Family heritage.

[AUFred]

My advice for the day learn what you can about your family from your elders before they are gone.


I will share what I know of a little story concerning my family. My great-grandmother was a twin. Her twin sister and another sister seem to have had a wild side and both died young, not sure the circumstances. They left behind 7 children and no spouses who wanted the children. Those 7 children were about to go to an orphanage when my great-grandmother and another sister did a bold and crazy thing. They talked their husbands into buying an old farmhouse and combining their families and raising the 7 neices and nephews as their own. The sisters each had one daughter apiece. Those nine kids grew up like siblings and held the families together as a fairly closely knit group for a couple of generations. I grew up knowing my 3rd, 4th & 5th cousins because of it. I cannot imagine taking on that kind of responsibility today.

 

[HK]

I'm learning more about my family all the time. I was looking at the genealogy site my dad has been entering information into, and found that he had a sister I never knew about. Turns out she had hydrocephalus and died when she was quite young, and he's just never mentioned it.

 

[pjbleek]

my dad had a sister but died before even he was born....

 

[Jezzebelle]

I always loved listening to my great grandmother when she was alive. She was an amazing woman who left and divorced her abusive husband in the 30s, and went on to be an extremely successful single mom. Unheard of at the time.

 

[Sneakiecat]

My grandmother wrote an autobiography about twenty years ago and gave a copy to her daughters. She including songs her parents sang to them, family trees, all sort of random information that she could remember. She followed up with a cookbook for all the daughters and granddaughters.

 

[AUFred]

that is awesome. My mother has done something similar about geneology.

 

[Sneakiecat]

that is awesome. My mother has done something similar about geneology.

My grandmother told me it's my turn to write a book since I've been working on the family genealogy.

 

[Kakapo Dundee]

I have been very fortunate. My grandfather lived to a good age, and was very active and lucid. We had many good talks about how the family business succeeded through the Depression, and how he spent most of WWII in the RAF serving in the Middle East but never went near a plane.......

 

[Accountable]

I'm the youngest of 5 children. My father left when I was about 10. I remember asking about our ancestry when I was little. He told me we were American (he was a Marine in WW2). My mom died suddenly when I was 12. The only grandparent I knew was my mother's mom, but she died when I was about 20.

My eldest brother did a little research recently and gave each of us a list that goes back 2 generations. I have to confess that I'm not tremendously curious. Maybe because I don't have kids of my own. Maybe because I spent my teenage years in foster care.

Oddly, I love to study cultures.