Friday, February 1, 2013

Long Ago, Far Away

Good grief, how did it get to be February already?

The Bag Lady has been doing a lot of family tree research on the computer. Ancestry.ca is addictive. She has traced several lines of her family tree back to the 1600's.... in North America! This surprised her, in a way. Her grandfather on her father's side came to Canada as a teenager in the 1890's, which is probably where she got the notion that her family were recent immigrants.

Of course, she knew that her mother's family had been here a little longer, but had no idea that some lines on both sides had been here so long. Several ancestors on her mother's side left the United States for Canada around the time of the American Revolution.

Her parents met in Halifax during WWII. Her father was from Alberta and joined the navy during the war. Her mother lived in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, which is practically a continent away. They married after the war ended and settled in Alberta.

The oddest thing that she has discovered is that one line of her ancestry on both sides of her family tree can be traced back to Scituate, Massachusetts in the 1640's. Now, she really has no idea how large Scituate was in those days, but thinks it is a distinct possibility that those ancestors knew each other! She wonders if they were on friendly terms. She wonders what they would think of their respective descendents finally meeting and marrying after all those years. (She also wonders how the hell you pronounce "Scituate"...)

Some day, perhaps, she will be able to travel to Massachusetts and stand on ground that her ancestors stood on when they first came to North America. Wouldn't that be cool?