Fresh Start!

Another year and another effort on my part to keep up with the 52 week challenge by Amy Johnson Crow!  We shall see how I do this year....

I always loved the family stories and was blessed with grandparents and great grandparents who were both alive, (always an advantage) and who loved to have an audience for their stories. I heard the stories growing up and took them at face value, there was no reason to question them, in my mind. When I was older there was an aunt in Virginia who had 'done' the family tree and I received a copy. What fun that was! We were related to Mary Queen of Scots and Andrew Hamilton and Andrew Jackson....and this just can't be true, I got my first taste of what can happen when sloppy work and copying from others happens. My father was a history teacher and I knew that Andrew Jackson didn't have any natural children although he adopted and raised several. I started researching the stories and the alleged relatives and...I was hooked! For the rest of my life I have loved the hunt, the research, the dusty files, the genealogical societies correspondence...I love it all!

Apparently there were some less than honest genealogists, or so-called genealogists in the early 20^th century who did bogus trees, where everyone ended up related to famous people or in famous battles and my relative had gotten hold of several of those and mooshed them all together into the most fantastic, sigh, and inaccurate tree you could imagine! The whole thing needed to be done over, a fresh start as it were.

I began to gather historical records from family members who had collected them, asked questions of my grandmother (who lived to be 102) and began at the beginning. Tracing back has been so much fun and the history of the family has been as much fun as the names and dates.

I did find the connection to Mary Queen of Scots and from her, of course, most of the houses of Europe. It is not however a legitimate relationship although it was an acknowledged one, I'm not in any danger of inheriting a castle. There is a distant relationship between my Hamiltons and Alexander Hamilton but very distant. There is no relationship between my Jackson and the former president. It is OK though, I have found veterans from the Revolutionary War and every war from then to the present day. I've found pioneers and inventors, relatively recent immigrants and one that was kicked out of the Plymouth Colony, a couple from Jamestown and in the background information from the Wessex branch of the family I found my cousin Thor and his father Odin. (That one may be a little sketchy too though!  Definitely needs more research, pretty sure the comic books don't count!)

So I guess I owe a thank you to my gullible aunt who gave us all a mimeographed copy (are you old enough to know what that is?) that set me off on this wonderful journey! My Fresh Start!