Family Tree Whatnot

The other day Jake was searching online for various family names but kept coming up with the same couple of guys (a Confederate general and a beverage inventor) who he already knew about. I think probably he was hoping for a Union general or something, somebody who wasn't a complete bastard or isn't responsible for the rotting teeth of America's youth.

Anyway, he got bored and started typing in random names from my family tree, and lo and behold, he totally found something! A very nice woman named Debi apparently has spent quite a bit of time piecing her family tree, and it turns out I'm on it. Or technically, my grandpa is on it. She didn't have anything after him. If I calculated correctly, I think she's my third cousin once removed, or some such relation so far off we're not even related anymore.

So I've spent the past few days entering each person in her tree into my Family Tree Maker program. She offered to just email me the file, and I probably will eventually ask her to do that to fill in anybody I've missed (I'm nowhere near done, and my family file has gone from just under 400 people to over 1200). I am having so much fun though entering each person individually though. She's got biographical information on many of them. For example, two of my great-great granduncles fought for the Union at the Battle of Vicksburg, kicking the ass of Jake's Confederate General who was also there. There was also a guy who fought in the Revolutionary War. I haven't gotten into him much yet, so I can't say for certain yet whose side he was on.

The most tragic stories came from my great-grandmother's family. The short version is that her brother poisoned himself with strychnine, and a few days later (the reason for which remains sort of unclear) her brother-in-law shot himself in the head with a revolver. This all happened about 13 years before my grandpa was born, and my dad said he'd never heard anything about it. I wonder if my grandpa knew about it at all - that's the type of thing no one talked about back then. Plus, the whole experience must have been horribly traumatic, and my great-grandmother may have just not wanted to go back there.

Entering all those names with their birth dates and death dates, I've been wondering a lot about who these people were. I've been thinking about all the funerals my grandpa must have attended - for old people and young people alike. My favorite factoid yet? My great-great grandmother (that's my grandpa's grandma) was still alive when my father was born in the fall of 1944. She died the following spring at the ripe old age of 95, but I really like to think she was thrilled at the news of her newest great-grandchild. It's fun stuff.