I'm bloody French. And Irish.
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I've been doing Ancestry.com, with varying degrees of success.
I've tracked down at least some of our Irish ancestry, which I knew about - they were Dublin protestants, by the sound of it.
The surprise came from my maternal grandmother's side. I knew her well when I was a kid, and whilst being a truly lovely grandmother, she was also the most straightforwardly protestant no-nonsense kind of person you could imagine.
So, it turns out her grandmother married not once but three times (in the early to mid 19th century), and grew up in Brighton, the hipster capital of England, and was the daughter of a French character who fled to Britain during the French revolution and became a musician for the king, and possibly also taught dance to the royals. Somebody had put together a document about him, and he sounds as though he could well have been an utter charlatan.
I found their address from the census, and the house is still there - a small terrace.
Quelle surprise!
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Soooooo, between the two of us, it sounds like I'm the one who's more British? Guaranteed I drink more tea and get more pedantic about language, so I suppose that tracks.
What kind of documents did you find? Anything cool about the great-great-grandmother?
Please love yourself.
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Soooooo, between the two of us, it sounds like I'm the one who's more British? Guaranteed I drink more tea and get more pedantic about language, so I suppose that tracks.
What kind of documents did you find? Anything cool about the great-great-grandmother?
@Aqua-Letifer said in I'm bloody French. And Irish.:
Soooooo, between the two of us, it sounds like I'm the one who's more British? Guaranteed I drink more tea and get more pedantic about language, so I suppose that tracks.
What kind of documents did you find? Anything cool about the great-great-grandmother?
It's mostly census records. She appears to have married a guy in Brighton (or Brighthelmeston as it was called then), and then they divorced and she moved up to Hale Barns, which is near where all my mum's family are from. She married my great great grandfather, had kids, and then her new husband died, so she re-married again. We have a painting of my great grandfather that my grandfather drew (he was quite an accomplished artist, we have a ton of his stuff). The guy she divorced seems to have somebody doing their family tree, so I've been spying on that.
It's annoying my great grandfather was on my dad's side was a professional portrait painter, and there's my grandfather on my mother's, and I can't draw for shit.
I need to dig more into it - I go through phases. There are suggestions for ancestors going back to the 16th century.
I was only joking
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@Aqua-Letifer said in I'm bloody French. And Irish.:
Soooooo, between the two of us, it sounds like I'm the one who's more British? Guaranteed I drink more tea and get more pedantic about language, so I suppose that tracks.
What kind of documents did you find? Anything cool about the great-great-grandmother?
It's mostly census records. She appears to have married a guy in Brighton (or Brighthelmeston as it was called then), and then they divorced and she moved up to Hale Barns, which is near where all my mum's family are from. She married my great great grandfather, had kids, and then her new husband died, so she re-married again. We have a painting of my great grandfather that my grandfather drew (he was quite an accomplished artist, we have a ton of his stuff). The guy she divorced seems to have somebody doing their family tree, so I've been spying on that.
It's annoying my great grandfather was on my dad's side was a professional portrait painter, and there's my grandfather on my mother's, and I can't draw for shit.
I need to dig more into it - I go through phases. There are suggestions for ancestors going back to the 16th century.
@Doctor-Phibes said in I'm bloody French. And Irish.:
@Aqua-Letifer said in I'm bloody French. And Irish.:
Soooooo, between the two of us, it sounds like I'm the one who's more British? Guaranteed I drink more tea and get more pedantic about language, so I suppose that tracks.
What kind of documents did you find? Anything cool about the great-great-grandmother?
It's mostly census records. She appears to have married a guy in Brighton (or Brighthelmeston as it was called then), and then they divorced and she moved up to Hale Barns, which is near where all my mum's family are from. She married my great great grandfather, had kids, and then her new husband died, so she re-married again. We have a painting of my great grandfather that my grandfather drew (he was quite an accomplished artist, we have a ton of his stuff). The guy she divorced seems to have somebody doing their family tree, so I've been spying on that.
It's annoying my great grandfather was on my dad's side was a professional portrait painter, and there's my grandfather on my mother's, and I can't draw for shit.
I need to dig more into it - I go through phases. There are suggestions for ancestors going back to the 16th century.
Being adopted, DNA testing is one thing, but living ancestry is quite the minefield.
I received an alert one day that said, "we found more DNA relatives!" I think the service is intended to let you know that your Uncle Jack got on Ancestry and hey, isn't that cool, pair his record-finding with yours and learn more stuff kind of thing. It's quite different for someone like me.
I was told I had a first cousin in Kentucky. I reached out in a very careful way, knowing she got the same message as me. Let her know what my situation was, the extent to which I understood my own biological ancestry (which isn't much), and if she knew any info that she would be willing to share, cool, but if she didn't or preferred not to discuss it, completely understandable and that's okay, she shouldn't feel any obligation to reach back.
She did, but boy oh boy, was she uncomfortable. She launched recklessly into some kind of "I don't know anything about that I'm just on here for family history this is what I'm doing I live in Kentucky" explanation.
This might be reading too much into it, but exasperated as she appeared to be, she had definite disinterest in discussing it further, but there wasn't any "WTF" confusion in her response. Which was the opposite of what I expected. Considering the nature of my birth and the time period, what a lot of people did was just to never talk about it. Most of those folks got a little older, had kids, and never told them there's an older half-sibling walking around out there.
I know of one person who found out their history and now has wonderful relationships with their two younger half-siblings. Another friend of mine learned his birth was an absolute horror story involving inbreeding and the Amish. Which, good God.
Anyway, I didn't want to make things hard on her so I just left it. Very hard to know how to handle these things.
