Glad to hear your presentation went well, vw.
I sat at the office for a while today, but didn't actually get anything done. Mostly ended up at the same "This is confusing and I'm not sure if it works" conclusion that I started at. I can write what I need to write without that, but it's major changes, so I don't really want to start writing until I know for sure that I won't have the other thing.
Genealogy is confusing. Two branches of the same family, starting with the same last name and going through several rounds of, "This name sounds too foreign. Let's change it to something else!" through three countries (England, US, and Canada) ended up at Anders and Young. Trying to track this is ridiculously difficult. Especially since a whole lot of people would change the name they used, but not officially change the name, so the same person might switch back and forth between two different names from one record to the next. I have, however, put together a bunch of records to find my great-grandfather's brother that no one remembered.
Anders and Young? What a contrast. And I thought I had it bad going from Kirstaetter to Castater.
Both of those were several rounds of changes. And each individual change makes sense. It's just that, after they've gone through three changes each, neither bears much resemblance to the original name (which was Yentis or Jentes -- no one could agree on how to spell that one, either.) I've also found three brothers who started out with the same last name in Poland, but in the US for some reason, one became Hochman and one became Hackman, and one seemed to use whichever suited him at the time.
Also, I've so far found three different families within this group (like, all cousins or something) who had kids name Leib, Abraham, Rachel, and Meyer, in that order.
I've decided my German and Dutch ancestors pre-emigration were all spawned parthogenetically from the forehead of Minerva, so I'm not worrying about finding them anymore. God bless my boring-named WASP ancestors.
Heh. I run into that with the Muzzy side of the family. They're all Johns and Samuels. And with the 1840 and earlier censuses only listing the name of the head of household, it's pretty much impossible to find the right ones. It got easier after that with the George Washington Muzzy's (plural!) and Milton Filmore Muzzy and the like.
The earliest any of my family was in the US was 1887, so I don't have to deal with the older censuses that only have the head's name. Instead, I get to figure out how to order records from archives in Poland.
We can trace a couple different branches back to about 1800, but before that it gets iffy. Not so much that they weren't in North America, but which side of the border were they on in 1776! I'm sure if I looked at more than census records, I could figure out more of our ancestry, but at this point it takes more effort than I'm willing to expend.
I've been emailing a man who I think might be my grandfather's second cousin, but I'm not sure. We're still trying to work out all the relations. I know he's related somehow. He remembers a lot of old family stuff, but like most of the older people I've talked to about family history, he doesn't really remember unless you ask the right way. He's got lots of interesting stories about growing up in Brooklyn in the twenties, though.
My favorite of those sorts of stories is from my grandfather. He was born in 1918 and lived on Coney Island. In the summer when he was a little kid, he'd wander around the beach and pretend to be lost so that people would feel sorry for him and give him food. He wasn't starving or anything -- his father owned a shoe store and could feed him perfectly well -- but he just liked the hot dogs and fries and candy that people on the beach would have better than the soup or sandwich or whatever that he'd get if he ate lunch at home.
