The Beginning

For the past few years I’ve become interested in the family tree – at least the tree for my four siblings and me. I’ve tried to be interested in my husband’s and therefore my children’s, but it hasn’t caught my attention the way my own has. When I started, I knew one branch of my father’s tree had been heavily researched.

When I think of my heritage I think of my parents’ lineage – to state the obvious – the facts of my four grandparents. On my mother’s side we were told her father’s family had come to America to fight for the British as German Hessians. As the story went, they were apparently lost for years in the hills of West Virginia. From my research there isn’t much truth in that story. There is some indication that the family of her grandmother on her father’s side may have been here since the Revolution, but so far I haven’t seen any indication of them being hessians. I’ve begun to believe they might have been Tories.

As to the side that is documented and has its own web page that would be my father’s mother’s side – the side we as children weren’t that impressed with. Guess we should have been because they can document their lineage back to at least two families on the Mayflower and perhaps more. More than one of my father’s ancestors fought in the civil war and one lost his life. My father’s grandmother was about 3 or 4 when her father died during the war. Growing up I always had the impression my father’s parents felt lower socially than my mother’s. But if social status was determined by length of time one’s relatives had lived in America, they would have been much higher. My mother’s mother was a first generation American – both her parents emigrated from England in 1870. One side of her father’s family migrated here only a generation earlier. Of course, they do have that Tory problem, too.