Tracing my Roots

I have begun to find fascinating facts about several of my family lines. These family histories date back to the colonial days of America and some date back to medieval Europe. With my recent family history discoveries I have had to change my perception of certain family traits and mottoes. For the longest time I believed my tree was tenuously rooted in a dusty, red clay-soil with no hope of recovering a past that involved illiterate, undocumented farmers and housewives. Recently, I have begun to uncover a treasure trove of ancient family lines that I hope to share with anyone willing to listen.

To begin, I have to preface these fantastic discoveries by telling of my most recent ancestors. My grandmother grew up in the 1950s and 60s with no running water or electricity. To put this into perspective, color TV began broadcasting in the early1950s. My grandmother had never seen white bread, or any other pre-packaged food until her marriage in the mid-1960s. Put bluntly, she was poor and inexperienced. Her parents were uneducated and believed in working hard, playing harder and dying young. She has told me that the only thing she ever learned from her parents and grandparents was how to survive, that they were too busy feeding the family to worry about bettering their children's lives. I am using this brief description to put into context my grandmother's rich, noble, and royal family history.

More to come...