Yippee! Just got another clue in the search for my mother's family.

[Bertha Venation]

My mother died in 1974 and I was estranged from her family. I've recently regained contact with my favorite aunt, who is only ten years older than me. She told me many things I didn't know; among them, that when her mother died, when she was three, she went to live with my Aunt Lovella & Uncle Harold.

To this point, Aunt Lovella had been merely an unfortunate punchline in my memory. My mother, the world's worst housekeeper, poked fun at Aunt Lovella for being a neat freak. (My mother apparently had no sense of irony.) But in her email my aunt Penny mentioned Harold & Lovella's last name -- and I just found Lovella's death record on the SS death index.

I don't know how I am related to Aunt Lovella; I'm waiting to hear back from Penny on that. I am guessing that Lovella and Bonnie, my maternal grandmother, were sisters.

I want so badly to know more about the women I come from. I know some of them had to be pioneers on the prairies of Kansas & Oklahoma -- my mother was born in Kansas; my father, and his mother, in Oklahoma.

I just wish the on-line genealogy sites didn't cost so much.

Do you do ancestry research? What tools do you use? What fascinating facts have you found about your family?

[carolinayellowdog]

1. Some free tools

Dear Bertha,

Warning: this is an incurable addiction so best to stop now if you don't want to get hooked. Even though ancestry.com is expensive, one of the best tools is free, the ancestry world tree aka WorldConnect. It is a huge database of user-contributed genealogies, accessible either through rootsweb or ancestry. Here's a link:

http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/

Also the LDS church has a very useful site:

http://familysearch.org

Some fascinating facts I've learned: 2 of my gg grandfathers and 1 ggg grandfather fought in the 1st NC Infantry (USA) in the Civil War, as did most of their brothers and uncles of military age. Northeast NC was a hotbed of Union sympathizers for various reasons.

Happy hunting,

CYD

[Bertha Venation]

2. Thanks, CYD!! eom

[madfloridian]

3. Here is site with GREAT mailing lists and experts in in genealogy.

www.rootsweb.com

You can search or do the mailing lists from the link at the top. Sorted by area, surname, or interest. This is a free site with free mailing lists. Some areas are paid site through Ancestry.com, but the mailing lists can work miracles.

Also try www.genforum.com and check surname forums or area forums.

Good luck in your quest.

[NicoleM]

4. I don't have any suggestions but

how cool is it that you had an Aunt Lovella? That's such an awesome name. :)

[carolinayellowdog]

5. Awesome names

Well, that gives me an opening for my latest discoveries in the ancestors-with-amazing-names category. This is a mother and daughter: Freelove Stafford, b. 1680, and daughter Freelove Tillinghast, b. 1699, both of Rhode Island.

Doing research for a friend I discovered that his ggg grandmother was named Hettie Fagg.

[Mrs. Venation]

10. An Ancestor On My Mother's Side

was named Prairie Flower Hufstetler. My great-aunt Lettie has a tintype photo of her. It's way cool.

[TNDemo]

6. I come from three generations of adoptions.

My mother, her mother and grandmother were all adopted. All have pretty interesting stories. My mother's father was the mayor of Lexington, Kentucky who apparently was a Catholic with political aspirations who did not want a pregnant Protestant bride. My mother's mother led her family to believe she was dead but my mother ultimately tracked her down in Ohio. She had been married to a man for 35 years who had never met her family (which I would find odd). She had died before my mother located her but she did get to know the rest of the family.

[Mr. McD]

7. My family has been traced 27 generations on my fathers line.

Back to about 1100. I only had to research 5 to make the connection.
My immigrant ancestor was well researched. There are family connections to Robert the Bruce and the Lords of the Isles.
11 generations lived in Ireland. Many served as mercenaries (galloglasses.

[Fovea]

8. Good for you.

My mom told me my father's name on my death bed, but I have never made the effort required to track him down.

I fear an additional rejection more than not knowing, I guess.

[Snow]

9. This is a lot of fun, especially for the

sense of history, of context, the cautionary tales you can get.
I have a great-grandfather (father's father's father), for example, who left his wife during one of those repeated 'panics' in the late 1800's, hit the road, did who-knows-what day labor or whatever, ended up dying in a rail yard. One of the Bok, Muir, & Trickett cd's has a wonderful song called "I never knew my grandad" that could've been written about him.

There's also the talking with the old folks, who come up with the most astonishing things. While I was in high school I was friends with my father's mother's mother, who lived in a little shack in Broad Ripple, Indianapolis. She had a pump for water in her kitchen and an outhouse. She was in her 80's at the time, which in that day was pretty daggone old. She sort of raised dandelions in her yard - harvested the flowers in the mid-day (so they'd be open with no ants in them) to make wine (which she made sweet, tasting very much like a dessert sherry), picked the leaves for 'greens' which she boiled the bejabbers out of, with salt pork and which tasted pretty good. And she dug up the roots, sliced and dried them, then steeped them in hot water to make a really nasty drink that she said tasted like coffee. She was wrong on that point. She had been married three times, outliving all her husbands, starting at age 17, and her first house had a dirt floor. And she was quite progressive and active politically, getting jailed three times in her youth for marching for the vote.

My wife's mother, as well, was full of fascinating stories. She was much better educated than my great-grandmother, being a university professor, and that alone was very unusual in Korea (she was Korean) at that time. To go along with that, she was from a family with political connections going back several hundred years, so was all full of inside stories of what really happened. Great stuff to listen to.

My dad's family comes from northern England/ southern Scotland, although I haven't made the connection from an ancestor who was born in Pennsylvania about 1800 any further back. My mother's family is English, and they're connected all the way back to a family from northeast of London, a town called Brentwood and nearby Wrightsbridge (it's the Wright family), and they're dated to the time of Henry VIII. We went to see the ancestral home, a place called Kelvedon Hall, and the people there were very gracious about showing us around. They pointed out interesting things like an arrangement of four pine trees on the west side of the manor, a signal to Roman Catholics during the time of the persecutions that this was a safe haven. Also, I looked in family records in Chichester, and found an ancestor who got in trouble for selling beer short measure, during the late 1600's sometime. ~sigh~.

It really is a lot of fun, and interesting. However - note of warning - most of my sibs, who are adopted, find this neither relevant nor interesting, with the possible exception of stories about immediate ancestors & their influence on the family. For example - my father's father grew up in a single mother household - how did that influence my father? That sort of thing.

So, go to it - have fun, you'll likely discover even more cousins you never knew about.