{"id":3602,"date":"2016-01-16T15:39:12","date_gmt":"2016-01-16T20:39:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/?p=3602"},"modified":"2018-12-24T18:14:45","modified_gmt":"2018-12-24T23:14:45","slug":"genealogy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/2016\/01\/16\/genealogy\/","title":{"rendered":"Genealogy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love a good mystery.\u00a0 I have been an avid reader of whodunits for most of my life.\u00a0 I cut my teeth on The Hardy Boys<\/a>. Arguably my best Christmas present ever was a set of 40-plus used Hardy Boys books when I was 10.<\/p>\n

All of which goes to explain why I like genealogy.\u00a0 The search for one’s roots is a very personal kind of mystery story, as the Ancestry.com<\/a> commercials are quick to note. Everyone has a story and that story is, at some point, a mystery. While some branches may be easy to trace (e.g., Jett’s paternal lineage can be traced back 17 generations, to medieval England), others – like my paternal grandmother – are surprisingly difficult. I have gotten almost nowhere on figuring out her lineage. I am suspecting that her parents were German immigrants who anglicized their name, but that is just a guess right now.<\/p>\n

I am fascinated by the information that is available when one looks for it. For example, there are (nearly) complete passenger lists for all ships that arrived in New England prior to 1700! There is a website (finagrave.com) that not only helps locate graves of ancestors, but in many cases provides a photo of the headstone. Who has time to wander cemeteries, snapping pictures of all headstones?<\/p>\n

As I track down my personal history – and Jett’s – I am learning a lot about early American history as well. I was under the impression, for example, that the passengers on the Mayflower<\/a> were the first Europeans to set foot in what is now Massachusetts. Not so. In 1602 Bartholomew Gosnold<\/a>, in his ship Concord<\/em>, landed on (and named) both Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard.\u00a0 The passengers intended to establish a colony and built a camp on Martha’s Vineyard, but decided that they lacked sufficient food to last the winter and decided to return to England.\u00a0 But, still, the fact that European settlers were in Massachusetts some 18 years before the Pilgrims was a complete surprise to me.<\/p>\n

And I have learned this all in a week, so I expect that many more revelations will follow. It should be an interesting way to spend some time in my retirement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love a good mystery.\u00a0 I have been an avid reader of whodunits for most of my life.\u00a0 I cut my teeth on The Hardy Boys. Arguably my best Christmas present ever was a set of 40-plus used Hardy Boys books when I was 10. All of which goes to explain why I like genealogy.\u00a0 … Continue reading »<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rv-living"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1VniU-W6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3602"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7225,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3602\/revisions\/7225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}