A VERY Serious Question

[Tarakin]

(...)But what Tarakin's talking about is far more interesting. Being on the other side of the fence (?), his family decided to deliberately obscure what great-grandaddy did in the war; he didn't just "lose" track of them.

My family was fairly open to me about what happened to our family during Nazi reign. There are some things blanked out, but all in all I know most of the things I think. Nothing of it is known outside the family of course, and there are lots of excuses in the tales.
Almost every German is just ashamed of what they let the Nazis do by ignoring them or even helping them. Sadly very few of my family were fighting against the Nazis...

 

[oggbashan]

Tommy Thrice

When I was very young the family lived in a cul-de-sac (Dead End Street) in Wales. Everyone knew everybody and we children were in and out of everyone's houses.

The older people were unofficial babysitters for whoever needed them. My favourite non-relation lived next door. He seemed incredibly old to me. He must have been in his late 80s but still reasonably spry and mentally alert. He enjoyed reading books to children or telling stories some of which he made up as he went.

His name was Tommy Thrice. His real name was Thomas Thomas Thomas. His son was Tommy Four. His grandson was Tommy Five.

Each year on Tommy Thrice's birthday his family would gather around for the formal reading of Tommy Thrice's real name. His full name was a list of his paternal heritage from early history. I couldn't remember his full name then because it was all in Welsh so I haven't a hope all these years later but a translation would be something like this:

Thomas (Tommy Thrice himself) the Petty Officer at Jutland, son of Thomas the able-seaman at the bombardment of Alexandria, son of Thomas the sailor in the Crimean War, son of Iestyn the sailor who missed Trafalgar, son of Thomas the slate miner at Penrhyn, son of Thomas the blaster who blew himself up at Penryhn and so on right back to the Welsh version of Noah who came down from Snowdon as the floods receded.

There was another version with the mothers' names: Thomas the son of Blodwen from Bangor the daughter of ...

I thought that the recitation, in unison, by his whole family was really impressive. It also emphasised to Tommy Four and Five that they too had this heritage.

Og

 

[cloudy]

y'all think your ancestors are hard to find? Try being native.

My father was Welsh, almost exclusively, with a little British thrown in for flavor.

The Anglo side of my mother's family were basically mutts: French Creole (family lore says one in particular was a sea captain...a pirate, perhaps? ), Swiss, and Scottish.

I can't go back any further with the Native side than the removal to Oklahoma, and the Dawes roll. My great great grandmother walked the Trail of Tears.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I do a little bit better with my Cherokee ancestor. She was an orphan at the end of the American Revolution and raised by whites. Her husband was an Indian Agent for the govt.

I have a few Indian ancestors from Virginia circa the 1600s, but those tribes are extinct.

 

[cloudy]

I do a little bit better with my Cherokee ancestor. She was an orphan at the end of the American Revolution and raised by whites. Her husband was an Indian Agent for the govt.

I have a few Indian ancestors from Virginia circa the 1600s, but those tribes are extinct.

The Cherokee kept fairly decent records, too.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

CLOUDY

Yes they did.

My great-grandfather taught school at Vinita, Indian Nation, back in 1895. That was a wild place.

 

[Recidiva]

My family on one side is Scots - good family records, but most of them killed each other constantly.

The other side is French-German from Alsace-Lorraine.

Most of them died in wars, the others entirely uncomfortably losing their livestock and farmland to whomever was marching through at the time. Which was...always.

Lots of dead people.

 

[carrie-on]

she had it destroyed with the comment that it contained "more outlaws than inlaws."

LOL I had to laugh when I read this part of Your post. A friend of ours, several yrs ago after finding out a lot from his geneology history, wrote a song he called "All of My In-laws Are Outlaws". I still sing that song to myself when I think about him.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

My old man used to talk about the mansions and Cadillacs and servants his family had, and my mom said the Johnsons were never anything but sharecroppers & horse-thieves. When she met my dad he was not living in a mansion! He had a 6th grade education.

But my Old Man was right. I did the research and he actually understated the wealth and influence of his family. Like, in 1920 his aunt married the son of the chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court. The wedding was at the home of the President of the University of Florida (her cousin). Many of the family members at the wedding were state senators and representatives. Nan's dad (my great-grandfather) graduated Harvard. Her brother, John, graduated Vanderbilt and MIT.

What happened was all the beautiful people pissed the fortune away and lost the land and plantations that supported them. By 1940 most of them were working stiffs trying to cope with the Depression.

 

[Weird Harold]

LOL I had to laugh when I read this part of Your post. A friend of ours, several yrs ago after finding out a lot from his geneology history, wrote a song he called "All of My In-laws Are Outlaws". I still sing that song to myself when I think about him.

My Dad always claimed that his side of the family was the Inlaws and Mom's side was the Outlaws (in part because of that infamous geneology, but mostly because he just loved puns and wordplay.)

it's an old joke in many families, but if the fragmentary reports of the "Bones" side of the geneology are even close, Granddad's side had more than it's share of "bad ends" -- as in the end of a rope; Pirates, Horse Thieves, and corrupt lawmen galore, and many of them named Billy Bones.