My Pedigree

I took a genetics class with Carrie in college, and our professor was this short, skinny, nerdy old Southern man who would always refer to family trees as "pedigrees." She and I had a lot of fun creating a pedigree for the white trash family we used to make up stories about. Let's just say, there were a lot crossed branches and twigs indicating learning disabilities.

Genealogy fascinates me, not that I have any really cool ancestors or anything--I just like to have an idea of where I come from, what life was like for the people before me, why they came to America, and what they would think of it nowadays. Why I am the way I am, I guess. It's really all about me, let's be honest here. So, I joined ancestry.com for a free trial of their like, deluxe package, where you have access to all sorts of records and other people's family trees to see if you have any matching information. It's pretty cool, and I've been able (if the information is accurate) to trace one line of my tree all the way back to France in the twelfth century! A lot of ancestors had Norman-English names, which is to be expected, since the conquest was so complete. Most of the tree dead-ends in various parts of England or Wales, which was cool because I didn't know I was at all Welsh. There were some people from Devon and Cornwall, too, which is kind of neat because supposedly they are from an entirely different tribe than the Anglo-Saxons. Although at this point they've all inter-married so much I suppose it hardly matters. There were some pretty crazy names, one being a guy called Oger Fitz Oger. There was also a woman named Amicia. That line of the family eventually moved to the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, then to North Carolina, and then to Georgia around 1800 or so. I had always assumed that because Georgia had been a debtor's prison colony when it was British that I was descended from some poor people who couldn't pay their bills! Looks like we're not such deadbeats after all! At least on that branch.

Unfortunately, I completely dead-ended on my Dad's branch after my great-grandparents. His mother was Irish and she was raised in Atlanta, but we aren't sure where she was actually born--she would say either Connecticut or Florida, but I don't know her mother's maiden name, and her father was one of about a hundred men named Jeremiah Joseph Sullivan that lived around the same time period. And while the site does have death certificates on file, they don't seem to have access to birth certificates, so that's a lot of missing information. There are no records from Mexico or Spain on the site, either, so nothing on his father's side.

My great-aunt did a lot of genealogy on my Mom's mother's side of the family, so I might give her a call and see if she can give me some more information there. Anyway, that's what I've been up to this week for the most part. The free trial is going to end soon, though! Maybe I should just print out all the stuff so that I have it. I think I will do that.