Unraveling my family history

Patty here…

My mother was from a close-knit family of German immigrants who came to the U.S. before 1900 from various German villages in what was then called South Russia but is now Ukraine. Catherine the Great, Czarina of Russia, who was German, invited her fellow country(wo)men to establish villages in Russia's outlying territories. My family heeded the call, with mixed results, I might add. For the most part, I know all the players in my mother’s family, because she and my grandmother passed down stories and a German Bible inscribed with all the births, deaths and marriages.

Kate the Great

Unraveling details of my father’s side of the family is a murkier task. His early life was fractured by a tragedy that separated him from his parents and siblings. He was sixteen when he began to search for information about what had happened, finding some details but not all of them. As an adult, he continued to write letters, search the LDS family library in Salt Lake City, and travel to cities and towns where his family had lived, hoping to find someone who knew them. Some of the data he found was incorrect or could not be verified; some was not what he expected to find. I helped him search, mostly as a way to strengthen our father-daughter bond. After he died, I stopped looking.

Recently, I was cleaning out a closet and came across a box of letters, replying to my dad’s long-ago inquiries. During my prior genealogy search, I had become frustrated by several family names that simply stopped. As diligently as I’d searched, I could not trace them back to the previous generation. One was my great grandmother, Emeline/Emaline/Emiline McCoy. I found her father and her grandfather, who was born in 1796, but nobody prior to that. I wanted to know their country of origin.

Flag of Ireland

I love a good mystery, so I began sorting through the letters. What I found inspired me to resume the search my dad and I had started so many years before. After overcoming some skepticism, I subscribed to Ancestry-dot-com, and found the information available is somewhat overwhelming.

All the names in my dad’s family tree are WASPy, although there may have been a Catholic or two thrown into the mix. Based on the history of the name Smiley, I suspected the family had come from the lowlands of Scotland or Northern Ireland.

Scottish flag

Once I entered the name of my 3-times great grandmother, I tapped into research already done by other people, and found an ancestor who was born in London in 1609 and who immigrated to Plymouth, Massachusetts on either the ship Anne or Little James in 1623, just three years after the Mayflower. My ancestor, Ralph Wallen, owned several pieces of property in Plymouth, including a house and garden at Hob’s Hole and land along the Eel River called “Wallen’s Well.”

Sailing to Plymouth

In the United State Revolutionary War service records, I found another member of that family who served as a seaman in the Navy during the Revolutionary War on a ship called Liberty. I'm a sailor, so I felt a definite kinship with him.

Me in my foulies

I realize some people don’t give a rip where their ancestors came from, but I find it not only fascinating, but also poignant to know that my people tilled the soil of a garden in Plymouth or sailed on a warship called Liberty. And now, thanks to fellow genealogy travelers, I have FINALLY located the next generation in the Emaline McCoy saga and look forward to following it wherever it leads me.

HAPPY MONDAY!