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Before you even look up Gregor Mendel...1) write down as many names of your family, for as far back as you can go 2) list birth order 3) add hair and eye color for each person. This will give you and overview, a way yo see patterns, and a good way to check your results, once you DO use Mendel's theories.

Thanks. I will check into it.

The only problem is my mother had no siblings and we know very little, really next to nothing about her father’s family. As far as I know he had only one sibling, a brother but he died from alcoholism in his 30’s and was never married. We know nothing about his parents or grandparents. And both of her male cousins on her mother’s, side, her mother’s only sibling’s children were both childless and are long dead.

Same with my dad. He had an older sister but she died a month before he was born as did his dad, a week before my dad was born. His mother came to America from Norway when he was a toddler, leaving him behind with her parents and coming back to bring him to America when he was about 5 or 6 after she remarried here in the States. And there was some sort of big falling out between his mother and her 1st husband’s family but no one is sure why. As I understand his father sister, his aunt even filed a custody lawsuit to try to keep him in Norway, alleging his mother was unfit. My dad vaguely remembers that this aunt who he hardly knew, came to the dock the day he left, gave him candy, flowers and a stuffed animal and that she was tall and had strawberry red hair and as my father told me, much like mine, and that she was crying but that is all he knew or remembered about her.

My dad didn’t even know that his step father was not his natural father until he was in his late teens and didn’t know he had had a sister until he was in his late 40’s and has only one faded B&W photo of her that his mother had kept hidden away.

My dad has two half-brothers but the youngest moved to CA before I was born I only met him once in 1976 but I wouldn’t know him from Adam if I bumped into him or his two sons today and my other uncle and his wife couldn’t have children and both of their two children were adopted.

Both my parents passed in the late 90’s so the only people in my family who may know anything about my relatives is my older brother and my father’s half-brother.

I do have a big box of photos though that I inherited when my father passed, but the old ones that show some relatives from before I was born are all in black and white and last time I went through them with my older brother, he isn’t sure who some of the people in the photos are.

I do have my mother’s maternal great grandparent’s immigration papers from the mid 1800’s when they immigrated from Germany and my father’s maternal cousin in Norway sent him a family tree a few years before my father passed.

Some years ago my niece got into Ancestry.com and found some documents related to my father’s mother’s immigration to America, the ship she came on and being listed as being a “domestic” but couldn’t find anything about my mother’s family except for a census that showed that after her father died that she and her mother lived with her aunt in the late 1930’s.

When my mother died and we went to bury her in her family’s plot, the only one of two left, when the cemetery went to dig her grave, they found a small coffin and the remains of a very young child and the cemetery manager after researching the very old cemetery records, found out that she died in late 1918 and was named Martha, but there was no last name or parent’s names listed. The only thing to be done was to bury my mother and then rebury little Martha over her.

My brother and I tried to do research on who this child was as my mother nor anyone in her family ever mentioned any relative by this name, but there had been a fire in the local courthouse in the late 1920’s and most records from before then were lost. So who Martha remains a complete mystery to us. Was she my mother’s older sister, perhaps a victim of the Spanish Flu? Many times people back then didn’t speak of such deaths. Or was she the illegitimate child of a relative, perhaps her father’s alcoholic brother or even her fathers? Or was she the child of a family friend or neighbor who couldn’t afford to bury their child, especially during the great influenza plague? My brother and I don’t know. But I think my mother, who loved children so much would be comforted that little Martha, whoever she was, is no longer alone.