Yeah... when I’m looking at some of my ancestor’s families, I’m thinking:’that’s not a family, it’s a tribe.’ I’m really enjoying studying genealogy, it gives you a good perspective on history... puts you ‘in the stream’ so to speak.
My current tribal count: 29,454 people
4221 photos
What is interesting to me are the “new” cousins/aunts/uncles and even grandparents, we are adding due to the 1950 census.
Apparently, with my tribes, there was a lot of migrations of relatives/Americans after the Civil War up to and after the depression.
It appears that these migrating tribal members often lost track of each other during that 9 decade era.
Early during that time period telephones were not there and people depended on the mail to communicate.
My mother and one of her sisters could type as fast as they could talk and one of their first cousins was a good family record keeper. So they typed a semi annual Christmas Genealogy newsletter. Copy machines were not in vogue then, so. Fortunately, one of my first cousins got a lot of that info into a genealogy format. I still have the decades old data on our common ancestors.
A couple of my wife’s relatives put together basically a book of a few families. They lived in the midwest, were connected with farming. They often lived in died in small geographical areas. I used the data for my wife’s aunts and uncles and cousins back 3-4 generations.
Often the same first and second names were often used across the generations. They were born, grew up and married a local and repeated the process until they died.
I sent the book back to some of her relatives as neither of us really got into that heritage besides people she actually knew.
Besides having a heritage interest, I believe that our DNA will play an incredible increasing role in our healthcare, life style and longevity.
My mother, her mother,sisters and female cousins all lived well into their 80’s/90’s. The men barely made it to 70. That has reversed with this generation. My male cousins are all in their 80’s and we are active. Only a sibling sister and one female cousin made it past their early 70’s.
Enjoy your genealogy!