Ancestral Musings

I am still working on catching up!  This week's theme of unexpected provides a broad range of possibilities:  nearly everything that I've found on this genealogy journey has been unexpected.  I was casting around this afternoon for a suitable focus for this entry, and started down the rabbit hole of DNA matches on Ancestry.  And you know, there's a lot there that I really had not expected to find which today's discoveries confirmed. My father's family has always been notably mysterious because he refused to talk about them, particularly the Howdeshell (mother's) side.  I still have zero idea of what happened there, and my uncle Norman, Dad's middle brother, also claimed to not know so I'm pretty sure that mystery will never be solved.  However, it turns out that the Howdeshells are Not Shy about getting their DNA tested.  Moreover, there are a lot of them.  One of the first unexpected things I found was a bunch of people who shared more DNA than ...

Things get handed down--pictures, plates, photos--and stories get handed down--we were pilgrims or pioneers or patriots!--but we all know, some things, like truth, get lost in the transmission.  Sometimes the truth is deliberately misplaced.  Between my mother who felt the past was just over, and my father who had some unhappy secrets, not many stories got handed down to me, and most of the "things" went to other family members as we moved around too much for sentimental storage. What did come to me were three quilt tops that have never been finished.  Judging by the fabrics, they were probably made in the 30s and maybe the early 40s, but the two probable quilters were both dead by 1944 and one of them was essentially blind, so I expect the bulk of the work was done in the 1930s.  When my mother's sister gave them to me in the mid 1990, she told me that it was possible that these had been made by my father's mother, Olive Prewitt, but the other possibility, the one...

As we slog on through the pandemic, I will observe, apropos of nothing, that a friend's daughter was finally able to have her wedding today after a delay of a few weeks!  Pictures show a grateful and happy bride and groom. The prompt suggested using pictures (as I recall, having read this two weeks ago) and I have plenty of those, from both sides of our family.  I have my parents' family Bible, given to them on the day of their wedding, July 6, 1941, by my mother's grandmother, Metta (Case) McDuff.  My mother told me that she wore a navy blue suit and my father was in uniform, having recently rejoined the Navy.   They were married in Olympia, Washington at the Foursquare Gospel Church (which I've always found puzzling as I've never found that either of them had a connection to this church). My husband's parents were slightly younger.  Though they knew each other before the war, my mother-in-law was only 16 in 1941, and her husband to be was 18.  He...

I'm well behind on the challenge here.  The COVID-19 pandemic has left us all wondering what day it is, what week it is, what time it might be:  in other words, uncertain!  I've found it harder to focus recently than I did at the beginning of the lockdown, not just on genealogy but also on my sewing projects, keeping the house clean (we're not living in filth, but the Golden Retriever tumbleweeds are taking over under bookcases and tables), and running.  But today I picked this topic up again, reading many of the stories other people had posted on Facebook about their own uncertainties.  Some couldn't figure out who was descended from whom, or where they came from, or what their names really were.  One person was able to post the letters of three different ancestors who had used the word "uncertain" in the text.  But for me, the big uncertainty is James McDuff, one of my maternal great-great grandparents. I realized that James was not going to yield ...