Happy Canada Day! My subject line today is a snippet of the French lyrics for O Canada, and seems appropriate to the genealogy work I’ve been doing lately. The English line is “Our home and native land,” whereas the French version translates to “land of our ancestors.”
I spent most of last night following a new branch in the family tree to its conclusion. It’s busy work, though it requires a lot of concentration to make sure I don’t miss something or mistranscribe something. I start with a person, then move on to the parents. Each of those has parents, of course, which means that I now have four threads to track, and it expands geometrically after that. Some threads peter out very quickly, either because records were lost, or the person who researched that lineage wasn’t interested in a particular branch. Last night I started with a husband and wife from the latter half of the 19th century and traced their ancestors all the way back to the late 16th century. Another 32 ancestors on the chart, with a few threads left to trace yet. This isn’t meant to be legible, but just to give you a rough idea of the shape of things:
I’m the red box in the lower right-hand section. The upper central portion is almost exclusively families that originated in France. The left and right-hand sections are English and Scottish. The strange line that goes across the bottom is there because one of my father’s brothers married one of my mother’s cousins. Their kids are simultaneously my first and second cousins. My father had 12 siblings, which accounts for the long span across the lower left part of the tree. I haven’t followed all of their descendants yet, many of whom I’ve never met. I expect I’ll have over 500 names on the chart soon.
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