Neat family history from the 30s!
Jun. 28th, 2006 12:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zdashamberThere will be a proper update soonish, but for now, Look! Incredibly cool thing! Ancestry.com, which recently got done copying in every single US census record, is offering free 3-day trials to look at the 1930 census (Maybe just for the 3 days June 27-30). I mean, the actual scans of the actual paper held by some actual census-taker 76 years ago as he went door to door and bugged your people.
You type in someone's name and all the info you can remember, it offers you a list of options, and you click on one to go to the actual scan... All you have to do is give them an e-mail address. Awesome! www.ancestry.com
My ancestors, like me, seem bound and determined to avoid the typical. No Germans or Polish or Irish or Italians... Nope, instead I've got someone from just about every tiny no-account country in Northern Europe. Wales? Oh yeah. Denmark? Yep. The Netherlands? Hells yeah. Estonia? Check. Latvia? All over that like white on a russian...
I found my dad's parents, and maybe my mom's dad, though not yet my mom's mom. I'd forgotten that my dad's dad's mom was from Latvia. (And apparently her dad came to Latvia from Estonia to live with her mom... And they spoke German at home... Huh! And then she married a guy from the Netherlands and went to live in America.) I hadn't even known that my dad's mom's mom was born in Canada. Apparently her parents immigrated there from "England" (I heard Wales)... Did they continue on to America, or did they stay in Canada?
My pamapafather (trying out a new relative-tracking scheme I invented here) was a "teacher" in April 1930... I remember hearing about how he still had a grand piano for my pamamother to play even in the Great Depression, because he had a government job. My papapafather was a preacher, born in Friesland. (His name was "Floris." Beat that! That's awesome!)
Some of my papa-uncles were crazy into Christianity (like their dad, Floris, I gather)... We got Christmas letters from one for a long time, about how the Mission in the Middle East was Suffering, and they'd gotten ejected from of yet another country for printing and distributing Bibles, but their Faith remained Steadfast... From that branch of the family I find the Christian Broadcasting Network columnist Julie Ferwerda, who self-published a book about how to find God's best man for you, and who thanks James Dobson for how her family turned out. I think her husband Steve is my second cousin. Their daughters are my second cousins once removed. That's as far away on the cousin chart as I've tracked anyone in my family... Well done!
Anyway, back to the census sheets. My papapafather is listed as having grown up speaking Dutch at home... Which I find a bit odd, since he was from Friesland, and should've grown up speaking Frisian. Did the census-taker decide it wasn't really different, or was the triumph of Dutch evident even in the 1870s?
On my pamamother's, they don't have any interesting languages, but some of the families around them on the chart have "Jewish" listed in the language slot. Jewish? Is that Hebrew, or Yiddish? In Pennsylvania, 1930... Maybe they were calling Yiddish Jewish, because "yid" was derogatory, but "jew" wasn't?
Eeenteresting stuff.
You type in someone's name and all the info you can remember, it offers you a list of options, and you click on one to go to the actual scan... All you have to do is give them an e-mail address. Awesome! www.ancestry.com
My ancestors, like me, seem bound and determined to avoid the typical. No Germans or Polish or Irish or Italians... Nope, instead I've got someone from just about every tiny no-account country in Northern Europe. Wales? Oh yeah. Denmark? Yep. The Netherlands? Hells yeah. Estonia? Check. Latvia? All over that like white on a russian...
I found my dad's parents, and maybe my mom's dad, though not yet my mom's mom. I'd forgotten that my dad's dad's mom was from Latvia. (And apparently her dad came to Latvia from Estonia to live with her mom... And they spoke German at home... Huh! And then she married a guy from the Netherlands and went to live in America.) I hadn't even known that my dad's mom's mom was born in Canada. Apparently her parents immigrated there from "England" (I heard Wales)... Did they continue on to America, or did they stay in Canada?
My pamapafather (trying out a new relative-tracking scheme I invented here) was a "teacher" in April 1930... I remember hearing about how he still had a grand piano for my pamamother to play even in the Great Depression, because he had a government job. My papapafather was a preacher, born in Friesland. (His name was "Floris." Beat that! That's awesome!)
Some of my papa-uncles were crazy into Christianity (like their dad, Floris, I gather)... We got Christmas letters from one for a long time, about how the Mission in the Middle East was Suffering, and they'd gotten ejected from of yet another country for printing and distributing Bibles, but their Faith remained Steadfast... From that branch of the family I find the Christian Broadcasting Network columnist Julie Ferwerda, who self-published a book about how to find God's best man for you, and who thanks James Dobson for how her family turned out. I think her husband Steve is my second cousin. Their daughters are my second cousins once removed. That's as far away on the cousin chart as I've tracked anyone in my family... Well done!
Anyway, back to the census sheets. My papapafather is listed as having grown up speaking Dutch at home... Which I find a bit odd, since he was from Friesland, and should've grown up speaking Frisian. Did the census-taker decide it wasn't really different, or was the triumph of Dutch evident even in the 1870s?
On my pamamother's, they don't have any interesting languages, but some of the families around them on the chart have "Jewish" listed in the language slot. Jewish? Is that Hebrew, or Yiddish? In Pennsylvania, 1930... Maybe they were calling Yiddish Jewish, because "yid" was derogatory, but "jew" wasn't?
Eeenteresting stuff.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-28 10:57 am (UTC)I think the most startling thing I've learned so far is that my great-grandfather Sol was Canadian. I'd known his father was, but Sol grew up in Marine City (my hometown in Michigan) -- played on the first football team they had, graduated from the local high school, etc. Turns out the family moved here when he was very young, and he didn't actually become a US citizen until a few years after he was married.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-28 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-28 07:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-28 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-28 12:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-28 07:51 pm (UTC):) We're starting a supervillains campaign, and our goal will be to make our own utopian country.
Latveria and Latvia are different places!
Date: 2006-06-29 01:41 am (UTC)Re: Latveria and Latvia are different places!
Date: 2006-06-29 07:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-28 05:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-28 07:49 pm (UTC)We are probably related more closely than most people. I mean, how many people were there in Latvia in the late 1800s? They must have all been related...