Genealogy

Today at Dad’s rotary meeting, one of the members gave a presentation on genealogy. Jennifer was starting to do some genealogy on her family. On her Mom’s side she and her sisters had a pretty good grasp back a few generations. She was wanting to dig more into her Dad’s side.

It was going to be more challenging because her dad was adopted. Her Dad was really not into digging into who is biological parents were (we do think he knew who they were but he never shared it). Jennifer was very excited to pick the brain of one of our Bocce club members whose husband was adopted and they had researched his family history and were actually able to find some of his biological family.

Anyway the talk today brought all that to mind.

The talk focused on how much the field has advanced due to computers and DNA testing. Two of Jennifer’s sisters have had the DNA testing done and it has presented some interesting information such as they have some Scandinavian ancestors. Jennifer’s Mom was 100% Irish so that ancestry must be from her Dad’s side.

One funny thing regarding Jennifer’s dad side is that for years Jennifer’s dad used to get letters from a guy named George Dysinger. This guy was doing genealogy on the Dysinger family. Mick used to call this guy cousin George and cousin George would send updates on his results and on Dysinger family reunions he was putting together, etc.

Mick’s adoptive father passed away when Mick was pretty young so he was mainly raised by his adoptive mother. He had a older sister, but she was also adopted. I only met her once and that was at our wedding.

His sister lived in the Seattle area. Mick did not have much use for her husband Homer whom I understand was a character, so they did not see each other much. Mick did talk to her on the phone but they did not see each other much. Jennifer only met him a couple of times and she was kind of freaked out by him, because he was disfigured from a shotgun incident.

Anyway, she was really wanting to start on this and was wanting to,some research at the Butte archives and courthouse. Unfortunately, she never got to do that.

Well enough for today.