Wow I did not see that coming!!!!!!!

Defianttruth

I took my family for a weekend trip to a lake in Oklahoma a few weeks ago. The area is right at the end of where the "Trail of Tears" (I don't know if human atrocities should be in paretheses, italics, or underlined. Yes, I have a dark sense of humor.) So we were taking a tour of an old Native American camp and listened to a presentation by a park ranger. It was very informative and interesting. Growing up I was always told that one of my ancestors a few generations ago were Native Americans. I told my children this and they were very excited and wanted to know more so I fired up the ole interweb and went to ancestory.com

It took a little while looking through old published records and I could not find any records of us being of Native American decent. Then I noticed something strange. One of my ancestors was born with one name and died with another. I looked over this quickly and didn't think about it much. I was laying in bed about to go to sleep. So I jumped up and ran to the computer to login. The person's name was Goldberg. No way right!!!!!! I was able to trace Mrs. Goldberg back several hundred years.

I was astonished. Everyone lied there was no Native American blood in our family we are semitic. It explains why every once in awhile one of us, including myself and one of my children were born with olive skin and curly hair. I always thought the olive skin tones came from the Native Americans. I grew up in a pretty redneck part of the world. I quess it would be easier to be Native American than Semitic. I am not pushing a for profit web page here, but Ancestory.com had some very interesting results for me.

I want to reasearch this more. I find this very interesting. What originally was a family trip to understand American History better turned into a trip of self discovery and a lesson on world history. My girls and I are reading all kinds of books on Jews through history. Everyday they ask if I found something else. So much fun.

Oubliette

Interesting discovery. Thanks for sharing.

Comatose

Very cool! I am planning on doing some research too. Congrats on finding out some of your heritage.

LisaRose

That's interesting. Many Jewish people changed their name when the moved to a different country to fit in better and avoid discrimination. I was also told I had a native American ancestor, but it wasn't true, but someone did researched out family history and found an interesting story. My paternal great grandmother was married to a soldier that died in the civil war. The soldier had asked his commanding officer to look after his wife, should anything happen to him. The commanding officer did look after her, with three illigitimate children being the result. My great grandfather never officially acknowledged his paternity and my grandfather didn't use his last name until later in life. My father had seven brother and seven half brothers, and one sister.

JWdaughter

I knew we had something in our family, but suspected it was Jewish (some known relatives were doctors from Germany and settled in Texas). Turns out that they were just lutheran, but one of them married a native American woman (who was one of the few survivors from our tribe on the 'trail of tears'. His blondness meant that their kids "passed". The big secret was revealed (and reasons for it) about 15 years ago when someone did geneology and talked about it with one of the great aunts who was the last keeper of the family secret. When she was a young woman no one wanted to admit to being mixed.

Ironically, I grew up thinking that my grandma was Scottish. She was embarrassed to be IRish (and was from N. Ireland(family was scots from way back) and Presbyterian). So, I thought we were mostly Scottish and it turns out that we were mostly Irish on my dad's side with a pinch of scots from way back. Irish wasn't much better than Indian back in the day, I guess. Which gives me perspective on the dramas that we have now with immigration policy, racial issues and religious ones, too!

Nothing really changes but the date on the calendar. Same story with different villians, different heroes and different politics.

awakenyr2004

I love researching my ancestry. I haven't been able to find much but I do enjoy the detective work. But I am only hoping to find a wealthy and generous relative that would like to adopt me.

happy@last

It's great fun to research your family tree and can be quite revealing. It can have it's sad moments too. We're a' Jock Tamson's Bairns apparently

cofty

It's a fascinating thing to do.

I was fortunate to come across a distant relative from Australia who had already done the work and had thousands of names on a database which he kindly shared.

It confirmed my grandfather's stories of gypsy origins.

blondie

I found out that my paternal grandmother had been married once before she married my grandfather and had a son....now that was a surprise.

I am now checking to see if that son lived to be an adult and married.

jgnat

Yes, there's the family legends and then there's the records. Both sides of my tree is made up of plain, hard-working stock. You go back far enough, they don't even have a last name. We're talking Carl the Carpenter and Sally the Seamstress here.

There was a long-standing family legend that we were related to gentry (Lainchbury, I think), and several generations stuck Lainchbury as a middle name on to their progeny. So I looked it up. A sixth cousin ten times removed or somesuch was one of the Nouveau Riche from the rising industrial age. In order to settle the debt of the local gentry, our Lainchbury ancestor came to acquire the gentleman's property. I found a very interesting court document where the said gentry several years later, tried to argue that he was still entitled to the rents on the land. The gentleman lost. I get the sense that the handing over of said land to - essentially - a working man, went down hard.

I don't know what happened, but within two generations that land was no longer in the family.

Wow I did not see that coming!!!!!!!

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