I am not and probably never will be a serious genealogist but yesterday I was fiddling around with Ancestry (for the first time in a couple years) and got struck by a small lightning bolt.

When I think of who/where I come from, I most often think of my dad’s father (my paternal grandfather), who was born in northern Saskatchewan. His father died on a fur trapping trip (this was the late 1800s) and subsequently his family ended up in Sault Ste. Siberia, on the Michigan side since his wife had relatives there.

It’s an exotic story. I pull it out occasionally when people ask me weird, intrusive questions about my “heritage” and they look at me a bit differently, at least for a while. Of course we all have FOUR sets of great-grandparents. I was never lucky enough to meet ANY of mine. They were all dead before I was born and it is what it is.

I don’t really know much about my dad’s *mother’s* parents although they are on my very rudimentary “tree” in Ancestry. For reasons I couldn’t articulate if I tried, I got curious about them yesterday. So I got on to Ancestry and, yes, they are in my tree but I couldn’t find anything about *their* parents. My great-great-grandparents…

So I did the google. I didn’t find their parents but I did find a *blog* that talked about a Raeburn family. Naw, it couldn’t be the same family. But. A lot of the details added up. Like immigrating to Canada (Ontario) from Scotland and then *Sault Ste. Siberia* (Michigan). And then my grandmother’s *parents’* names matched the names I have on my tree. I know those are correct. Great-grandma’s name is especially distinctive when all four parts of it (including her maiden name) are strung together. And (hello), she was born in the USA, not Canada, but that is a story I don’t know well enough to tell.

I poked around on this blog for a while. It isn’t frequently updated, at least not in the last 10 years or so, although there is a February 2024 entry. One of the entries that I found showed pictures of a couple and boy oh boy, did I recognize my great-grandmother. Oh, not that I ever knew her but I have that picture somewhere in my archives. The blogger made the statement that, “These are my great-grandparents.”

That’s when the lightning bolt hit. Those are MY great-grandparents too! Jeebus! I did not act on this. For one thing, people started arriving for Easter dinner. For another thing, I am always a bit hesitant to just barge in on a person’s life that I don’t know, even though this woman seems to be my second cousin. Who knows, she might (mistakenly) think I am looking for money?

So. Maybe this is a time to pull my little DNA kit off the shelf, spit, and see what happens. And dust off Ancestry. This is actually a systems analyst kind of thing and that means it’s right up my alley. It’s one of the things I’ve done all my life, whether or not I have gotten paid for doing it. I am currently getting paid for it, thank you very much Corporate America. But I can’t let this become a rabbit hole because I have enough to do.

The pic is a little forsythia bush by the Landfill compost bin. Just so you know that spring is progressing around here.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 1st, 2024 at 6:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.