Ellen
Thompson-Jennings wrote 20 More Questions About Your Ancestors and Maybe A Few About You this
week and Linda Stufflebean thought it would be a great SNGF challenge. Randy Seaver also mentioned this in his
Saturday Night post. Here are the
questions and my replies.
THE QUESTIONS
1. Why
do you love doing genealogy/family history? I love problem solving
although mixing history with genealogy comes in a close second.
2. How
far have you traveled to research an ancestor? Belgium, Luxembourg and France
3. What
do you think your favorite ancestor would think of our lives today? My
favorite ancestor, Hiram R Dunbar was born in 1804 and would definitely be
confused.
4.
What do you think that your ancestor would
like/dislike? There’s a group of us
(isn’t genealogy a team sport?) looking for information on him. Although we are distant cousins, we still are
in communication with each other over him and we remember him. I think he’d
like that.
5. What
was the most unusual cause of death that you’ve found? On my husband’s side, there was a boy
decapitated by a train and another teenager smashed by an elevator going to the
basement where he was looking for something.
6. Which
ancestor had the most unusual occupation? Hiram Dunbar, Jr. was a street sprinkler in 1870. He watered
the town streets to keep the dust down. Basically a teamster driving a horse
drawn wagon with leaking barrels of water up and down streets.
7. Have
you ever gone to where your ancestor lived and it felt like home even if you’ve
never been there before?
Yes, in Bastogne, Belgium where my grandmother grew up.
8. Do
you have a distant ancestor (several generations back) that looks like someone
in the family? Not that I know of.
9. What
is the oldest ancestral photo that you have? Civil war vintage, 1860’s. One a soldier and another a
portrait.
10. Did
you have an ancestor that had an arranged marriage? Not that I know of.
11. If
you could live in the time period of one of your ancestors what year would it
be? Where would it be?
Homesteading in the 1880’s in Kansas. (If
I didn’t have to do the work.)
12. Which
ancestor was married the most times? Perry Commodore Dunbar was married three times, twice to his
second wife, Catherine Coffey because he wasn’t quite divorced from his first
wife when he married her the first time.
His nephew, John, married 4 times, not always quite divorced.
13. If
you’ve tested your DNA what was the biggest ethnicity surprise? I think a lot of peoplefrom central Europe
are surprised by those Scandinavians coming during the 30-year war.
14.
Did you have a female ancestor that was different
or unusual from other females from that time period? I had a beautiful great aunt who ran away from
home when she was 20 to elope with a much older married man. It was in all the newspapers, she was nick-named
Sheba. They were arrested under the Mann
act. Later, she took up with someone in the mob.
15. Did
your ancestor go through a hardship that you don’t know how they managed? My grandmother lived in Belgium through two
World Wars, and was widowed twice. Came here and never left. She was a woman
without a country.
16.
How often do you research? Are you a genealogy
addict? Research something everyday.
17. Do
you have someone in your family that will take over the family history? I have a couple of possibilities, but no sure
bets yet.
18. Have
you had a genealogy surprise? What was it? One of my husband’s gr-grandmothers
had 5 children, never married. In general, there have been lots of marriages while
the bride was pregnant.
19. Are
you a storyteller? What’s your favorite family story? I’m a good but not great story teller. When I was born my father was still a Luxembourg citizen, so I had dual citizenship until I turned 18 years old.
20. What
was your greatest genealogy discovery? My husband is related to the baseball pitcher Warren Spahn.
