Small World

I had put up some new names on the Brennan-Mueller family tree - descendants of Ned Brennan (my father's family) who would be my 3rd cousins. I had never met these cousins, and had actually never heard their names, even though they live in Lima, Ohio, the town where my parents and I were born and where they lived until their early twenties.  Then, during a phone conversation with Tim, a second cousin on my mother's side of the family, I learned something fascinating. 

Tim happened to mention the surname of the family I had just added to my tree, not knowing about my connection to them, so I said "those are my relatives."  He seemed surprised, then begin reciting the names of the children in this family - all 12 of them.  Turns out he had gone to school with some of them, and knew their mother as well.  She had been a friend of his mother, and he told me, she had been a friend of my mother as well.

I wondered aloud if my mother realized that her friend was related to my dad.  He said he was sure she knew as those Irish clans are pretty tight.

Lima is really not that large of a town.  Most of the residents belong to either a large Irish family, a large Italian one, or a large German one.  At least, that was the case when my parents lived there.  So I suppose my mother knew - although I had never heard of this family before, so perhaps she didn't.  People don't always keep track of their second and third cousins.

Anyway, my husband and I are visiting Lima this spring, so perhaps I can visit with the woman who once knew my mother and find out. 

The list of relatives I want to see is growing longer and longer.   

DNA RESULTS

My DNA results are in and they are largely what I expected.  My ancestry is 51 percent Central European - which includes Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Luxembourg.  Since nearly all the ancestors on my mother's side are from Germany and Belgium, this isn't surprising.

Also not surprising is the fact that 38 percent of my ancestry is from the British Isles, which includes England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.  On my father's side, there are many ancestors from Ireland as well as England. 

The one surprise is that 8 percent of my ancestry is from Eastern Europe, an area that includes Poland, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Belarus and Ukraine, among other countries.  Since I have not identified any ancestors who came from this area, some early ancestors must have migrated from there to either Germany, Belgium, England or Ireland quite a long time ago.  The information provided regarding the DNA results states that your personal DNA sample may include DNA that is not reflected in your family tree because it dates from thousands of years ago. 

There are a few empty spaces on my family tree.  I have one great great grandfather on my father's side that I have been unable to identify, and one set of great great great grandparents on my mother's side who are not identified.  In addition, there are many ancestors who go back further than that who remain unidentified. 

Although my husband has not had his DNA analyzed, we already know we share roots from the British Isles and Central Europe, as he has ancestors from England and Switzerland.  We now know we share Eastern European roots.  His results, were he to have his DNA analyzed, would show at least 25 percent Eastern European Ancestry and probably the same from the British Isles.  

I was a little disappointed that there was no Native American ancestry as I had heard occasional rumors of that possibility.  But there is 3 percent of my DNA that is labeled "uncertain," so perhaps that is still possible. 

As part of the report I was given the names of other family trees on ancestry that contain, with 95 percent certainty, some of my distant cousins.  Now I will decide whether or not to reach out to any of them.  Perhaps they will be able to provide more clues to solve the remaining family mysteries. 

DNA

I took advantage of a special offer by ancestry.com and am having my DNA analyzed.  Here's the kit that they sent me to collect a sample of saliva.

It's a simple procedure.  You just collect a small sample of saliva, seal the sample up in a special bag and enclose it in the pre-addressed and stampled padded envelope. 

I've already received notice that they received my sample and will send me my results via email in 4 to 6 weeks.

So what can I expect to learn?  First, I will learn the various ethnicities that make up my ancestral history.  While I already have a pretty good idea of who my ancestors were and the countries they came from, there may be some surprises - perhaps I'll find that rumored but unknown Native American ancestor. Or I might find that some ancestors came from Eastern Europe before they made their way to the British Isles or Germany.

I'll also be directed to potential ancestors on other ancestry.com family trees who share some of my DNA patterns. 

I don't really expect any surprises, but I'm anxious to see the results nonetheless. It's just one more clue to solving the family mystery.

The Book is Finished

A few days after we returned from Ireland, the completed family history books were delivered. 

After nearly two years of research and writing, it was gratifying to see the finished product. 

The book contains several sections, including sections on the ancestors and descendants of Anton Eterovich (Terich) and Madalena Yeseta, my husband's grandparents.  It also includes sections on their brothers and sisters, and their descendants, complete with pictures.  There is a section on the history of the island of Brac as well as a section on the history of Bohemia, the two places from which the ancestors came.  There is also a section on Croatian immigration and a description  of Los Angeles in 1910, when most of the Croatian ancestors arrived.  In the center of the book are 9 pages of wedding photos spanning a century.  Finally, there is a large section on Croatian recipes. 

After receiving the books, I prepared them for mailing.  Earlier, I had recieved checks from the relatives for the book and postage.  Nearly 40 relatives asked to have the book mailed, so on a Saturday, my husband and I carted 4 boxes of books in padded envelopes into the local Post Office.  Since then, I have heard from a number of relatives who are thrilled with the book.

I have also personally delivered a few of the books and my husband and I will be going to a book signing party this Sunday.  I'm really looking forward to that.

In future posts I will outline how I went about researching, writing and designing the book, for any of you who might be interested in writing a book of your own.   

IRELAND - PART III, CONNECTING WITH FAMILY

We left Ashford Castle with a driver who took us to the Dublin Airport to pick up a car, and hoped we could figure out how to drive on the left hand side of the street.  We then headed to County Laois and our new accomodations: The Roundwood House.

We arrived and looked around at this mansion built in the 1700s and refurbished several times, most recently in the 1980s.  A young couple runs the place, the daughter and son in law of the former owners who still live on the property. (Obviously they weren't the original owners.) They were quite welcoming, though it was a little odd to be staying in someone else's house with no locks on the bedroom doors. 

After settling in, we were ready to begin the highlight of our trip - spending time with family we had never met.  I called my cousin Canice from the inn and he came to meet us at 5:30 and took us on a tour of the surrounding area and sites of significance to my family.  First, we stopped at Aghaboe Abbey, orginally built in the 6th century and destroyed in 1346.  The present day building is a ruin of a Dominican friary that was built in 1382 and has been preserved by the local community.

 

 

The adjacent cemetery is where many members of the family are buried.

 

 



 

 





Next, Canice drove past a small dirt road where my great great grandfather, Ned Brennan, lived in 1860, before he came to America.  There are no houses there now, but Canice said there once were 14 homes on the lane, probably the simple stone houses whose remains dot the landscape of rural Ireland.

 

 

This is as close as I will ever get to where my ancestors once lived. 

We also drove past a slight mound on a local farmer's property.  It was overgrown with foliage.  Canice identified it as Kyletabreecheen (or what a cousin, Father Bob Brennan, called Killabrigeen in his book Irish Diary), the abandoned cemetery where many of my Brennan ancestors are buried.  I wanted to explore the area, but Canice said there was nothing to see as there are no headstones. 

Our next stop was the Chapel of Clough, or Aghaboe Chapel, where my great great grandparents, Ned and Mary, were married in 1860.  The building is no longer a chapel and is now a community center.  The only hint that it was once a chapel is the graveyard adjacent to it. 

The final stop on our evening tour was the home where Canice grew up, and the house and barn owned originally by his great grandparents, James and Mary Brennan Clooney.  (Mary was the sister of my great great grandfather, Ned.) 

 





He even took us on a tour of the interior of the house, where we saw an old turf-burning stove downstairs and four poster brass bed upstairs.

The home is on Canice's farm, and his own bungalow, where he lives with his wife, Maura, is just down the lane. He took us there to meet her and she fixed us a nice tea.  We had a lovely visit.

The next morning, Tony and I visited Kilkenny and toured its castle.

We also drove around the area to see the many towns and villages whose names  I've seen in census records as I've worked on my genealogy.  That evening, we joined Canice and Marua and about 50 members of the local community at a mass at the Abbey, said for those who are buried in the cemetery. 

We were told by a local that at this time of the year, masses are said in cemeteries throughout Ireland.  Here, they really remember those who have passed on, and every tiny village seems to have its own cemetery, which is a continual reminder of the connection between the living and the dead.

Afterwards, we joined Canice and his family for tea at the house.  Maura insisted everyone sing a song, so each of us had to think of something to sing.  Tony and I sang a duet, but everyone else sang alone, mostly 20-verse Irish ballads they've been singing for years.  It was wonderful to feel a part of this large and thoroughly Irish family.

 

The next day, our final day in Ireland, we drove to Rathdowny, home of my great great Grandmother, and Castlecomer, a Brennan stronghold to this day.

 

 

Then it was time to return to Canice's house for lunch, but we were distracted by the sight of what could only have been a workhouse, set up during the time of the famine.     Sure enough, it was a workhouse that had been made into a museum and it was grim. Men, women and children were housed separately, all slept on straw on the floor and worked very hard for very little food. It was a gruesome existence, but it was the only thing between some of the starving population and death.

 

 

 

We spent about 20 minutes at the museum, and then got lost on the way to Canice's.  There are no street signs and you simply have to know the lanes and roads, which we don't.  Finally we arrived and had a lovely visit where I gave Canice a copy of my book and some family pictures and family history.  He showed me the letters he had kept from my father.  Sooner than we knew it, it was time to leave, which wasn't easy.  Canice and Maura invited us to return, and we said we would.  Hopefully we'll be able to keep that promise.

 

 

Ellen and Canice at the Abbey



 



IRELAND - PART II

I suppose you could say our trip to Ireland was divided into four segments.  The first two segments I have already spoken about: the first being Dublin, and the second being the scenic and rugged west coast of the island. The next two segments involved castles and family. In this blog post I'll write about the castles. In IRELAND - PART III, I'll report on the visit with family.

After our two days and three nights in Killarney, and our visits to the Dingle Peninsula, the Burren, and the Cliffs of Moher (with brief stops in Galway and Limerick) we spent our first night in a castle. This castle was Dromoland.

 

We were only here for one night, but the staff was wonderful and we felt like royalty. The breakfast was to die for.  The next morning we left to drive through Connemara.  Along the way we saw the famous Connemara ponies, lobster pots in inlets, thousands of sheep, and this gorgeous site: Kylemore Abbey.

 

You may have seen this view in travel brochures of Ireland.  Once a private residence, it served as a school for girls for many years.  Now it is home to the Benedictine nuns.  Lucky ladies!

Our day ended at Ashford Castle, where we checked in for two nights.

The bridge leading to this castle was used in the movie The Quiet Man with John Wayne.  The small village of Cong down the road was also used. 

The castle was elegant and amazing.  Dinners were formal affairs and breakfast was an exercise in indulgence.  The first night, we were unable to get a table in the formal dining room, so we crossed the bridge to Cullen's Cottage, a lovely and less formal restaurant.  The staff was every bit as attentive, however and the food was excellent. We joked with the waiters about the pictures on the wall - every one of them was crooked.  One said, "We didn't hang them, but we like it when someone else does a bad job, because then we can complain but have no responsibility to fix it.  If you come back here next year, it will look exactly the same."  I kind of liked that philosophy.

 

But beyond the beauty and luxurious surroundings of the castle, there were also activities that were quite memorable. The first involved falconry, with a small Peruvian Hawk named "Inca."

 

This Irish beauty brought Inca to us and then Conner, our guide, took us out to the "Scary forest" and taught Tony how to handle Inca.

She performed beautifully, taking off and returning with each movement of Tony's hand, but then she found a stick and wanted to play with it on the ground. 

 

 

I believe this was one of the highlights of the trip for Tony.  In these past few years, he's taken up bird-watching, and he has always loved watching the hawks in our neighborhood.  I don't think he ever thought he'd get this close to such a beautiful animal. 

The afternoon turned to a more serious pursuit of nature and history.  We took a boat across Lake Corrib to the island known as Inchagoill, or "Island of the Stranger."  According to local legend, when St. Patrick came to this area of Ireland he was not greeted warmly by those who still practiced the Druid religion, and was exiled to the island along with his nephew and navigator, Lugnad.  They stayed there a while and built a stone church, the ruins of which are still there.

There is a small graveyard next to the ruin, with the stone marking the grave of Lugnad, who died on the island in the mid-5th century.  St. Patrick escaped somehow, and later, in the 12th century, Augustinian monks built a small church on the island, to use for a retreat center.  It was called the Church of Saints because of the heads of "the 10 Saints of Lake Corrib" over the entry door.

 

 

Our stay at Ashford ended with another glorious breakfast and then we headed back to Dublin to pick up a rental car, attempt to drive on the left hand side of the road and find our way to County Laois and my newly discovered cousins. 

That part of the story will be told in IRELAND - PART III

 

 

IRELAND- PART I

We've just returned from two weeks in Ireland and the visions and memories are permantantly etched in my mind.  We had a truly memorable and wonderful time. 

First, it should be said that this journey might never have taken place were it not for my desire to connect with the culture of my ancestors.  There is something about being part of an Irish family, even if the family isn't one hundred percent Irish, that lures you to that small island across the Atlantic.  The stories you heard growing up, the myths and legends, the songs, the hardships, the history, the parades in honor of St. Patrick all make you want to visit  and see what those great great grandparents left behind, and why they brought so much of it with them. 

Our trip started off in Dublin and we got a glimpse into over 1000 years of Irish history - from the prehistoric and then Celtic origins, to the invasion of Vikings, to the conquest of the Normans,  to the British rule, and to the many rebellions against that rule, most of them ending in disaster.  The place that I found both fascinating and haunting was Kilmainham Gaol, the jail where the leaders of the 1916 Easter rising were imprisoned and executed.  Here is the Jail:

 



And here is the place of execution:

Of course, we saw many other sites in Dublin, including Dublin castle, which really isn't much of a castle, the General Post Office, where you can still see bullet holes from the Easter Rising, the Guinness Storehouse and Jameson Distillery, Grafton Street, Trinity College and the Book of Kells, the River Liffey, the Cathedrals, the Dublin Writer's Museum, the Statues of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, the visitors from Galway and Cork wearing their colorful jerseys and walking to the semi-final hurling match, even a parade - not in honor of St. Patrick, but a surprise LGBT parade in support of gay marriage.

 

After three days we left for Killarney and the Dingle Peninsula. Along the way, we stopped at the  1000 year old Cahir Castle in County Tipperary.  Here are a few pictures:

 

 

 

 From Killarney, we toured the Dingle Peninsula.  The raw beauty of this windswept, Emerald landscape was breathtaking.  We saw fields and fields of sheep, grazing with a view of the Atlantic Ocean. 

 

 

 

 Along the way, we saw an ancient bee hive hut, where monks once lived solitary existences.

 

The following day it rained, but we braved the weather and rode through Killarney National Park in a horse drawn buggy.

 

 

Then we headed over to Muckross House, a nineteenth century mansion which was stunning in its beauty and opulence.  Built in 1843, just three years before the Great Famine in Ireland, it is almost unbelievable that people could live in such splendor when thousands of families, only a few miles away, were starving to death.

Queen Victoria visited Muckross House in 1861, the year my great great grandparents came to America.  It is said the owners spent three years preparing for her visit, and went bankrupt in the process.

The next day we visited the village of Adair with its thatched roof cottages -

And the Cliffs of Moher -

Then our drive took us to The Burren, a barren and strange lanscape formed when the ice receded from the last ice age.  It stretched for miles and miles.

Appearing here and there throughout this landscape are ancient Druid Tombs, dating back to thousands of years before Christ. 

We also passed through Limerick, and saw some landmarks from Frank McCourt's book, Angela's Ashes.  Then we headed to Dromoland Castle to begin the second half of our journey, and the long anticipated meeting with the cousins.  That part of the trip will be presented in IRELAND - PART II

 



Double Excitement

Two things converge in the next two weeks week: the beginning and ending of two projects and experiences.  My husband and I leave for Ireland on Wednesday and will meet some distant Irish cousins for the first time.  This will hopefully be the beginning of a relationship with my Irish cousins, and a good start to the Brennan family history I want to write.

At the same time, my husband and I are ending a project on his family.   The Eterovich-Yeseta family history book is being completed at a printer here in the United States. 

We will be in Ireland for two weeks and one of the highlights of the trip will be a visit to Aghaobe Abbey and a celebration with my new cousins.  The Abbey is a ruin of a 6th century building, rebuilt in about the 11th century, with only its walls standing. 

There will be a Mass celebrated, and then a gathering at the home of one of my cousins with whom I have been corresponding for several years.

When we return, we will hopefully be greeted by a box containing the family history books which we will then distribute to my husband's relatives.  It is so exciting to be concluding a two year long project, which we hope will bring much joy to my husband's family.  

I hope to have much more to blog about in the coming weeks.  For now, here's the cover of the book. 

Irish - American families in the 20th century

We leave for Ireland in two weeks and I'm updating the American Brennan tree to show my cousins in Ireland.  I'm searching the recently released 1940 census records as well as new databases that have shown up on ancestry in the past year (when I have mostly been busy finishing my husband's paternal family history book - which is now at the printers).

Sometimes in genealogy, you find something interesting, something you actually hadn't given any thought to, such as how circumstances in the nation might affect the marriage rate and numbers of children and grandchildren in a given family.  Recently I found some interesting data along those lines regarding my family.

My great great grandparents, Ned and Mary, came here in 1861 and had six children, five of whom married and had large families.  Mary Ann, their oldest, had 9 children.  Michael, the oldest boy, also had 9 children.  Bridget had 5.  Edward had 7, and my great grandfather John had 8.  Only Sarah remained single.  But the next generation held a different story.  Some of the children of Ned and Mary had fewer grandchildren than children. Granted, some of the records are hard to find, but one thing stands out: many of the male grandchildren of Ned and Mary never married, and a number of the female grandchildren didn't marry until they were in their forties. There was at least one nun and one priest in this group, so they obviously didn't have children, but many of the others were childless as well.

We're talking about people who were born between the late 1800s and the early 1900s. The youngest of the bunch, one of my great uncles, was born in 1917. 

So I began to ask myself why this was so. Why did so many never marry or marry so late?  And one of the clues came in the draft card registrations for the men.  While most of the young men had a job in 1918 when they registered for the WW I draft, they often listed themselves as unemployed on their WW II draft cards.  I assume this must have been because of the depression, which lasted from 1929 up until WW II.  These men, having no income, must have not been good marriage prospects.  Even if they wanted to marry, they had no means to support a wife and children.  I imagine a good number of them were depressed or despondent over this situation as well, making them poor company to women.  On the women's part, it may not have been easy to find a man with a good income.  Hence, many of them either remained at home, found employment in another town or state, and married in their forties and never had children.

It made me stop and think how the economic situation of the country can affect more than just income levels.  It can actually slow down the rates of marriage and the numbers of children born.  An it can leave a lot of people without the lifelong companionship of a spouse - which I find very sad.

Brennan-Fahey Family Update

 My great great grandfather, Ned (Edward) Brennan came to America from Ireland in 1860.  A few months later, his wife, Mary Fahey Brennan, arrived in New York and there had her first child.  Her widowed mother, Sally Finn Fahey, supposedly accompanied her on the journey. Mary Brennan's father, John Fahey, had died some years before the journey.  While I have a few names that may or may not be the parents of Ned Brennan, I have little else to tell me about his ancestors.  Since most census records prior to 1901 have been destroyed for various reasons, it is quite difficult to trace ancestry in Ireland.  So, six weeks ago I hired a research company in Ireland to see if anything could be found on my Brennan and Fahey ancestors.

Yesterday, I received the report and it was quite disappointing.  Griffith's valuation, an 1850 survey of landowners and tenants, lists an Edward Brennan leasing land in the townland of Gortnaclae, the area in which he had lived prior to emigrating.  However, there are no baptismal records for Ned Brennan in Gortnaclae, so this indicates he and his family may have come from somewhere else.  Where that might be, I have no idea.

Also, by 1858, according to the Cancelled Books, which update ownerships and land leases, Edward Brennan appears to have left the district. 

There are baptismal records for a Mary Fahey close to the area from which she came, and close to the approximate date of her birth in 1833.  The parents listed were John Fahey and Sally Finne.  John Fahy and Sally Finn or Finne had two other children, baptized in the same parish:  Patrick in 1835 and Judy in 1837.  These dates are close to the dates of the births of Mary's known siblings, who also came to America, but their names were John and Julia, not Patrick and Judy.  It is possible, of course, that Patrick's middle name was John and he went by that once he came to America, and that Judy used Julia once she arrived here.  But I can't be certain of that, so I'm not certain this is the correct family.  As for dates, Irish immigrants often were vague on their actual birthdates, whether by ignorance or design I'm not sure. 

We'll be leaving for Ireland in less than 5 weeks and hope to spend some time with a cousin there who has offered to take us to the old Brennan homestead.  Perhaps he or another family member can give me a better idea of how long the Brennan family lived there and where they might have come from before that.  At this point, that is the only remaining way for me to find more clues. 

Finding Another Lost Family Member

My husband and I made another trip to the cemetery yesterday to find a lost family member.  This was the wife of my husband's great uncle.  She was born on a small island off the Dalmatian Coast in 1878 and came to the United States in 1912 with her two daughters.  Her husband had arrived some years earlier. She died sometime before 1920, when in the census for that year her husband states he is a widower, but we did not know the date of her death, nor the circumstances.  In speaking with her living descendants, we were unable to gain any new information other than the possibility she had died in childbirth.

In a previous trip to the cemetery, we had been unable to find her grave.  Even the office staff was unable to find her name in the large pre-computer record books.  However, I decided to give it another try (sometimes one cemetery staff member is more adept than another) and this time the cemetery staff found her.  She was buried, they told us, with a baby.  She had died on the day of the baby's birth and the baby had died a few days later. The staff member gave us the location of the grave.

We went to the location they gave us and couldn't find the headstone.  We walked all over, but could not find it.  We began to think that there was no headstone, that perhaps the family had never purchased one, and we went back to the cemetery office.  They looked it up again and found that there was, indeed, a headstone, but it had only been purchased in 1991.  They also sent a staff member out to help us find the grave and it was not where they had originally directed us. 

This is eventually what we found:

The glare of the sun makes the image less clear than we would have liked, but if you look carefully, you can see the name "Dora Eterovich"  and the word "baby" below it. This appeared to confirm our theory that Dora died in childbirth.  And we were finally able to determine the year of her death.  We spent a few minutes at the grave, reflecting on the tragedy of dying at such a young age and leaving children behind.  Then we went on to find other family members and pay our respects. 

Portrait of a Family

When you spend your days learning things about your ancestors - three, four, ten, even fifteen generations ago - you come to think you know them just a little. In most cases, you can only imagine what they looked like as you obviously never met anyone past a great grandparent - if you even met them.  So anytime you can find a picture of an ancestor, it is like finding treasure. 

Yesterday I was working on the Shaw side of my family tree - my paternal grandmother's side - when I found a link to a picture I had never seen before.  Someone from Ohio put it up on ancestry.com.  I don't know if he's a relative, or just someone who searches through records and puts things up.  I've also come across the name of this man in connection with my maternal side of the family and I doubt he's related to both sides, although it is possible, I suppose. 

Anyway, the picture is a group photo and it was taken in about 1903. It's not in great shape.  There are two obvious places in the photograph where someone cut it as if to remove certain people from the others.  Don't know if it was deliberate, or some 5 year old child got ahold of the picture and practiced their scissors work on it.  It actually looks deliberate to me, and that makes me curious.  Was there a falling out between members of this family?

The man on the top left is my paternal great grandfather, and below him, holding a little girl, is my paternal great grandmother.  My own grandmother had not yet been born when this picture was taken.  The two people in the middle of the picture are my great great grandparents.  The man with the beard was Jacob Burden, the woman to his left Rebecca Lippincott Burden.  They had 5 children.  But Jacob had been married previously and had 4 children with his first wife.  Both sets of children are in this picture, along with spouses and grandchildren.

This picture is remarkable to me for many reasons - the fact that so many family members are gathered for one photograph.  The fact that it's not in a studio, but outside.  The fact that someone with a quality camera took it.  The fact that so many family members are living.  The fact that it even survived.  But even more remarkable to me is how attractive this family is - how much (aside from the clothing), many of them could fit in today in our society.  The children look much like other children I see running around today and the adults are all so handsome and healthy looking.  I've seen many pictures from this time period and the people in them look like they belong in the early 1900s.  These people don't.  They seem more vibrant and alive to me.  Perhaps it's the way some of the woman are holding their babies, or the the way some of them have their hands on others' shoulders, or the way the little boy, fourth from left, has his arms crossed and a scowl on his face as if he finds this whole enterprise boring and he just wants to run off and have some fun.  Some of them look as if they could simply jump off the page. 

This picture, as so many pictures, is a reminder that people who are no longer here were once alive and happy, working and playing, loving their children and sometimes grieving over the loss of someone.  They were as alive as we are now - and that is one of many reasons I love photographs that bring them back to life, if only on paper. 

How gullible do they think we are?

There's a popular television show on now called "Who Do You Think You Are?" that follows various celebrities as they search for one of more of their ancestors.  I watch it regularly and enjoy seeing people find interesting details about an ancestor's life.  I also admit I'm a little envious that I don't have several professional genealogists at the ready, able to look up documents and find hidden stories and facts about my ancestors.  At the same time, I'm irked that it is so set up, so unrealistic to those of us who search for hours at a time, on a weekly if not daily basis, for years just to find what they find on the show in ten minutes.

Each week, they make it look so easy.  All you have to do is find a grandparent's scrapbook with clues.  Then you breeze into a library or hall of records with a genealogist waiting for you.  He or she has newspaper articles or ancient data books, ready for you to find exactly what you need.  Then he or she points you to another city and another genealogist.  You hop on a plane and walk into the next library, with another expert waiting for you.  Somewhere in there, you type in the name of your ancestor on the ancestry.com website (one of the show's sponsors) and up pops exactly the record you need.  Eventually, you find out something amazing.  Your ancestor fought in the Revolutionary War, or was in debtors' prison in Europe, or was executed in the Spanish Civil War, etc. 

Last Friday's show featured Rob Lowe on the hunt for a possible ancestor that fought in the Revolutionary War. (The DAR calls such people "patriots.") Rob started out with his brother Chad and they looked in Grandma's scrapbook, which interestingly, looked nothing like any scrapbook of any grandmother I've ever seen.  Each page had only one or two documents or photos and they were perfectly placed on the page.  The documents were not yellowed, dog-eared or tattered in any way, and the scrapbook itself was brand new. 

Then Rob is off to find out about one name he came across and he finds out this man was a Hessian who had fought against the colonies in the Revolutionary War.  Rob is, of course, depressed that his ancestor was not a "patriot," until he finds out that his ancestor eventually paid taxes to the colonies after he left his job as a hired soldier, and for some reason this makes Rob eligible to apply to the "Sons of the American Revolution" for membership, which, of course, one of the experts on the show did for him.  This made me laugh.  How does someone who fought agains the American colonies during the Revolutionary War suddenly become a "patriot?"  Anyway, I don't know all the rules and regulations of the Sons of the American Revolution, so I won't comment further on that, but I have to say it really struck me during this particular episode how the show, as interesting as it is, really gives a false impression of how most of us non-celebrities find information about our ancestors. 

I asked myself after Friday's episode:  "How gullible do they think we are?"  First of all, most of us don't have scrapbooks in perfect condition.  Any documents I have - like old newspaper articles, are so yellow I can barely read them.  And most pictures from my grandparents' eras, let alone ancestors dating further back, need photo restoration.  Secondly, I don't have genealogists to help me access just the right record in some archive somehwhere in New York or Ohio or Pennsylania.  Third, I can't just hop on a plane and present myself at a library where some eager genealogist will do the work for me.  And finally, while I can go on ancestry and find much information, I can't do it the way they do on television.  First, I have to pay nearly $30 a month just for the privilege of going on the website.  Then, I can't just type in a name and find the exact I want.  I have to first find the correct data base, and that can take hours or days.  And, of course, no one is going to help me become a member of the DAR.

Then again, maybe I'm not really that envious.  While Rob Lowe, or Martin Sheen, or Paula Deen can have their families researched for them (as admitedly I had done for my husband's Croatian family because it was unrealistic for me to fly to Croatia to do it, and besides, I can't read Croatian), most of the time I have to spend hours at my computer and going to libraries and even cemeteries, in order to find the information I need.  And while that is time-consuming and at times frustrating, it is also a lot of fun. When I find information on someone that has eluded me for months, I am thrilled.  It's like discovering little pieces of buried treasure.  Pictures and stories can be even more exciting.

So doing genealogy work may be exhausting, and at times it may be tempting to have someone do the work for you as they do on "Who do You Think You Are?" But doing it myself is much more rewarding.

A Visit to the Cemetery

I never thought I'd be one of those genealogy nerds who goes to cemeteries, searches for deceased family members, and makes rubbings of tombstones.  It seemed a bit ghoulish, and unnecessary considering the amount of information you can access online about ancestors. But last Friday, my husband and I went to a Catholic cemetery in Los Angeles where many of his family members are buried.  We were searching for dates for several people whose records we could not acess online. 

Like so many cemeteries, this one was beautiful.  It was a lovely day, the grass was green, the sky blue, and the rolling hills of the cemetery quite peaceful.  We had to stop in the office first, and it took some time to access the names we were searching for - they were not digitized, so an employee had to go back and search in some old books.  We found most of the people we were looking for, and were able to read the headstones  to get the dates.  In other words, we didn't have to do  rubbings in order to read them.  I was happy about that - I would have felt silly. 

While there, we stopped by the graves of my husband's grandparents, Anthony and Madalena.  They had changed their surname many years ago from Eterovich to Terich.  We were surprised to see, however, that their headstones were inscribed with the original Croatian name.

Before we left, we placed some flowers on a few of the graves, and spent a few moments reflecting on the people whose graves we visited - all immigrants from Croatia - and on their lives, their courage, their fortitude and their legacies.  



A Marathon, not a Sprint

It's been an eventful few days.  I had ten copies of my mother-in-law's family history book printed to distribute to relatives.  This one I did myself on word and inserted all the photographs, then took it to Fed Ex Office and had them print it double-sided and then bind it.  It isn't as good as a professionally printed book, but since we only needed a few copies, it worked just fine.  As long as everyone treats it carefully, it can last a long time. 

I also sent off the Eterovic book to the book designer, finally!  I had thought it would be ready to print by now, but the book project snowballed and as we met more and more cousins, we were referred to more and more relatives who had information we wanted to include. So things were delayed a bit.  Now it will be a matter of phone calls and emails between me and the designer to get the book to look exactly as we want it to.  In the meantime, my daughter in law is designing the cover.  The next step, about six weeks from now, will be to send everything to the printer, and by late June or early July, we should have the book. 

So with those books completed, I had to choose my next project.  And with our upcoming trip to Ireland, I decided to start with the Irish research.  Almost a year ago, I paid for a preliminary search by a genealogy firm in Ireland.  They found some promising areas to research and I just hired them to continue and see if they can find anything else in the records.  Ireland's records are very spotty, most of the census records from the 1800s having been destroyed intentionally or unintentionally, so I don't know how much we may find, but at least I'll know if we've reached a dead end or not.  The history I have only begins with my 2nd great grandparents, Ned and Mary Brennan, who came to America in 1861.  Before that, I have only names, and even those I'm unsure of.  So we'll see. 

I also want to research my paternal grandmother's family - the Shaw family and their ancestors.  There is a possible connection to the early American colonies and I need to confirm two generations with very few sources available to me.  I have recently sent for a book on the Bland family - one crucial line - and have been searching through it for clues, but I may have to go to source records in Ohio and other states.  That will mean some interesting travel and I'm up for that. 

A researcher in the Czech Republic once told me genealogy is not a sprint, it's a marathon, and I now understand what he means.  I have much more to learn and discover about my side of the family, and even with my husband's family history books complete, there is still more to discover about his family.  So, after a short break to relax and recover from the last two projects, I'll be back in the archives, learning what I can about the people who made it possible for me to even be here.

The Yeseta Family, Together Again

I finally have in my possession pictures of all of the Yeseta siblings - the brothers and sisters of my husband's paternal grandmother, Madalena.  The original spellling of the name was Ješeta, but in Croatian the letter J is pronounced Y so in the United States, the family changed the spelling. (The name Ješeta is actually a Czech name, the siblings' father having been born in Bohemia - the modern day Czech Republic.)

There were six siblings, all of whom came to the United States.  Their names were Maria, Anna, Matej (Matthew), Sime (pronounced Shima), Ante (Anthony) and Madalena.  Now that I have their pictures, I can send the manuscript of the family history book to my book designer.  She will need to do some photoshop repair work on some of the pictures.  Here they are:

Maria

                                                                               Anna

Matej

Sime

Ante

Madalena

These siblings were born between 1875 and 1886. Four of the six died between 1929 and 1939, at relatively young ages, from pneumonia or accidents.  All of them married and have many descendants. Some of the descendants have kept in touch with other descendants, but in many cases relatives had lost track of each other. This project has brought many of them together again, in small gatherings, and through email and phone calls. This was a bonus outcome I had not anticipated - the reunion of grandchildren and great grandchildren of the orignial Yeseta immigrants. Many of those grandchildren  had never even met the grandparents who died so young.

Besides these pictures of the siblings, I have wedding pictures of the two brothers, other group pictures, and the names of most of the descendants as well as ancestors dating back to the early 1700s.  All will be sent off next Monday to the designer.  In about 2 months, we should have the finished product and the Yesetas will once again be united, if only in a book.