No, I'm not going to talk about some antecedent who memorized a thousand verses from the Bible ... or a great aunt with seventeen cats. But I am going to admit that one recent evening when I'd finished my book and there was nothing on TV, I picked up my laptop and started exploring, and for some reason that I can't now remember (and that doesn't matter, anyway), I keyed in the name of my paternal grandfather and his city (Baltimore). Lo and behold, what should I find but a link that turned out to show a full length photo of him dating from the 1880s when he was in his late teens. Dressed to the nines and looking pretty natty. The odd thing was that I had never seen a picture of him before. Well, a snapshot around 1900 but hat and bushy mustache pretty well hid his features.
Okay, I was hooked. I'd already done a lot of genealogical research some years ago, but I decided to see if I could fill in some gaps. And I have to say, I'm finding it all very interesting. Maybe that's because I'm part historian, part researcher, as well as someone curious to know why those relatives left Virginia in 1808 and moved to Tennessee, or was that x-times great grandmother really related to that Confederate general, or did that particular great great great grandfather fight in that battle described in our national anthem?
I'm also impressed anew that each generation doubles the number of ancestors from the generation before so that if you go back ten generations (the 17th century for me) we each have 1,024 direct ancestors. And, if you go back to the Norman Conquest, I've read that we have more than a billion. Of course, there weren't even that many people on the planet then. Hmmm... so how does that work? A piece about it suggests that part of the answer, at least, lies in cousins marrying cousins (which happened more frequently "back then").
So here I am now checking dates in early Virginia, traveling overland to California in 1846, learning who fought for the north and who for the south. And I found a 2-times-great grandmother who, after she died at age twenty-six, had a clipper ship built and named for her that took some of the first Gold Rush folks around the Horn to San Francisco, carried a cargo of tea from China to England, and brought back a boatload of Irish immigrants to Philly. I'm even getting a book out of the library on clipper ships of that era--which I wouldn't have thought to look at otherwise.
Well, it's one of those intriguing, elucidating things to do. After awhile, though, you get the sense that with so many antecedents, everyone has to be related to everyone!
Interesting blog!
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