I discovered my love of genealogy while in college. By then, many of my older relatives were deceased. Pop Pop, however, lived until my senior year, and toward the end of his life, he told me the tale of his dad, my great-grandfather, Pre ston McEady.
Preston, said Pop Pop, was a short, brown-skinned man with an untalkative nature and an ungodly temper.
I always found Edmond Harris, my great-great-great-grandfather, mysterious. While family stories and documents abounded on most of my ancestors, not one word or piece of paper had been passed down about him. All I had were a few dates filled in on a family pedigree chart.
The information I collected about his later life appeared fairly straight-forward.
Like many American families, especially the ones who “went West” to settle wild and woolly frontiers, if you give the family tree a hard shake it’s likely a few scoundrels will fall out.My own tree had several, but the one who most intrigued me as a child was The Outlaw. That was all that the old folks ever called him.
Back in the 1940s, my husband had an imposing aunt, Agatha, a compulsive talker who, if she’d rated herself in modern terms from one to ten, would have boasted an eleven. Aunt Agatha was, by her most charitable relatives, dubbed a “character.” Aunt Agatha always prefaced her remarks with a loud open-mouthed intake of air.
Swept under the carpet for many years, a British child emigration scheme was in operation between 1869 and 1939. More than 100,000 children, most between seven and fourteen years of age, but some as young as four, were sent to Canada from the British Isles by at least fifty childcare organizations.
Mom knew I loved a mystery. Attached to her e-mail was a missive from the Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon. “JGSO received this message from Stuart Harris,” it read. “If you have any information, please contact Mr. Harris directly.”“I have a rather odd question,” began Stuart’s memo. “My parents purchased a home in northwest Portland in 1969.
Pitigliano…not a city that comes to mind when thinking of Tuscany, but this is where my deceased grandfather, Ottavio Faenzi, was born. I went to Italy to find family and what I could of his life before he came to America. On this trip, I brought along my Aunt Joann and her son, Dan, who after days in Italy preferred to be addressed as Danilo.
In the May/June 1999 edition of Ancestry Magazine, I wrote about finding my birth father, Vasco A. Leitao. The experience of learning about the man whose name was on my original birth certificate took my breath away. There was no way of knowing then that Vasco was not my father or that the truth of my conception would unfold like a soap opera.
On 21 February 1945, an American fighter plane crashed down in the English countryside. Over the past five years, the little village of North Stifford in Essex had been no stranger to German, English, and American planes flying overhead. But this time a plane had fallen from the sky.
Thirteen-year-old Ken Rydings was attending school when the screech of the plane caught his attention.
