My Ancestry is Like an American History Book
Since fourth grade when Mrs. Harris told us to find out where our ancestors came from and no one in my family could tell me, I have had a burning desire to find out. I had only the sparse information my living grandparents could tell me, some of which turned out to be based on truth, but not correct. I discovered a distant relative of one branch of the family who did genealogy research in libraries in the years before the internet became available, and she shared what she had on the Shields clan. But that didn't tell me much. I still had eight known family names to research. We had that family rumor that we were part Indian, which today we call Native American. Grandpa thought he was Scotch-Irish. Okay, I thought. When I retire, I'll work on that.
Fast forward through all those working, child-rearing years and suddenly I am retired. I realized it was time to make good my promise to myself and begin tracing the family tree with all its branches. I was interested, but I didn't really know where to start. Then I met a distant cousin of my grandfather's at a family reunion and she told me of a source for information. A few years later, I met Mom's cousin at the same family reunion. He told me his daughter, who was just about my age but whom I had never met, was working on the family tree. So I emailed her and introduced myself. Bless her heart! She began sharing her research with me and unlocked the path to all the genealogy any one person could ever want to know.
From my Cousin, I know about the DeMohans who were given title to lands in England for winning a war for a Scandanavian King. They lived as Knights and the name became Moon. Several of them accompanied William Penn to the new world to found Pennsylvania. Meanwhile my many-greats grandfather Miles Standish and my ancestors, the Allerton children, came over on the Mayflower with the Pilgrims. Someone from our family tree was involved in the Salem witch burnings. We had Revolutionary War relatives and quite a few Civil War relatives, both sides. We had a whole host of pioneers who kept moving further west. We had some who lived where there was an Indian Massacre. We are related to famous people. My Cousin has collected so many ancestors, I just know there is a book in there somewhere.
Today, I made another interesting connection on my own. Last Christmas my parents replicated a Christmas tree my dad had when he was a kid. His Grandmother used to help Dad and his 10 siblings make a tree by wrapping a bare branch with pink cotton cloth, then hanging icicles and tablet paper chains on it. She remembered it from childhood. I did a little googling and discovered what they had was a traditional Pennsylvania German Christmas tree. I had done enough research to know that Grandma's family came from Pennsylvania. Her daughter, my dad's mother, had once told me the grandparents came from Amsterdam, she thought. I put the two things together and wondered whether they could have been Pennsylvania Dutch. I googled and discovered that theirs was indeed a spelling variant of a Pennsylvania Dutch name.
There will be much research ahead to verify this connection. But I feel like I have won the lottery. That little fourth-grade girl is overwhelmed by all this family information. My ancestry is like an American History book. Say! That sounds like a good title for that book my Cousin and I want to write.
