awanderingbard | Family Stuff

Here I am to prove my existence once again. Still feeling kind of yucky, healthwise, but maybe a little better. My dad's had some health issues now, in addition to my woes and my mum needing another hip replacement, so Ascii is the healthiest member of the family right now, but we're getting by.

In Ancestry news, my mom's DNA came back, and it was also about what we expected (except more Southern French than we knew about), but with the exciting news that her grandfather, who was illegitimate and adopted, is, in fact, the biological son of the man who adopted him, or at least a member of his immediate family (we found matches with people who were connected to both his adoptive father's mother's and father's lines). We had a lot of family legends around that, and I haven't been able to find anything to link him to a mother yet, but it's cool to have it confirmed he was biologically related to that line of people in some way. I also found out my grandparents were very, very distant cousins, which is interesting. The area of Quebec they came from is pretty small, so it's not surprising there was some crossing of lines there. My mother's side has over a thousand people matched with her DNA, so a lot more people on that side have taken the test, compared to my father's side, who only had about 400 results, I think.

And someone on my father's side of the family (his mother's cousin), got in touch with me and has given me so much information about my great-grandmother's family. Pictures, full biographies, documents, like, just tons of awesome stuff. And he solved a family mystery I've been working for YEARS without success, so that's great to have cleared up for me.

If I can just figure out how my other great-grandmother on that side got to Canada (she is on no boat records, despite the rest of her family being there) and clear up the whole 'birth mother' thing on the other side of the family, I will have solved all the mysteries.