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Family History
13 years ago
General
...not a subject I find particularly interesting, but a pair of my siblings do. There had always been a sort of wall when it came to back-tracking because of this great-great grandfather no one would talk about. Well, and there's a great-great grandmother we can barely even prove existed because she was a native american and some elements in the family were racist enough to not want to acknowledge her, but that's a different issue.
Well, my brother was able to track down a branch of the family we didn't know existed living in Kentucky and between the information they had and the information he had, they were able to piece together what happened with great-great grandpa. This is so juicy...
So, he had abandoned the family and fled to Kentucky with a much younger woman. Why, that's pretty danged romantic, if not exactly what you would call responsible. Certainly not worth blotting the guy out of existence over, right?
The thing was, this younger woman was his niece. Ooooooooohhhhhhhh...
So! That was fun. We knew that some of our ancestors were honest-to-God slave-having plantation owners, but now we have names, even a few pictures. We have a picture of one guy in his civil war duds who had been a professional horse racer (never saw that comin').
Buuuuuuuuuut we run into another wall once we get into the 1700's as it appears that an important link was, in all likelihood, an escaped criminal living under an assumed name. So it goes.
Well, my brother was able to track down a branch of the family we didn't know existed living in Kentucky and between the information they had and the information he had, they were able to piece together what happened with great-great grandpa. This is so juicy...
So, he had abandoned the family and fled to Kentucky with a much younger woman. Why, that's pretty danged romantic, if not exactly what you would call responsible. Certainly not worth blotting the guy out of existence over, right?
The thing was, this younger woman was his niece. Ooooooooohhhhhhhh...
So! That was fun. We knew that some of our ancestors were honest-to-God slave-having plantation owners, but now we have names, even a few pictures. We have a picture of one guy in his civil war duds who had been a professional horse racer (never saw that comin').
Buuuuuuuuuut we run into another wall once we get into the 1700's as it appears that an important link was, in all likelihood, an escaped criminal living under an assumed name. So it goes.
Wow.
On a more serious note, no wonder your family tried to forget about him. XD
Mmmm, yeah...that whole "keeping up appearances" thing seems to have been important all the way up to my father's generation, despite rampant mental illness. Not sure how successful they were in all that, though, since my father was the youngest (he's 77 now) and most of his side of the family was either already dead or well on the way by the time I was born.