It has been a year since I posted an entry to this blog. What I was doing is not relevant to my genealogical search, but it did take me away from it. I am now back and hope to rekindle the readers I have. Let's get started.
Here is what excites me about #genealogy and working on my family tree.
As you might recall from earlier posts, I knew very little about my grandparents' emigration into this country in the early 1920's and some of what I thought I "knew" turned out to be completely wrong. For example, I always thought my maternal grandfather, JOHN FRANCIS BURKE, was an Irish immigrant who was married to my maternal grandmother, NINA THOMPSON BURKE, an immigrant from Scotland.
I do not remember why I thought that, but oh, how wrong that memory is.
My Grampy John was a born-and-raised U.S. citizen from New Hampshire with a New England lineage going back two generations, so far. Likewise, my Nana was not from Scotland at all; I have no idea how that "knowledge" came to me, but it was as wrong as it could have been. She was born and raised in Quebec, Canada, and her lineage is Canadian going back a couple of generations, too. Those misunderstandings kind of confused me and misdirected my attention a bit; instead of focusing on one person at a time, I started skipping around trying to make sense of things. For people who are beginning to work on their own family tree, that is an inefficient way to operate and might populate your tree with erroneous information because you skipped something.
So I reoriented my thoughts and actions and began looking at one person or family unit (husband and wife, for example) at a time. Doing so has been productive for me. I also expanded my sources; I have been a long-time subscriber to the big genealogy site, Ancestry.com, but doing so has limited me in some ways. Recently, I reactivated a 'free' membership to Family Search, another large genealogy repository based in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) and has given me some data points, including documents, that I did not have from Ancestry.com.
While I was looking for birth documents from my maternal great-grandmother - finding birth certificates has been Challenge #1 for me - I discovered something I had not found on Ancestry.com. (By the way, as I mentioned above, the maternal side of my family hails from the United States, so finding information about them is much easier.) A quick trip to the Family Search data immediately pointed to a birth certificate for my Great-gramma Burke, BERTHA JULIA RAYMOND, who I knew as an 8-year old boy before father and my family left the United States for his original posting in Jordan. (I never saw her alive again until we returned for the only burial I have ever attended...hers.)
The birth certificate I found was not hers; I am still searching for that. It was for a stillborn baby boy she had on August 12, 1905, in Wilton, New Hampshire. But that is not even the 'ah hah!' moment for me - stillborn children were very common in the early 1900's in a very small town in rural New Hampshire. The eye-opener was the entry on the line marked "No. of children, 1st, 2d, 3d..."
8th. Yes, eighth.
My great-grandmother had at least 8 children. Up to this point, I know of only four (now five) ancestors ... my grandfather and three of his brothers plus the one stillborn boy. Who and where are the other three? The only relatives I have identified are males; did my great-grandmother give birth to any girls? Where did this stillborn baby boy fall in the lineage? Are there more than eight? Large families are common in my past - my maternal lineage is Roman Catholic.
I now have other questions to answer in the search for branches and leaves on my family tree! As I have said before, finding these exciting clues to previously unknown people is what makes my climb up my family tree so exciting and rewarding.
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