The Immigrant in your family tree

As I'm sitting here at my desk typing this blog to try and keep to the promise that I made myself that what I have to say is relevant to someone somewhere while they travel down the road on their very own genealogical journey, I could not imagine what it would be like for one of my family members to come to America with little to no literacy/education/skills, not being able to speak English (if they came from Quebec), or have any family to fall back on because, personally, my largest move was about 60 miles from the town I grew up in. The distance of my move is a-typical for people in the US. Most don't more more than 100 from the place where they were born.

In Europe, countries are close, so moving to and through one from another seems like it's not that big of a thing. But from Canada to the United States, the move could be thousands of miles.

To be able to come to the decision that leaving the only place you knew to be home is better than staying seems to be quite heroic.

Imagine, you're a teenager and all you knew is what you were taught on the farm or from books in the one room school house you went to when you weren't needed to work the fields to bring the crops to market for sale to feed your family. And then the crops failed.

This is the reality many of my Canadian ancestors faced and this is why many migrated south to the United States.

These migration patterns fascinate me.

I wish I knew the answers my ancestors would say for the question, "When did you know it was time to go?"

The things that are hardly never published in the Census Records.

 It's a cold winter's morning in Southern California and this memory just popped into my head:

'' My dad used to call me 'silly potato head' as a small child. ''

The Mr. potato head was a plastic toy that they bought me and I used to play with it along with a dress me Betsy and a Mrs. Beasley doll from a TV show called "Family Affair", a Barbie, a GI Joe, and one "See and Say" toy where you pull the string, and it says in a scratchy male voice, "the cow goes moo".

And it just struck me that calling a child that is not a great way to build self-esteem. 

These are the legacies we are left with and fight to change because we are determined there is a better way to raise a child even though no one is provided anywhere near the number of books, lessons, or training in advance of the moment when new parents are discharged from a hospital with a newborn baby.

The fact is... we are winging it all the way until something catastrophic or bad happens.

Some of the crazy family nicknames that we take on are never recognized upon Census records and lost to time. And in my case, maybe that's a good thing.

Census Mishaps - Do you have them in your records, too?

In the 1950 U.S. Census, my great-grandfather J. Alfred Fredette is listed. But he's also dead. He could not be living at 270 Shaw Street, because he had already died by the time the census taker rolled around to the family home. So why is he listed? 

Who am I, what am I?

It's been some time since my last post about genealogy. In this post, I'm going to try to address the "Who am I?", and "What am I?" questions.

I always felt like something was off. I would look at my little brother, and look at my reflection in the mirror, and then look at my mom and dad and think, "How can these people be my parents?" My dad told us we were German. I grew up without the benefit of extended family around so I didn't even have cousins to compare my looks to. I think we were told that at a young age we were German because that was an easy answer. It was believed that I had German ancestors on both sides of my family because of the surnames in the family tree.  

The more complicated answer was one I began to discover when I was 19 years old and sick in the hospital after surgery from having a ruptured appendix. I was told I was part Jewish. My grandfather, on my dad's side, who was born in New York to a Jewish immigrant family who was either Romanian and/or Polish and/or German, converted to Catholicism to marry my grandmother. I take it that being Jewish is not something that you decide lightly to be or not to be because it's a culture... a way of life.

But in America, culture is subjective. On one hand, you're told to be proud of where you come from, your heritage and traditions. On the other hand, you're also part of a 'melting pot' of humanity and you need to speak and read American English and get enough education to function in society well enough so you can make money to be judged by all of the other people making money. That leads to discussions on the social classes and how big is your house and what car that you drive, etc. But I digress.

American culture is the habits you do and share with your family and friends. My parents would have little to none of it. Where does that leave me?

Years down the road, and DNA testing arrives which opens up the idea of how we now have a definitive scientific way to find out who we are related to and where our ancestors came from. This is how I was discovered by a second cousin who said she was related to surnames I had no connection to, but had to find out more.All of the second cousins, come to find out, had these breadcrumbs to the path that lead me to the realization that my German surname was not my surname at all, it was a made-up name by a boy who ran away from home and went into hiding from his family. After all of the discovery and the dust settled, I believe my true last name is Weschler, which was Americanized to be Wexler when my great-grandfather immigrated to the US in the 18XXs from where he came from.

One cousin took a trip to Romania in 2023 with the hope that there were still records yet to be discovered. 

We are still researching the location of his immigration papers.

Every journey begins with a single step.

I'm not good at talking about myself, but I think I can write well enough about some of the things I've discovered about genealogy in my family and the process that I went through creating my family tree.

***Step one is to write down what you know***

My mom was the one who would talk to me about her family. She knew some information about three generations. She knew her father was an immigrant from Canada. She knew she had deep roots in New York. I didn't find out much about my dad's side of the family until 1985 when had to have surgery, but that's a story for another day.

***Step two is to get with your relatives and find out what they know***

I was lucky enough to have grandmothers who liked to write letters and that helped me a lot initially.

I was also lucky enough to be allowed to copy my grandmother's genealogy book when I visited my Aunt Grace in 2001. It was chock-full of information and newspaper clippings.

I also received an envelope that contained a family tree for my son's side of the family.

***Step three is to organize the information you've collected***

I collected all of these papers, letters, and more into three-ring binders organized by surname so I could find it again if I needed it. The documents I've collected were placed into plastic archival pockets and each pocket has a surname label I made with my p-touch label maker.

Once everything was organized, then I transposed all of information into my familytree maker software. Those were the days when they sold you CDs full of information because the internet was not the huge collection of databases like it is today.

Any records you've collected can be made into source records that relate to the profiles you create.

***Step four is to share what you know with others and collaborate***

Later, I had an ancestry.com account (didn't everybody at some point?) until it became too expensive to maintain and I quit that. I can still access my tree on that website, and trees shared with me by others, I just can't add any new people on ancestry without a paid account.

About 10 years ago, I joined Wikitree.com and for the (hopefully) last time transposted each family member into a Wikitree profile by uploading a GEDCOM file. My family tree had so many names by that point, that I had to upload more than once and then had to review each profile and connect each relative together. I am Stutz-25 on Wikitree.com.

I've really enjoy the time I spend on Wikitree.com and I love the fact that the profiles I've created that make up my branch helps others find connections because it's just one global tree. And we are all cousins to some degree.