Laytonwoman3rd (Linda) Works on the Archive

Hi, I'm Linda, and I've been researching family history most of my adult life. In my college days I did a project for a sociology class where I filled in a questionnaire about my family background. I was pretty disappointed to learn that as "culture" goes, we didn't have any. No traditions that could be traced back to an "Old Country"...in fact, on my father's side, no one could even agree on what the Old Country was. My grandmother's family had a rare surname and for decades I could not find any trace of it in my research. My uncle said it was Lithuanian; my father said, No....Hungarian. When my grandmother passed away in the late 1960s, that mystery was finally solved through some old documents found in her attic...her father's passport, issued at Budapest, in 1886. So, Hungarian, yes, but from the village of Luky, in Trencin Province, which is now part of the Slovak Republic. (How Lithuania ever got into it is still bewildering, but I let that go. Naturally, it had never occurred to me to discuss this with my grandmother when that was possible, but as her parents were both dead by the time she was 11, it's unlikely she would have been able to contribute much.) My first, and still greatest, achievement in my search came in the early 90s, when, with the help of a contact made through one of the old forums, I was able to locate and communicate with descendants of my Great-grandfather's brothers still living on the family homestead he left behind when he came to America. At this time, the farm my GG established here in Northeastern Pennsylvania is also still in our family, and so far six generations of Stefan Lepulicza's direct descendants have lived there.

My father's paternal ancestors were somewhat legendary in our local area---"The Snyder Boys", a family of eight brothers, including my grandfather, who were all big men, with prodigious strengths, some musical talent, and a way with draft horses and stonework. They were often referred to as "Dutchmen", but as it was a common term applied to Germans in Pennsylvania, I have always assumed their origins were German. And here I have to opposite problem to that presented by my grandmother's family---the name is TOO common. The number of Snyders in upstate New York where the family was living in the mid-19th century, is beyond computation. When my brother and I took a road trip to visit Town Clerks and church registries some 30 years ago, we encountered potential cousins everywhere. "Oh, you're looking for Snyders? My grandmother was a Snyder (or my Mother-in-law, or in one case, I'M a Snyder!)" That trip was a lot of fun, and we found documentation of a lot of births, marriages and burials of people we already knew we were related to, but no new connections.

>1 laytonwoman3rd: That was a great attic find! Sounds like your father's family could be a challenge. My grandfather was one of twelve. Sadly few ancestors still live in our "home county"--and many of the ones who do bear a different surname today.

My current project is to organize all the "stuff" I have gathered and inherited over the years into some sort of coherent collection that might be of interest and use to "the kids" of the next generation. In the process, I've made a couple of discoveries that were right under my nose all the time, by putting 2 and 2 together.
For example, I've always known that my grandfather had grown children from his first marriage when he married my grandmother; I had dates for all the parties, but I had never studied them closely enough to realize that both of my father's half-siblings were OLDER than his MOTHER.

>3 laytonwoman3rd: That's often what happens!

Awfully quiet in here, Linda :-)

I've been in an actual written correspondence with a cousin (2nd, 1x removed, but who's calculating?) about family history. Our fathers grew up together, but our paths diverged when she was about 5, and I was a teenager. We each have little pieces of our common background, and it is so much fun to put it all together. Susan has some letters her father inherited and saved; I have a similar collection that has come down to me. It turns out that together we have a "set" ---postcards and letters between my grandmother and her older sister Anna (who was Susan's great-grandmother), during the months before Anna died of complications from a stillbirth. I've been able to fill in a lot of details that Susan didn't know, and we've exchanged photocopies, pictures, and stories. Her dad was a terrific story teller, but it seems when he didn't have the facts, he freely filled in with speculation and outright invention, so I've also cleared up several misconceptions!

>6 laytonwoman3rd: Sounds like a terrific find in the letters! Glad you all are sharing and clearing up erroneous info.