Yeah, the Mrs. is glad she found out. But it was a bit of tough sledding. Her Mom was trying to keep a secret for like half a century, LOL.
So, I've been doing ancestry.com. I've actually geeked out on it pretty hard. Makes me think a lot about my place in the world. I've had a couple of points of frustration though. My wife is part black and I'm surprised (the cynic in me says I shouldn't be) that I don't get the records popping up for black forebears that I get for the white forebears. I followed one trail back to the 1600s in England on the white side, but I'm having trouble getting back to 1900 on the black side. I expected the antebellum period to be impossible, but I'm not finding birth certificates, marriage licenses, or census returns from the 1950s. And they were making a decent living in a large northern city. Anyone have insight for me on why and what I should do about it? For the living people, I'll ask them to scan docs for me, but not sure what to do about the dead ones. I also have a lot of international family, and ancestry.com wants to charge extra for them. When I'm done with the American side, I'll do it but I'm concerned their records won't be fruitful. I'm especially interested in French docs, and given France's reputation for bureaucracy there is probably something there. Germany and England are less important, but they probably have something. But China? I need stuff from the communist era, colonial Hong Kong, the Republic of China, and the Qing dynasty. I'm not bullish. And, I'm very confused about Fort Smith Division legal docs. I might have a relative who was indicted for murder during the Civil War, but the only link I have is a name and rough geography. A bunch of these documents are digitized on the National Archives website, but it tells me that the ones I'm interested in exist but are not digitized. I wrote to the National Archives and they responded that ancestry.com has everything I want -- but they don't. Each of the two entities essentially are pointing me to the other and all I have is a photo of the outside of a manila folder.
I’m able to trace some ancestors back to the Mayflower and Constitutional Convention/Revolutionary War. Mostly a lot of Appalachian hicks on that side though.
I haven't done this either...I'm pretty convinced that the Brits weren't keeping great records on the Irish they were occupying and starving to death.
