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Went To The Garden Center


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Another thing caused by the popularity of checking your DNA is all the cold cases being closed by police. Forensic DNA is an up and coming thing. DNA scammers are abounding too.

My MIL has sent us 23&ME (I think it may be the other one) DNA test kit so we can find out how we're all related. Both kits are somewhere in the dead mail pile. 

Frosty The Lucky.

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We have a family diary of our ancestor fighting in the civil war. We have the old family bible of one side from the late 18- early 1900's.  The thing that annoyed me was my dad proclaiming one thanksgiving that we had a descendant on the 1492 voyage that reached the Americas.   He couldnt answer the lineage thereafter.  Just, Bam, in America, then civil war era and after. My mind tends to call Bull. There would be Something in between. I don't trust much of that. Maybe the regional dna but nothing stating your ancestors did this, with no lineage after. 

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Madelynn is the family genaeologist and she has turned up some stuff that I never knew abouty my near and distant ancestors.  I found out that my father had been married and divorced in the 1920s and '30s well before he met my mother.  As far as I know my mother never knew this.  I also was able to discover detailed military records of one of my many times great grandfathers who had been in the NY militia in the Mohawk Valley and fought Native Americans and Tories during the American Revolution. 

Families tend to recall and sometimes exaggerate the roles and feats of ancestors and never mention the ones who were hung as horse thieves or were less than faithful to their spouses or fled before a crowd of creditors.  We probably all have ancestors who were admirable and some who were scoundrels.  They can be both an inspiration and a warning to us.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

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When we were first married I took my wife down to Fort Smith and was showing her the old family home.  The current owner noticed us standing on the sidewalk and when they learned what I was doing invited us inside and got the "historical tour" too.  Things like speaking tubes are still in the walls and there used to be a "servants staircase" that was later turned into a bathroom as originally there were only an outhouse.  Any way I was pointing out a bunch of dots in the HIGH ceiling of the room that had been my grandfathers bedroom when he got frail and told their history:  My Grandfather was a smoker and an alcoholic and the family was worried about him possibly smoking in bed while drunk and setting it on fire. So they installed a smoke detector right over his bed.  Well after a year or two the batteries  got low and it started beeping. With the high 12'? ceilings there was no way he could service it and was so annoyed by the beeping that one night when he was lying in bed drunk he took out his Saturday Night Special---22 short revolver and started trying to kill the smoke detector!  He must have reloaded several times....

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I'll bet the owners of the house at the time LOVED the stories, I do! 

My paternal Grandmother's maiden name was Sherman and she was a 2nd. cousin or niece of William Tecumseh Sherman and her Mother's maiden name was Cody and a closer relative of "Wild" Bill Cody. No family stories about either though. <sigh> 

Mother's side is a Heinz 57 of nationalities, mostly English and Dutch with a healthy mix of Scot Irish, touch of French and much wildly unknowns.

No cool stories though, about the closest is the seedling my maternal Grandfather, the federal superior circuit judge brought my Grandmother from a stint in N. Cal. She planted it in the front yard of their home overlooking Puget Sound Wa. sometime in the 1920s. When I saw it, the giant redwood was more than 6 people's stretched arm spans in diameter and probably close to 200' tall. That foggy FOGGY part of Puget sound was perfect for giant redwoods though they were assured by experts it would never survive. 

When she sold the house and land in the late 60s the tree brought more $ than the house and land. At the time it was taken down it was 240+' tall and 12' in Diameter. They had to helicopter log it. It was such a cool tree.

Frosty The Lucky.

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  The bullet holes in the livingroom floor came from the basement where grandpa's shop was.  He was known to hide bottles down there too.  Nobody could prove what he was shooting at.

  Now I'm curious to know more about our family history.  My sister has a couple of centennial books from the town we all originated from and a tub of newspaper clippings, photo's, etc. and is bringing it over.  Mom said my great uncle had a huge horn on top of his house and would blast it on a whim, day or night.  He was also a holistic healer.  

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We had a "great" Aunt who did the genealogy for that branch once; very carefully documenting Marriage dates and the dates of their first child's birth...seems like my family tended to make sure of interfertility before marriage!  We came over in 1628 IIRC; but other branches came over during the Potato blight and some walked over when there was a land bridge connecting NA to Asia.  Hybrid Vigor!

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   Hybrid vigor indeed.   I found out my great grandpa was a blacksmith from sifting through the paperwork.  Sister is helping me. Mom remembers bits and pieces. Grandpa had a farm but lost it so he tried taking up the blacksmithing and the smithy burned down.  so he turned to gunsmithing (bullet holes in the floor?) and tool and die work at a auger building company.  I will find out when my family came over, it's pretty tangled up figuring all things out.  Early 1800's I believe.  I knew a lot of this but not in detail.  Pretty fun actually.  I wonder if photo's from our family books would be out of line here.  Haven't found many pictures, mostly just text.

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I recently found out that my great-great-great-grandfather was a blacksmith in Bristol, VT at some point (not far from where IFI member Judson Yaggy lives now), and later a storekeeper in Middlebury, VT. In the latter profession, he got involved in a complicated lawsuit revolving around his brother Asa agreeing to buy a large quantity of eggs from someone who was buying them cheap on the farm and bringing them into town for resale. Great-great-great-grandpa Wightman (for that was his name) pulled out of the deal; one gets the impression that Asa was the impulsive one and Wightman the stubborn one. In any event, the fellow sued the brothers and lost. After a number of appeals (which he also lost), he disseminated his account of the trial in a self-published volume of A Collection of Useful, Interesting, and Remarkable Events, Original and Selected, from Ancient and Modern Authorities, mostly decrying the evils of the legal system and other miscarriages of justice.

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Well, he didn’t get anything for the eggs, and the Chapman brothers countersued and won. The final award was about $15, worth about $450 today. Don’t know how well the book sold, but I hope he made back at least his printing costs!

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