Living in the Past: A Family History

Well, in three-and-a-half hours we take off in the car for San Francisco; at 4:00 the plane will begin whisking us off to Paris (short change of planes) and Venice, and then we will whisk ourselves to Ferrara, Florence, Siena, and Lucca. Yes, I'm nervous!  Didn't get much sleep last night.  I think I have everything packed except for a few last minute things, I know what I'm wearing on the plane (comfort first), I'm hopeful that the seating crisis (we're not sitting together on the long haul to Paris) will be resolved so I can relax on the plane, I have our tickets already to get by boat from Marco Polo Airport to Piazza San Marco and directions on how to walk to the hotel from the vaporetto stop . . . what could go wrong?  It should be about 68 degrees when we get to Venice -- a welcome change from the beastly hot weather we've had here over the past week. Temperatures over 100 degrees, and no air conditioning in anyone's home in Santa Cruz.  Ugh!  But it s...

In the time I've been doing genealogy, I've come up with very few connections, whether through traditional research or DNA research.  I've found one second cousin, and there's a lady in Holland who believes her mother and I are connected, but we haven't found the link yet.  Other than that . . . not much. A short while ago, I joined the German Genealogy Group , out of New York State, and of course submitted my surnames to their list.  Then last week, a woman emailed me to say that we might be connected through our Heissenbuettel ancestors.  At first, I said that must be a mistake, I don't have any Heissenbuettels, but I investigated a bit further and found out that indeed, I did -- they came in with the nearly 40 people I added to the tree when the brick wall around my great-grandmother came down. She gave me information about where her ancestors lived, and in what time periods, and I looked at the same things with my ancestors.  And look at this: Google maps He...

So . . . we're off to Italy next Tuesday.*  My loved one and I will travel for 10 days to Venice, Ferrara, Florence, and I hope Siena, then he goes home (with an overnight in Paris) and I continue on to Lucca, where I will be picked up to go to a 10-day watercolor painting workshop.  I can't tell you how excited I am about this -- I have wanted to go to Venice my whole life, and with the painting workshop included, it's a dream come true. So I'm thinking I'm not going to be writing about past family history for a bit; rather, I'll be writing about family history in the making.  I've always liked to travel . . . well, that's not exactly true.  I like the being there part, but I'm not crazy about the getting there.  I don't like to fly.  My father, who was in the 100,000 mile  or 1 million mile club from some airline because he traveled so much, said I couldn't possibly be his daughter if I didn't like to fly.  Well, sorry, Dad.  It's ...

I wasn't sure I wanted to write this post. But I feel I should, not only as a cautionary tale but also as a way of remembering someone whose life was far from easy. Beginning genealogists get a lot of advice;  don't take others' research as fact, check multiple sources, document everything, and so on.  Sometimes, though, people also mention what I have to think of as the "darker side of genealogy" -- what happens when you find something out that is unsettling or even shocking?   ewormuthphotography.com A number of people have written about this issue, to mention just a few:   Sue Shellenbarger wrote in the Wall Street Journal about how people are affected when they find something disturbing in their history.   hayden in Daily Kos has written about one of the ultimate shocks:  How do you feel when you find out one of your ancestors owned slaves?   And Lisa Alzo gives us advice on how to document troubling things we find out through our research....

Many thanks to Valerie Hughes of Genealogy with Valerie for nominating me for the "One Lovely Blog" award!  I'm delighted and flattered; thank you so much.  Here are the requirements: Thank the person who nominated you and link to that blog Share Seven things about yourself Nominate 15 bloggers you admire (or as many as you can think of!) Contact your bloggers to let them know that you’ve tagged them for the One Lovely Blog Award 1. Done, but I'll say it again -- thanks so much for nominating a newbie to the genealogy blogging community. 2.  Seven things about myself: I recently retired from teaching; I was an English Professor at San Francisco State University and the Director of the Composition Program for many years. I fell in love with genealogy a couple of years ago, and have been actively pursuing it ever since.  I've gone from 7 or 8 people in my family tree to hundreds.    My family is 100% German and the ancestors who came to America almost a...

I haven't done a lot of research with siblings, though from what I hear everyone say, it's important to focus not only on the direct ancestors but on the siblings as well, because we can gain insights from that research, too. My grandfather, William John Ortman, was the last of nine living children of Joseph Ortmann and Annie Schwietering Ortmann.  Joseph and Annie were both German immigrants, but they met in the U.S. and all their children, four daughters (Mary Theresa, Anna, Adelaide, and Catherine), and five sons (Augustus, Joseph B., Herman, Henry, and William) were born in the United States. Sadly, I have no family lore about the Ortmann clan and no photographs, because my grandfather was disowned when he married and never spoke to his family again.  The party line was that my grandmother was Lutheran and my grandfather Catholic; we really don't know why.  But the result is that with eight great-aunts and -uncles, we probably have more second or third cousins than we...

This week on "Saturday Night Genealogy Fun," we're thinking about great-grandparents, and whether our children knew them.   Sadly, the women in my family in recent generations seem to have delayed having children.  My mother was born when her mother was 40, and my son was born when I was 34, so the likelihood of him knowing any of his great-grandparents was slim-to-none.  Actually, none.  And his maternal grandmother, so sadly, was gone by the time he was four. My cousin, however, married young and had children young, so I'm sure they knew their great-grandmother, at least for a short while.  Both grandfathers died early, 1952 and 1957, so they were long gone before any children were born.  This matters to me.  I come from a tiny family -- my father was an only child, and my mother had one brother that was 16 years older than she was.  I have one first cousin.  Period.  So I've always longed to have family of any kind around, and so wish...