Europeans came here, so it's all fairly recent. Beyond that, the trail goes cold, except for the fact that I'm the decendent of a bunch of government workers and peasants. Nary a drop of blue blood in my veins.

In one semi amusing story, part of my family comes from Alsac-Lorraine. I have an ancestor who fought for the Germans in the Franco-Prussian war. He got so sick of what he saw, that he said, in essence, s@#$% it and came to America.

Mud Princess · 2010-03-12, 09:38 AM

I see that I posted back in 2008 that I had given up on researching my own family's history.

Well, that all changed last summer. With minimal consulting work and too much time on my hands, I signed up for Ancestry.com and finally started finding out about the different branches of my family. My parents and grandparents are all deceased, so I didn't have a lot to go on, but I had a few notes which helped.

It's been an intense journey: learning where my relatives actually came from (family members always cited Russia as a generic term for eastern Europe), seeing the records of their immigration to the U.S., discovering exactly where they lived and when, and so on. I had to learn through experience that misspelled names and other errors are not uncommon, so you have to consider all possibilities when you do a search.

I've had a lot of surprises along the way, like the great-uncle executed during Stalin's reign of terror whose teenage son ended up dying in a gulag for writing a letter of protest. I reached out to distant cousins in the U.S. and Canada whose grandparents emigrated to the U.S. with my grandmother, but who didn't even know I existed. Linda_D compares family history research to working on a jigsaw puzzle. I agree - though I don't know if that puzzle will ever be complete.

Seabishop · 2010-03-12, 09:50 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Mud Princess

...Well, that all changed last summer. With minimal consulting work and too much time on my hands, I signed up for Ancestry.com and finally started finding out about the different branches of my family...

That's good to know. I've always wanted to sign up to Ancestry.com but didn't know if it was a rip-off. I'm in the same "Russian" boat although I think Ukraine and maybe even Estonia are more like it.

Queen B · 2010-03-12, 11:09 AM

I have dabbled just enough to stir up trouble.

Mud Princess · 2010-03-12, 02:58 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Seabishop

That's good to know. I've always wanted to sign up to Ancestry.com but didn't know if it was a rip-off. I'm in the same "Russian" boat although I think Ukraine and maybe even Estonia are more like it.

Feel free to PM me anytime if you have questions. My grandmother came from the Ukraine.

Linda_D · 2010-03-12, 03:40 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Seabishop

That's good to know. I've always wanted to sign up to Ancestry.com but didn't know if it was a rip-off. I'm in the same "Russian" boat although I think Ukraine and maybe even Estonia are more like it.

Quote:

Originally posted by Mud Princess

Feel free to PM me anytime if you have questions. My grandmother came from the Ukraine.

There are apparently more existing records than you might expect for Eastern Europe. If you can find your ancestors' records on the Ellis Island database (ie, their immigration records), they will give you the year(s) they were born and in what town/province they are from. If the town/province still exists -- or it wasn't just a crossroads that's known only to locals -- that's where you can start. If you can find the church records, you've hit the proverbial "mother lode" since those will not only record marriages and baptisms, but possibly deaths as well. Remember, that unlike in the US, most Europeans stayed in the same village for numerous generations. You might find some movement in the late 19th century, but probably not a whole lot before then.

Does Ukranian use the Cyrillic alphabet or the Latin? That would probably be the biggest obstacle to using old Ukranian church records, unless you hired someone to do the research or translation for you.

I'm iffy about whether ancestry.com is worth it for an entire year. The three month option might be a better choice, at least for me.

Mud Princess · 2010-03-12, 03:57 PM

It's a lot more complicated for Eastern European Jews. I've had few problem finding the hometowns, thanks to the Internet, but family records don't always exist in an accessible format, if they still exist at all. There are, of course, professionals who specialize in Jewish genealogy; however, I have not yet needed to pay for their services.

I have a monthly subscription to Ancestry. I was not aware that you could purchase a three-month subscription; I've never seen that option on their site.

wahday · 2010-03-12, 04:24 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Mud Princess

It's a lot more complicated for Eastern European Jews. I've had few problem finding the hometowns, thanks to the Internet, but family records don't always exist in an accessible format, if they still exist at all. There are, of course, professionals who specialize in Jewish genealogy; however, I have not yet needed to pay for their services.

I've had trouble with this in my wife's family as well. Between spelling changes and the shifting boundaries of home countries, its been quite challenging even to find decent records of their presence here in the US before the turn of the century (they came in the 1880s). Poland, Russia, Lithuania are all spoken about as home countries, but at different times those boundaries shifted and so its not even clear if the country they came from is still that country today (especially in the case of Poland). Their family name is the same as a region in Poland, but its not even clear that part of the family came from there at all - they seem to be from Lithuania. And even her father (who was second generation) has a different spelling of the surname on his birth certificate than he used as an adult. So confounding.

You would think that with names like Yetta and Hyman, these folks would not be so hard to find SOME record of. But they are...

Linda_D · 2010-03-12, 06:20 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Mud Princess

It's a lot more complicated for Eastern European Jews. I've had few problem finding the hometowns, thanks to the Internet, but family records don't always exist in an accessible format, if they still exist at all. There are, of course, professionals who specialize in Jewish genealogy; however, I have not yet needed to pay for their services.

I have a monthly subscription to Ancestry. I was not aware that you could purchase a three-month subscription; I've never seen that option on their site.

That is a toughie. My maternal grandmother was from a Jewish family that converted to Catholicism, most likely to avoid a pogrom and keep their property, but nobody knew if it was recent or distant. It didn't matter to the Nazis, of course. Because she came to the US, my grandmother was the only member of her family to survive WW II (she had 4 or 5 sisters and 1 brother and numerous neices and nephews).

Moreover, after WW II, the Poles just took over the Jewish towns and pretended the Jewish people who had lived there never existed. That meant that too frequently Jewish cemeteries were used for farming and the grave stones used for steps. This was the subject of a PBS program several years ago. I think it was called "Shtetl". An American born child/grandchild of Holocaust survivors went back to Poland to try to find out what happened, I think.

Here's the link to the PBS show ... Shtetl

Bear Up North · 2010-03-13, 03:55 PM

Wow!

There are a lot of planners (at least the planners responding to this thread) that have roots in Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the countries that controlled Poland over the years.

I have been conversing via Facebook with a fellow from Poland, with the same last name. He has been doing extensive family tree investigation and I have been forwarding to him info I have on my family here in the states.

His investigation shows that we are related.

We both have family from a tiny village in Lithuania that was on the border of Russia. Our family eventually worked its' way to what is now eastern Poland, being instrumental in the beginning years of what is now one of Poland's largest cities, Bialystok. According to my relative's research, many of our family eventually worked their way to Hungary.

Last year I received a Facebook message from a woman in Hungary with the same last name. She wondered if we were related. I responded, "Probably not." My relative's research now shows different.

On my Mother's side of the family, we have German, Polish, and French blood. Our distant relatives include former NFL Commish Pete Rozelle.

The internet sure has changed the game.

Commie Bear

RichmondJake · 2010-03-13, 04:04 PM

Interesting that this thread popped up again.

I had a second cousin contact me via Facebook looking for information. I told her to get in touch with my Mom as my Dad had done lots of research before he passed. I need to send her a email to check on her research. She was going to send me a copy of her results.

Seabishop · 2010-03-16, 09:58 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Mud Princess

Feel free to PM me anytime if you have questions. My grandmother came from the Ukraine.

Thanks, I've got a decent family tree for one side of the family. Eventually I'll start digging deeper.

Bear Up North · 2010-03-19, 05:33 PM

This Bear has been doing some research on the Ellis Island web site. So cool, finding things you heard about but were not quite sure about. Such as my Grandfather coming to America well before my Grandmother, because there were jobs in places with foreign names.....Pittsburgh, Toledo.

Bear

Jazzman · 2010-03-20, 03:26 AM

My father has been doing extensive work on his genealogy. By researching old Census records, family records, etc. he has been able to trace his family lineage back to about 1830 or so. But he can't go any further than that thanks to slavery.

My mother knows very little about her family before her grandmother. In many Asian countries (even Japan) family records, birth certficiates, etc. are somewhat scarce up until modern/recent times. And what did exist was likely destroyed in World War II.

So much for knowing about my family history.

2010-03-12, 09:21 AM	#29
Whose Yur Planner Cyburbian Plus Registered: Jun 2004 Location: Have Ordinance, will travel Posts: 2,657	My families emigrated from Germany and Sweden in that 1880-1910's era when a lot of Europeans came here, so it's all fairly recent. Beyond that, the trail goes cold, except for the fact that I'm the decendent of a bunch of government workers and peasants. Nary a drop of blue blood in my veins. In one semi amusing story, part of my family comes from Alsac-Lorraine. I have an ancestor who fought for the Germans in the Franco-Prussian war. He got so sick of what he saw, that he said, in essence, s@#$% it and came to America. __________________ "Scars are souvenirs you never lose/The past is never far-"Name"-Goo Goo Dolls

2010-03-12, 11:09 AM	#32
Queen B Cyburbian Registered: Mar 2003 Location: "Somewhere in the middle" Posts: 2,827	I have dabbled just enough to stir up trouble. __________________ It is all a matter of perspective!!!

2010-03-13, 03:55 PM	#38
Bear Up North Cyburbian Plus Registered: May 2003 Location: Northwestern Ohio Posts: 7,742	Wow! There are a lot of planners (at least the planners responding to this thread) that have roots in Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the countries that controlled Poland over the years. I have been conversing via Facebook with a fellow from Poland, with the same last name. He has been doing extensive family tree investigation and I have been forwarding to him info I have on my family here in the states. His investigation shows that we are related. We both have family from a tiny village in Lithuania that was on the border of Russia. Our family eventually worked its' way to what is now eastern Poland, being instrumental in the beginning years of what is now one of Poland's largest cities, Bialystok. According to my relative's research, many of our family eventually worked their way to Hungary. Last year I received a Facebook message from a woman in Hungary with the same last name. She wondered if we were related. I responded, "Probably not." My relative's research now shows different. On my Mother's side of the family, we have German, Polish, and French blood. Our distant relatives include former NFL Commish Pete Rozelle. The internet sure has changed the game. Commie Bear __________________ I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, um, some people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help South Africa and should help Iraq, Cyburbia, and the Asian countries,so we will be able to build up our future - Best sentence ever!

2010-03-13, 04:04 PM	#39
RichmondJake Cyburbian Registered: Aug 2001 Location: Office with two windows Posts: 12,440	Interesting that this thread popped up again. I had a second cousin contact me via Facebook looking for information. I told her to get in touch with my Mom as my Dad had done lots of research before he passed. I need to send her a email to check on her research. She was going to send me a copy of her results. __________________ Delusions of grandeur make me feel a lot better about myself.

2010-03-19, 05:33 PM	#41
Bear Up North Cyburbian Plus Registered: May 2003 Location: Northwestern Ohio Posts: 7,742	This Bear has been doing some research on the Ellis Island web site. So cool, finding things you heard about but were not quite sure about. Such as my Grandfather coming to America well before my Grandmother, because there were jobs in places with foreign names.....Pittsburgh, Toledo. Bear __________________ I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, um, some people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help South Africa and should help Iraq, Cyburbia, and the Asian countries,so we will be able to build up our future - Best sentence ever!

2008-01-26, 07:02 PM	#26
Zoning Goddess White Tile Goddess Registered: Sep 1999 Location: Redneck City, FL Posts: 10,882	I'm adopted. My genealogy pretty much consists of me and my son.

2008-01-27, 06:49 AM	#27
mike gurnee Cyburbian Registered: Feb 1998 Location: Greensburg, Kansas Posts: 1,999	Found a relative who was a sargeant with the Maryland Line in the Revolution. He had emmigrated from England 2 years before the war. What would motivate a person to rebel so soon after leaving the mother country? Oh, I later found that he sentenced to death or "be removed to the colonies for life". I was closing in on another relative, but ran into a problem. In a male-female-male line, they all had the last name. Did the female assume her maiden name after a divorce/death? Not. The female moved in with her married sister. Her brother in-law gave her "comfort"--to the tune of four children. (it was in KY). My g-grandmother apparently had my grandfather 7 years after she was widowed. How can that be? Oh, did people do that kind of thing in the 1800s? (this was NJ) Not quite the blue blood stories I had heard in childhood; definitely more fascinating.

2010-03-11, 07:29 PM	#28
Linda_D Cyburbian Registered: Nov 2006 Location: Jamestown, New York Posts: 453	I'm an historian by training and avocation (you might have noticed that from my posts). I have always loved local history since my days as a student assistant at the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society back in my college years, but I kind of shied away from geneology because I just never thought that my family had much history. No bluebloods in these veins, just hard-working, persevering people. Polish and Italian peasants turned immigrant farmers/laborers in the US aren't very important -- or so I believed for a long time. Maybe they aren't in the grand scheme of things, but to me they are very important. I am who I am because of choices that my parents, grandparents, great grandparents and back made long before I was born -- and that's true for every person. Moreover, I'm a "roots" person. I need to know where I came from. Walking the same farmland that my father walked as a boy or visiting the house where my mother grew up is very awe-inspiring to me. Before I die, I want to go to Italy and Poland and walk the same streets where my grandparents and great-grandparents walked. Recently I've had considerable success tracing some of my Polish relatives' roots. I had successfully traced my Dad's Italian family back to Cugnoli, Italy, but I couldn't find any trace of my Polish grandparents except for their 1930 census record. Well, I finally discovered my grandfather's WW I draft card, so I knew his exact birth year (1892) and the exact year he came to the US (1910). Using that info, I started plowing through the surnames beginning with Kos or Koz looking for a Kasper Kos--- or Kasper Koz--- born in 1892 and coming to the US in 1910. Bingo. I found him in the Ellis Island database with a misspelled name. Now I know that he entered the US on May 31, 1910, that he was from Piskozyn in the Russian part of Poland, that he could read and write, and that this was his first time in the US (and he never left). Oh, and he also had $20 in his possession when he landed. My grandfather's older brother and two sisters also came to the US/Canada. The brother and one sister settled in the Buffalo area. The other sister settled in Toronto. Two of my cousins (one from Canada) and I are trying to find all the pieces so we can figure out how the family split up. It's like working on a jigsaw puzzle.

2010-03-12, 09:38 AM	#30
Mud Princess Senior Cyburbian Plus Registered: Aug 2002 Location: Upstate Posts: 2,823	I see that I posted back in 2008 that I had given up on researching my own family's history. Well, that all changed last summer. With minimal consulting work and too much time on my hands, I signed up for Ancestry.com and finally started finding out about the different branches of my family. My parents and grandparents are all deceased, so I didn't have a lot to go on, but I had a few notes which helped. It's been an intense journey: learning where my relatives actually came from (family members always cited Russia as a generic term for eastern Europe), seeing the records of their immigration to the U.S., discovering exactly where they lived and when, and so on. I had to learn through experience that misspelled names and other errors are not uncommon, so you have to consider all possibilities when you do a search. I've had a lot of surprises along the way, like the great-uncle executed during Stalin's reign of terror whose teenage son ended up dying in a gulag for writing a letter of protest. I reached out to distant cousins in the U.S. and Canada whose grandparents emigrated to the U.S. with my grandmother, but who didn't even know I existed. Linda_D compares family history research to working on a jigsaw puzzle. I agree - though I don't know if that puzzle will ever be complete.

2010-03-12, 03:57 PM	#35
Mud Princess Senior Cyburbian Plus Registered: Aug 2002 Location: Upstate Posts: 2,823	It's a lot more complicated for Eastern European Jews. I've had few problem finding the hometowns, thanks to the Internet, but family records don't always exist in an accessible format, if they still exist at all. There are, of course, professionals who specialize in Jewish genealogy; however, I have not yet needed to pay for their services. I have a monthly subscription to Ancestry. I was not aware that you could purchase a three-month subscription; I've never seen that option on their site.

2010-03-20, 03:26 AM	#42
Jazzman Cyburbian Registered: Sep 2008 Location: Birmingham, AL, USA Posts: 520	My father has been doing extensive work on his genealogy. By researching old Census records, family records, etc. he has been able to trace his family lineage back to about 1830 or so. But he can't go any further than that thanks to slavery. My mother knows very little about her family before her grandmother. In many Asian countries (even Japan) family records, birth certficiates, etc. are somewhat scarce up until modern/recent times. And what did exist was likely destroyed in World War II. So much for knowing about my family history.