Recently I became an embraced member of the Daily Kos Genealogy and Family History Community ("GFHC"). My sincere thanks to Klompendanser for setting me up with a membership slot. Like most ordinary people, I longed to understand where I came from and the seeds that sprouted the roots that gave me my life. I`ve had this appetite to learn about siblings connected to these seeds lost during childhood for quite sometime. This genuine curiosity has painfully meddled with my mind for as long as I care to remember. I finally concluded that it is never too late to search for my entire family tree. I am now dedicating this search to my own children so they can know early every branch and every limb to their own tree.
Lately, it seems like a long time I have been running on an empty tank in the story telling department of my brain. This for me has been somewhat unusal as I have not diaried in a while. It must be the brutal heat wave we are experiencing, or it may be some personal emotions I will describe below. But joining GFHC and what I consider myself to be now -- a genuine Genealogist on a journey, ( I would have it no other way), a hunter of my past family tree searching every nook and cranny, under every leaf and inside of every tree trunk for evidence of those siblings I have lost during my journey in this life. A journey into the Genealogy field appears to serve as fuel for my story telling brain and a good tonic for my soul.
As the saying goes, on my way to join this group something wonderful happened to me. A relentless wave of pro bono offers of assistance poured out of this community when I asked for help to search for missing siblings. The outpouring of support, offers of help in the GFHC community and in the comments section to my diary, offers of help too many to count in my endeavors overwhelmed me beyond words to express my gratitude. I have written so many times in so many diaries about losing siblings to the unknown during very troubling times in our Nation`s History of the Great Depression of the 1930`s combined with World War II in the early 1940`s.
I don`t think it to be unusual that as I grew up and became the master of my own mind I came to believe that searching was a waste of time. To begin with I moved from Texas (where my search is centered) to the Midwest, more than one thousand miles away. I needed to travel back in time seventy-years to reach the end zone point of my search. I was not even certain if any siblings existed, or left behind as I moved away at a very young age myself and from a certain point I now needed to go. But our mind guides us, and as I have learned by word of mouth as I grew up, indeed there are (or were) additional siblings in my family tree. These words of mouth I refer to came from one mouth I can never doubt to be anything but the truth when it relates to me. It is the mouth of my half-sister some of you have come to know as my baby mom (hereinafter named in this diary) as I describe her just under the orange squiggy of the link I pasted here.
You see, as I grew old to be in my mid-seventies with a family of my own, my baby mom was also growing up with a family of her own. Father Time, unfortunately was mean to us. It never permitted time for us to be together to exchange dialog or interact as we do now over the telephone. She grew up to become very close to some of the very same aunts that I wrote about Here. Aunts that I had not seen in seventy plus years. They all worked together in a fruit and vegetable produce company, apparently in the receiving and shipping department. Long before I ventured into this journey of genealogy I wrote many times about these aunts, my grandmother and uncles as I grew up under their care. So who can better know the history of my life if not these aunts who took me in when things got rough for my mother when I was just a mere child. Who could know every scoop and background of my mother than these aunts?
So here I was, totally ambushed by my own baby mom when she started telling me horror stories about the flawed and shady lifestyle of my own mother that led to siblings being left behind from me. My aunts relayed to her mountains of crucial facts about my family tree that I could never find online, anywhere. All of this dialog went on during their coffee breaks and later in their own homes that my baby mom frequented regularly as she grew older. To be honest, I am shocked to have heard what these aunts had to say about my own mother, and the real reason my biological family broke up which caused me to land on the porch of my grandmother`s house as you can read in this diary. I am shocked to know that indeed I had one (girl sister) left behind and two additional brothers not
counting my deceased Hero-brother Joe. (There is a creepy but innocent story to
tell about this "girl sister" and a youngest uncle of mine, making it more probable than not, that indeed I had one lost sister in my family tree). This story may or may not, come later.
During previous discussions with the DKos community the issue of finding skeletons in my family tree closets were discussed after I raised flawed lifestyles in the roots and trunk of my tree. Someone in the comments section of my diary suggested that these hidden closet skeletons were less harmful out in the open, insinuating that I should write about it to the community. While that may be true, when it is your own family tree with these hidden obnoxious skeletons I have to think you would not want to cut the chains and set them free. For me personally, if skeletons are indeed in my family tree closet, I can assure you that they will rattle their chains in their closets into eternity. I personally think that no matter how much respect and admiration I have for this DKos community, what takes place in my family, stays in my family. And I write this with all due respect to you.
I have two wonderful people, Kossacks that I need to give thanks to for guiding me and showing my how to walk, so to speak, into the cloudy and confusing world of genealogy. The first of these two wonderful Kossacks I have named previously. I will not repeat that here. I thank you also for giving me permission to use your name here. She knows who she is. My wholehearted thanks to you.
The other person is a gentleman in every sense of the word. Both have given me courage and inspiration and boldness to enter into a world that once was so intimidating to me. I must have been overly overjoyed by this gentleman`s expertise that I neglected to ask for his permission to use his name in future writings about my journey into genealogy. Thank you Sir, since I know that you too are not only a member of GFHC, but hopefully a good supporting future colleague to me in this daunting and difficult process of finding our family roots. There are no words yet written that would express my gratitude to you.
I have developed this sense of wanting to be an independent genealogist. By this I mean I want to say what is fact and what is not, knowing how information comes out during a specific search. I get several names with different spelling surnames to my searches, and that includes names of siblings I search for. At times to make matters worst, dates are sometime identical to siblings searches but misspelled in surnames of the mother or father of sibling is question. Even sometimes, death also is reported with date of burial -- but information comes to me with confusing and misspelled surnames of mother, or father. If this is not confusing enough, the date of birth of the deceased purported sibling coincides with the birth date of the sibling I look for. But confusion comes with the territory of a genealogist I have learned that much quickly as I take my baby steps in this thorny field.
I am using the FamilySearch.Org tool in my quest to find lost family members. I have to think I can manage alone for a while as I already have been successful in finding a target when I fill in the spaces to a search. There is one crucial area in my search that perhaps I will ask for advise down the road. Currently I am working towards making a connection with some church or churches in the areas where my mother lived during the 1930`s with my biological father.
My aim at the churches is to seek information if available in that particular area, on learning how many children my mother had from dates point one, to point two. If there is actually that information available, that would solve my question of how many siblings, on my mother`s side were lost to me during my family break-up that led me to San Antonio, Texas from Austin, where I was born in 1936. I have found that some churches assist with genealogy searches as well. So on this issue, I may well come to ask for your help in the near future.
As for Ancestry.com I found it to be a spam trap as I had questioned spam during a discussion with the FGHC group some time back. Due to the tons of personal information that I have poured online the only spam I keep getting today comes from Ancestry, where I decided not to go into the pay for services program it has. I relied on the Kossacks that use Ancestry and entered that site and filled out the information to a search I wanted to do using that tool. Almost immediately I was asked for my credit card and offers of membership, which I declined. But it was too late. I had already placed the names of those I wanted to look for with Ancestry tool. Well, everyday since I went into genealogy, I get spam offers from Ancestry with the names they have on file of my case. And they are relentless and won`t stop. On the bright side of spam, each time I see it on my spam folder it reminds me that I need to get, my you know what, to work in my search.
So this is where your new genealogist is right now. I wrote earlier about writing an update of my progress. This is it.
But hey wait! Next you will read that my grandfather cheated on who I had thought all my life to be my grandmother. She was not. She was not my own mother`s mother. Rather she was my mother`s stepmother. I got this from my golden source. It seems my grandpa had a sexual relationship with one lady named Beatrice. A very young lady at the time. My grandpa was married with his own young family.
Out of that relationship my own mother was born. My true grandmother`s name was Beatrice. After all these years of mind shattering questions about why my own
mother was hated by all members of my grandfather`s household is finally answered. But who and where is my real grandmother? How do I find her? Stayed tuned.