This is a subject I don't know if I will every know. My mother is VERY tight lipped about her information, she doesn't want it on the internet and won't even share with me for some reason! We just started talking about after many a long year though, so maybe I will get at least a little bit. I had briefly tried to track things, but my mom won't tell me her mom's name and that side is all passed. My father's side is all passed as well. I only know he was born in Ghana and my family lived in England for a bit. My half sister got a little farther, we're apparently Welsh in some fashion, but even what she got was very vague. I DID start a birth notebook for each kid. Wrote little things in like how my teenager was "scared or annoyed" of the hiccups and would kick SO hard that my stomach looked like it had a rave party in it. Little details like that and a few entries after they were born, but then I stopped and I shouldn't have. I discovered scrapbooking and tried to preserve a few memories there at least, not quite the same but it's better than nothing. I have exactly three photos of myself when I was younger. :/ I'm trying to make sure the kids at least have SOMETHING to go on. Good luck in your venture!!!
The state I live in did this also, in fact my boss was the sponsor of this legislation. However, I suspect we will see mandatory dna testing in my lifetime.
How awesome would that be Maureen! I was surprised to learn that you have Lithuanian heritage! Love learning new things about my digi pals! How very interesting about your son finding out that information about the Civil War and so fascinating about his ancestors being slave holders! My sister and I have pondered over the years whether to go and visit the places where our parents had been born, mainly just to see the country side but we never got around to it. My sister was born in Kassel, Germany and we DID get to go there when we went overseas in 2012. We were staying at Frankfurt and caught the train to Kassel and spent the day there, just walking around and sightseeing....... we both wondered if our mother had walked down these same streets. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a time machine to just 'pop back in time' whenever we wanted to................... but I think the Tardis would be petty expensive and heavily booked out I guess!!
Serena I don't have any baby or toddler photos of myself at all either but it was due to my parents not having a lot of money at that time so didn't own a camera. My father purchased one when I was around eight years old so I have a few from that time in my life. Getting films processed were also very costly so I remember that most of the time we had to get dressed up and pose for the camera, no candid shots of playing etc etc! As I mentioned earlier my parents were very tight lipped about their lives growing up but I think it was a case of them not wanting to re-live the terrible times they both went through in war torn Europe during the war. And I think there could be a couple of skeletons in the closet with a couple of my mother's brothers being in the German army. My father (Lithuanian) was conscripted into the Russian army during the war and never ever spoke about that time, we only got fragments of information from my mother. My sister, who is older than me, has started typing up her life story, just a lot of things she remembers growing up with some added family history, the bits that she knows. I was always going to put together a scrapbook version but never got too serious about it............ reading all these posts have given me some inspiration so I may need to start a project!!
I totally understand this. My Maternal Grandma knew who her dad was, but wouldn't tell my mom. There's always been a "Big Family Secret". She used to always say "You'll find out when I die". Well, Grandma has been gone for a 13 years now, and we still don't know. We can't even find a record of my grandparents being married. My mom was told when, and that they got married on the US side, but there's no record in Michigan. It doesn't help that the Scrivers popped back and forth across the Ontario/Michigan border a lot. My dad's side - my aunt complied a lot of it! I need to get a copy so I can see the details. I do know that we had a "witch" relative from Salem. John Proctor who was hanged, and Elizabeth, who was saved because she was expecting. My aunt did an "interview" with some of the information that she gathered. It makes it more interesting to read. I loved being out east and being able to walk around Danvers and Peabody where it all started.
@wombat146 Ona it's interesting that your father was in the Russian army and yes, I have no doubt he didn't want to talk about it. My US Army father was the same and sadly when I applied to get his records, the US Veterans Administration didn't have them. The VA went through a serious fire AND flood over the years and his were in a batch lost that way. However, I do know that he was coming east after the Battle of the Bulge and met up with the Russian army. You never know...our fathers could have met.
Got this picture and newspaper article emailed to me from a distant cousin. This is my great great great grandfather (bottom right) and his brothers in 1908. I actually love how this page turned out!!
Does anyone know of any free sites to find old obituaries? A friend and I are actually going to take a class at a genealogy library so I'm hoping they'll teach us how to search for those and other newspaper articles. Can't wait.
WOW!! Robyn this looks fantastic! and what an awesome photo to have! They all look so stern don't they but I am thinking that they would have got up to a lot mischief growing up! lol!!!
Not really. There are a few places I've found some but nothing comprehensive. Google started digitizing old newspapers a while back but then they discontinued it. If you are lucky, sometimes you will find something there (Google newspaper archives). Some newspaper randomly do have their old editions on line. Sometimes people will copy and paste obits to the Find-A-Grave website. And, if they are more recent, a google search of the person's name will sometimes turn up the obit attached to the funeral home record.
Maureen, what an interesting concept with our father's possible meeting! My father would have been around 25 or so at the time and apparently he was conscripted to the Russian army because Lithuania was then occupied by the Soviet Union. For such a small country Lithuania (and Latvia where my mother was born) underwent quite a lot of changes in government during those turbulent years. While my mother didn't talk a lot about her family and growing up in Latvia, she would often chastise us when were little (if we asked for something like a new toy), that we were very lucky to have the things we already owned as she never had that when she was a child.
Ona, my father joined the Army at age 23 and had never been out of his small town in Pennsylvania where he was a clerk in a grocery store after high school. Coal mining was the main industry and what my Lithuanian grandfather did. Even with a war, the army was a way out a dead end town. I do know a lot about Lithuania because it frustrated me so much growing up when people asked where my family was from...and of course no one knew Lithuania because it no longer existed after the Russian take over. No offense to any Russians today except perhaps Putin etal. but if someone mentioned Russia or Russians when I was little, my grandfather and his cronies would spit on the ground. Loss of their mother country brought up a lot of hate. His wife, my Nana, was born in the US and while her parents were native born Lithuanians, my mother never learned the language. She and my aunt never knew anything much about their parents and really nothing about their grandparents. The 'old country' was something everyone was glad to have left. Being seen as Americans was really important especially as the coal mining immigrants from the Baltic states were a step or two down on the pecking order from the Irish who were entrenched in the police and fire department back then. (btw, I obviously have the text for a heritage page here!)
@cookingmylife Maureen, it's interesting that you mention your mother not learning the Lithuanian language. I could speak it when I younger but both my mother and father preferred that we speak English as they wanted to learn it! I can clearly remember my first day at school, in kindergarten no less, feeling very scared and confused as I couldn't understand a lot of what was being said to me because at that stage my parent only knew a smattering of English themselves! My older sister and brother had slowly been teaching my parents and my father learned a lot where he worked at a tiling factory. LOL! He would come home and tell us some of the 'Aussie slang' that his workmates had taught him!!!! It took longer for my mother to learn as she didn't go out to work and no doubt would have found it hard communicating to buy groceries etc. Years later as an adult I realised just how very brave and frightening it would have been for both of them, to leave everything they knew and all their family in the 'old country' to come out to a country on the other side of the world. My mother especially as my father came out first and then my mother followed a year later, travelling by herself with my older sister and brother, on a ship that seemed to take forever across the Indian Ocean to arrive at Perth in Western Australia. She did say a few times how very frightening that trip was on her own. Like you Maureen, the more I write the more I want to document the history of my parents that I do know!
This week I received an email from a distant cousin. Attached was a file that contained a transcribed scrapbook of another distant cousin from the late 1800's early 1900's. The file was 119 pages printed out!! In it were birth announcements, wedding announcements, death announcements, and general newspaper articles about our family. It was an amazing gift!! Oh what I wouldn't do to see the original scrapbook!!
I would plan a trip to see that cousin! or maybe FaceTime while saving money if s/he is far far away!
They actually have a family reunion every August. I live in Minnesota, the reunion is in Kansas. I am hoping to convince my dad to go this year or next year. Would really love it if we could convince both uncles as well.
Kidnap those uncles and cart them off to the reunion. Lots of men balk at these things but once they're there they love to tell their own stories! Don't we all!
w0w Robyn how amazing that you found them!!!!!!!!!!!! look forward to pages about what you find out!!!!! With us....my grandparents told us so so many stories, my aunts & uncles also and my parents were also keen on taking lots of photos, but these days there are many photos they have no idea who the people are..... the main problem with my looking for history online is that there is info about when they came to the Americas, they first stopped in the US and then some of the families came down to South America, the problem of me getting past the ship they arrived in and the names they were registered is that they came from Syria... some of them Sephardi (Arabic) Jews so with the situation currently in Syria is almost impossible to get info... I am glad that I know a lot of my (huge) family up to my great grand parents, the family in the USA and the ones in South America, I even started a book for Sarita to have I should really take up on that again....
