My ancestry

I let other family members do the digging to find our ancestors, mainly because I don't have the patience for it; this means that I'm likely to hurry along and add the wrong people to the wrong places.  I quickly found out I shouldn't be messing with finding my ancestors because I can't do it properly.  At least I do have reliable cousins who dig deeper and find the right folks in my ancestry.  I have people working on both my parents' family trees.

My DNA fascinates me, seeing where my long-ago people lived, and even pictures of some; altogether, they are all the folks who made me what I am.  Experts are finding more things out about DNA all the time, and Ancestry occasionally refines what they know.  Here's my recent DNA findings:

I like the fact that I'm mostly Scotch and British, although I've always wanted a little color in my lineage, either native American or Black.  I do have one very distant relative who was an Indian living in Canada, but that doesn't give me much of an edge.  

As I say, the whole thing fascinates me.  Cliff doesn't understand it at all, and is always asking why I'd care about people so far back in history having nothing to do with my life.  Maybe I care so much because my mom talked a lot about her grandparents and how her parents lived.  She was a great story-teller, and I loved to hear all about the great-grandparents I never met, asking questions so I could learn more.  I learned a lot about her own life as a child, too:  Her father worked on a road crew and, as I understand it, was gone from home quite a bit.  So every Saturday my Grandmother would hitch up the team of horses to a wagon, load up the kids, and go to Eagleville to do her trading;  she told me Aunt Ruby, her oldest child, cried all the way to town as a baby and toddler.  

After taking eggs to the grocer and using her egg money  to help with getting sugar, flour, and other necessities of life, she and the kids would go visit her parents there in town, eating dinner with them.  I think she said that particular grandfather fought in the civil war, but I may have that mixed up.  I sure wish I'd written down more and asked questions when I was older.  She'd tell me about her Aunt Emma in South Dakota (they called her "Emmie") and a paternal aunt who lived in a cabin in Arkansas...  I think they  called her "Aunt Sadie".  Most of that information is gone from me, except that I recall that the Arkansas aunt's family had a wind-up Victrola in their simple dwelling, and the kids spent most of their time there listening to music the one time their family visited her.

So now I imagine what my ancestors may have done in the countries where they started out.  Most people back then were poor, and even the rich had things rougher than poor folks people do today.  What great stories they could tell us!

Oh well, I keep learning bits and pieces.  Who knows what stories might pop up eventually?

I can hope, can't I?