Echoing the Past

A while back I decided to make separate ancestry trees for my parents respectively. I did this because I did not believe I could safely navigate anymore a populous list of over 4,000 relatives. I wanted to have details for each person and truly discover them as a form of respect.
Unfortunately I have not given my fathers lineage the attention it deserves. I updated my own file the other day only to realize that his tree needed duplicate entries that I would have to hand type again. This I feel takes away from valuable time I have to review censuses and data mine for long lost fellows.
Perhaps I have not mentioned them before but my fathers Grandmother was of the Street family in Missouri. After a horrible tragedy in the family involving a murder suicide they withdrew themselves from each other and in fact little records remain. I am having a similar experience in current time where I am both lacking resources to find data and have to deal with my fathers reluctance to share information. Geneology had been a hobby he shared with my grandfather and I don't think he could ever part with his many boxes of hand written notes.

Most recently he entrusted me with the published book following our Grant lines from the original Scottish ancestor who settled King George, Virginia. That data however has holes and many misgivings. My Grandfather Joseph was only interested in following his paternal line so any information gathered otherwise is most likely unsorted sitting in the boxes on my fathers attic floor. The crypto-Judaism line is also amoung that neglected work. While I do praise my dad's willingness to share stories by word of mouth I would love to see pictures and letters that I consider a real way to organically and emotionally connect. I of course cannot blame my fathers since I too have fallen pray to favoritism within my mothers tree, the Fillies du roi line and the Metis Dufour. I believe a rebinding is called for if only to realign my focus.

Finding Cousins

My sister Heather has been commenting that I spend too much of my research time on dead sources when we have plenty of living cousins to find. She is right of course that I have almost no focus on living relatives. This is mostly due to how proliferative my 'Wismer' family has been up in Canada. Cousins upon cousins.

After the Leitzke, Neitzke debacle last week I am slightly more interested in living relatives than I have been in the past. As a change I ended up diving into the Boussey (Boissy) line of my Maternal Grandfather's tree. This would be the famous 'Fillies du Roi' decendency for which I have considered putting in a application to the society. A lot of my data has come from a user named 'AlyceBoussy' on Ancestry and I was curious enough to track her line from our common ancestor down.

It was fairly exciting to see that for the most part she was in a similar family design as I was with one or two families marrying siblings doubling our genetic comparisons. Closer however to recent I find that while her Father was predominantly french he married a lovely Italian woman. Following my own tree you have a predominately French woman marrying a Welshman. The difference that these  derivatives might make was tantalizing. I began to wonder whether she would have a interest in conversing with me.

So as I found Alyce's information I found that she had unfortunately passed away about 4 years ago and the family had not taken down her work. Four years is when I began doing research and so I missed a chance to reach out to a cousin I didn't know I had and find a connection that I am missing to French culture. This is especially disheartening since it is my Grandfather's family that I have little to no knowledge of.  His mother had been a Boussey and so I am grateful to Alyce's family for not taking down her work. Yet here I sit still missing my contacts as well from the Jones family line for most of my Grandfather's brothers: Murray, Floyd, Henry, & Ralph all predeceased him. After my grandfather's death the families separated and the 'Jones & Sons, LTD' was dissolved.

As of now I have placed in over 1700 unique people into my tree and most of those in the past week are cousins that I am no longer willing to miss out on. Perhaps I will find the secret to the Jones' in the old reunion papers that my Grandmother Lucienna has sent to me through my mother.

Major Aggravations

This week I have come to a pass where it is no longer a coincidence that I seem to be missing fringe folks in my Tree's. I came across the reference to the Dybbuk Box to which the most recent owner has the surname Neitzke and is from the general area as a spouse I just added into my work recently. I made a note about the box as it is featured in the newest horror flick, "The Posession".

Yet coming back to my tree's to coordinate data I cannot find a Neitzke at all and their are whole chunks missing. I have yet to check my backup files but finding a cousin featured in the news and then losing the information to fact check is highly aggravating. This also comes along with the news that I have a rare genetic form of anemia requiring transfusions and the only other recorded cases are from a singular family line in the Island nation of Sardinia. Within my Father's genealogical work their is also a claim of Jewish ancestry though the family claimed to be Mennonites when they populated the United States.

Another note is that I received my invitation to Ancestry DNA but was unable to accept it in time. My Father had his results updated from the Y-DNA panel he had done to the new system. His results were interesting especially when searching for Jewish ancestry. DNA testing results for him list- 54% Central European, 35% British Isles, 8% Scandinavian, and 3% uncertain. According to the given information this counter balances the data which gives no notion of Jewish ancestry for the bulk of his tree. History of course shows that most families changed their names and locales to escape persecutions. As for now my Father jokingly claims that the 3% uncertain is due to a crumb that must have contaminated his swab from the snack he had before hand.

##Update##. I have located the confusion as a name scramble. My relative's surname was Lietzke but the records are still missing from my old backup and recent live files on Ancestry.com.