Chris Dawson

Jealous as I research my wife’s family … her French-Canadian ancestors all came to one town in Massachusetts, stayed there for generations, and when anyone did move away, it was to another nearby town over the line in Connecticut. Embarrassment of research riches!!

Get in line!

I love when I turn my genealogy research into narrative history, because then I identify areas where I need to dig more, and get to go down new rabbit holes, learning areas of history I never knew before, and it brings these names alive again.

I’ve been doing research on my wife’s family and found paternal ancestors of hers that bounced back and forth between Quebec and Massachusetts all the time for years, which surprised me, but apparently it was quite common

Always check your sources; Ancestry had a birth record for a male child born on a certain day, and FamilySearch had a later version, where his name was crossed out, a female’s name written in, and a note that it was corrected in 1956!

So the Menard family research continues, and I found an 1884 article indicating the family had been quarantined in the town “pest house” for having SMALLPOX! according to the article, one unnamed child died, and 5 named children were sick. They lived in a house with ten families in total!

I’m amazed at the Menard/Maynard/Minor family research … I keep finding children and more children, with about 17 (that I can find so far) born in about 20 years, including TWO sets of twins. But it appears most of the children died. So far only 6 appear to have made it into adulthood! Horrific!

Ugh, working on the Menard family and some of the kids switched their names to Maynard … though one chose to use “Minor” as their last name. YOU’RE NOT MAKING THINGS EASY FOR MY RESEARCH!!!

On one hand, it was a great feeling when I found the story … but then I really wished that my mom was still around, as she first told me the story years ago. I did share it with some of her first cousins though, as I knew they had heard the stories too and would appreciate finding out the true story

It was like a moment when the clouds parted … because the story I found laid everything out and revealed the tale that we all heard bits second- or third-hand, and it led me to find out even more about this relative. I adore researching in old newspapers!

I’m such a sucker for good history … I’m doing some research on my wife’s family tree, and have fallen down the rabbit hole over her maternal great-grandmother’s family, especially her sister who became a social worker and went to France in 1918 with the YMCA to help the AEF. I just can’t stop!

Doing a newspaper search on Findmypast actually solved a longtime family mystery and uncovered the true story of a relative that we all heard about, but no one knew the true story, but I cracked it!

This doesn’t get said enough.

I do love the fact that through the Libby app I can read the latest issues of Family Tree magazine (US and UK issues and Who Do You Think You Are magazine, all for free!

Very cool … another one of my Dad’s cousins read the family history narrative that has been circulating in the family, and she let him know how much she learned from it, and enjoyed it! So glad all this work is being appreciated!!! It just makes me want to do more digging!!

Finally broke down and took a DNA test via Ancestry … and found that it validated a lot of my research, as genetically I’m from the regions my research has traced ancestors to … not much in the way of any surprises, which is good.

I’ve written a narrative family history, based on my genealogy work. My Dad asked me to send the chapter on his maternal line to a cousin, who then sent it out to a bunch of other cousins … but it resulted in one of them calling me; I’d never chatted with her before and we had a GREAT talk!

It just happened … all sorts of hints popped up on Ancestry for my Polish great-grandmother about her family, and I discovered a whole new tree had been added there with a great many details. I messaged the owner, and he’s a cousin I never knew I had! So we’re comparing notes and expanding our trees

While I’m enjoying this interaction with my newly-discovered cousin (and it’s filling in blanks on his and my trees on Ancestry), I’m really missing my mom and my grandmother now … they would both have really loved this, and I would have loved sharing it with them.

So it turns out my Polish cousin is actually in the US … he and his parents migrated to the US a few years ago! And the surprising thing is that as he’s begun sharing photos with me is that many of them are of my family, and they’re photos I already have … my g-grandmother sent them 70+ years ago!

Lovely follow up to discovering a potential cousin on Ancestry who just put up his family tree (intersecting with
My great-grandmother, his grandfather’s sister) … I reached out to him and he wrote back, very excited to find me. I already told him I have a stack of old photos to share!

Saw on Ancestry today some new hints on my Polish great-grandmother’s line, which I only have sketchy info. So I dug into them and found that it was an entire tree of her family that had just be added by the grandson of her younger brother who stayed in Poland. So now I suddenly have a new cousin!

Decided to splurge and subscribed to NewspaperArchive to see if I could extend my luck at finding news stories about ancestors, and quickly found an article that mentioned my great-grandfather while he was an oil driller in Japan for Standard Oil. Not bad!

Nothing spreads faster than family legend … in my family, one of my ancestral last names changed slightly and the claim was it happened from one son’s experience in the US Army, and the claim was the Army made the change … until I found his military record and found that the Army did NOT change it!

In my family, not the gravestone… my great-grandfather portrayed himself as 10 years younger than he really was, to make it easier to get jobs. The incorrect birthdate is on his gravestone to this day.

I see MyHeritage has their own transcriptions for Irish birth records … and their transcriptions have three entirely new and unusual versions of my GG-grandmother’s last name, adding to the nine other ones I’ve come across so far. No wonder I can’t find a birth or marriage record for her!!

My poor great-great Grandmother, Ellen Dreelan Grace already has every variation of her maiden name thanks to weird transcriptions, but now MH adds several new variations I couldn’t have imagined previously.

Still having trouble getting through some major brick walls, so I tackled a very minor one, solving the identity of “Uncle Jablonski,” whose house my great-grandmother moved into … and soon married my great-grandfather, one of the boarders. Turns out “Uncle Jablonski” actually WAS her uncle!

Happy 198th Birthday to my great-great-grandfather, John Dawson, an iron screw maker from Bolton, England. Born Sept. 1, 1827.

My great-grandmother must’ve had a good sense of humor; on my grandfather’s birth certificate, where it asks how many children are still living, she wrote in 5, but then afterwards in bold and underlined, “ALL BOYS!” They must’ve been a handful! #genealogy