Genealogy

G came home last week from Chicago with a bunch of genealogy books. Apparently, he's caught the bug and decided to start researching his family line.

This of course leads to me starting to research mine as well, because you can't give a science nerd a project like this and not expect her to dive into giant vats of online record-keeping goodness.

My uncle and one of my cousin-in-laws have been researching my dad's side of the family for two years and have reached a dead end around 1835. Mostly, because the 1840 census stopped listing children individually by name.

I did discover, however, that my great-grandfather sailed around the world. We MIGHT be related to the original John Whitney line from 1635. Apparently, my uncle even went through the DNA testing and discovered we matched that line, but were off by one mutation. Showing we're extremely closely related but there might be a branch off somewhere.

I find all of this really interesting. G started his search with 60 members of his family. I emailed my mom for our current "living" family members to add in for completeness. I then added them to the tree G had started so we'd need only one subscription to ancestry.com. After I added my family members G was dismayed his tree was now up to 200+ people! Yes, my family is that damn big!!! My dad is one of 8 and I have more cousins than I care to count. And apparently, my cousins are extremely fertile. I also ended up telling G a lot of stories because of some family members wedding dates and then subsequent dates of children's births. (there were some Jerry Springer moments here and there)

We both spend the good part of Sunday glued to our respective laptops at lunch time at Panera parusing national databases over lunch. G discovered the Texas databases are rather extensive, while unfortunately for me some of the Mass ones are severely lacking. Both of my parents sides of the family seem to have come from New England. Though, my Maternal Grandmother's side comes almost directly from Germany via my Great Grandparents. My mom has a copy of the boat ticket they used to get here. I'm going to have to get that from here to digitize next time I see her.

Until then, the exceeding nerdiness will continue!