Genealogy, it's a neat little research project. I LOVE trying to figure out where the family came from, but unfortunately, some of the family info passed down has incorrect dates & incorrect name spellings. That in itself lead to a LOT of dead ends, until my mom & I decided to search through census records & the like and correct the family's inconsistancies. We spent time tracking down a branch of the family tree, which lead us to the original Plymouth settlement, and our ancestors being there (area church records & cemetary records) That lead to finding where our English relatives came from across the pond. We managed to track down records as far back as the mid 1400's!
I started trying to trace our purported "Polish" ancestors though immigration records. Apparently, my great-great Grandpa didn't come here from Poland proper (then or now) at all---According to his ship's manifest, he came from somwhere in what is modern western Russia that I can't exactly pinpoint (village doesn't seem to exist anymore) which is exactly what we figured (the family name isn't Polish in any sense at all, and apparently my grandma always thought great-great grandpa was full of bullshit about where he came from anyway)
We discovered that he came with his brother, and 2 cousins, all of whom came from Russia as well. We're not sure if they were all born in the same general area they'd last lived in or not, but it's a start. It's interesting to know they arrived in the US during an anti-Jewish uprising in the Pale of Settlement era. In short, it was an area of Western Russia where the Jewish population was forced to live in poverty under Imperial Russia. Here's a good link for the curious:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_of_Settlement
Another interesting thing is that great-great grandpa & his brother married sisters from what is currently the Bialystok area of Poland, a Jewish hub in the Pale of Settlement at the time, also. Maybe that's why it was misconstrewed that we (the entire paternal side of my grandma's side) were from Poland--because the wives were.
I'm still digging things up, still trying to trace records, but I think it pretty much stops here with so many villages destroyed in that era, and in WW2. Too much info was obviously lost back then, I doubt there's a whole lot left anymore.
So what kind of cool stuff have you dug up about your family? Just don't give personal info away---keep the family name(s) to yourself
I started trying to trace our purported "Polish" ancestors though immigration records. Apparently, my great-great Grandpa didn't come here from Poland proper (then or now) at all---According to his ship's manifest, he came from somwhere in what is modern western Russia that I can't exactly pinpoint (village doesn't seem to exist anymore) which is exactly what we figured (the family name isn't Polish in any sense at all, and apparently my grandma always thought great-great grandpa was full of bullshit about where he came from anyway)
We discovered that he came with his brother, and 2 cousins, all of whom came from Russia as well. We're not sure if they were all born in the same general area they'd last lived in or not, but it's a start. It's interesting to know they arrived in the US during an anti-Jewish uprising in the Pale of Settlement era. In short, it was an area of Western Russia where the Jewish population was forced to live in poverty under Imperial Russia. Here's a good link for the curious:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_of_Settlement
Another interesting thing is that great-great grandpa & his brother married sisters from what is currently the Bialystok area of Poland, a Jewish hub in the Pale of Settlement at the time, also. Maybe that's why it was misconstrewed that we (the entire paternal side of my grandma's side) were from Poland--because the wives were.
I'm still digging things up, still trying to trace records, but I think it pretty much stops here with so many villages destroyed in that era, and in WW2. Too much info was obviously lost back then, I doubt there's a whole lot left anymore.
So what kind of cool stuff have you dug up about your family? Just don't give personal info away---keep the family name(s) to yourself
