I recently signed up for the 2 free weeks at ancestry.com, hoping to find out more about my family history and add to my family tree. While some of it gave me a headache, I was able to find some missing branches and fill in some of my family members, which was interesting and fun. The sad part was that I tried to contact a few people who had mutual ancestors with me and none of them got back to me! There are also some parts that I am not positive I did right, expecially on my husband’s side of the family. Here are some of the things I learned.
1. I was able to reach as far back as my 3rd great-grandparents on my mother’s father’s mother’s side. They were from Austria.
2. While my cousins were told that Abe Reles was a relative of ours, I discovered that in fact our 2nd great-grandfather’s sister was married to his father, but she was not his mother. So he is actually our 1st step-cousin three times removed.
3. Living relatives were harder to connect because ancestry.com doesn’t share their names for privacy purposes, but I was able to find as far as 4th cousins on my mom’s side.
4. My mother’s father’s father’s family immigrated from Sokolov, Poland to Wilkes-Barre, PA in the early 1900’s.
5. My mother’s mother’s family immigrated from Russia in the early 1900s.
6. My father’s father’s family immigrated from Brest-Litovsk, Russia and Austria in the late 1800s.
7. My father’s mother’s family immigrated from Poland in the early 1900s, and his maternal grandmother lived in Nebraska for awhile.
8. Zelda is a family name on my mother’s side. Zelda was the name of my 3rd great-grandmother, my 1st cousin three times removed (my 2nd great-grandfather’s first cousin), and my great-aunt.
9. In my 2nd great-grandfather’s brother’s family, there was an instance where an uncle married his niece (they were the same age) and another where first cousins married each other.
10. I have a few days left before I have to cancel my membership. I don’t know if there is anything more I can discover!
Have you ever researched your family tree?