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.

Ha, smart kid!

What's the difference between the cool-sounding thingie and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome?

As near as I can tell, the cool-sounding thingie is in a different location. Also, Carpal Tunnel *can* be caused by something other than the myelin sheath getting inflamed and squooshing the nerve that passes through the carpal tunnel.

The Jose Cuervo (or whatever it is that I have; I'm too lazy to scroll back), is apparently always caused by an inflamed myelin sheath.

It's not a huge difference, but there it is.

Very few family stories, but my parents went back to the village church they went to in Portugal (Feteiras on the island of San Miguel) to look up family marriages/births/deaths. They were able to go back easily on both sides to 1750-1800, and the oldest set of records they could find dated to mid 16th century or around then...

Most of my people had the good taste to be religious malcontents and fortune hunters and came over in the late 1600s and 1700s, so they show up in lots of books. The other ones plopped themselves down in Greene County, Pennsylvania, and didn't move for several generations.