For those who follow me on twitter you might have noticed a new hashtag in the past few weeks: #FamilyHistory.
Every spring the grade school has a family tree project. Every year I send my kids in with a bare three generations of living relatives because I’ve never sat down to research more. Since my husband’s aunt started putting together a family tree I started to try helping by combing old census records and hunting down lost relations.
You know what I’ve found? My husband’s family is obsessed with the name Francis. There’s six boys named Francis, a Frankisca, and a Frank all in one generation from one set of parents. There are so many Francis-es that I lost track of who goes where!
My side of the family has another problem: spelling. The lack of standardized spelling means trying to guess who on the census records might be related.
I’ve been lining people up by estimated birth year and hoping I found the right relatives. It’s entirely possible I stole someone else’s family tree. Which sounds about right, actually, more than one relative wound up in a penal colony. Several in Australia.
Anyways… there’s some lively stories in the history books. If you want to check it out, I’ll be doing #FamilyHistory on Sundays on Twitter until I run into too many dead ends. Who knows, maybe at that point I’ll start doing someone else’s family tree.