The Whole Famn Damily

On Friday, I finally started taking a crack at the genealogy info that I picked up a year and a half ago.

Here’s the story. When I was in grade 7, my teacher (Mr. Cowan) gave us a homework assignment to construct a family tree. I called my grandfather (my mother’s stepfather) for help with some names. He was able to pull some info together, and I was able to write out a few generations. My grandfather, however, never stopped researching after that.

That was 1978 or 1979. My grandfather died in 2007. He spent almost 30 years figuring out where the different connecting families came from and who all the descendants were. He hasn’t touched the Holmeses, instead looking at his family (English Smiths and Bantams with smatterings of German lines), my grandmother’s family (French Houles and Irish Kehoes) and my bio-grandfather’s family (Irish Dyneses/Dineses, Nelsons and Kelleys).

After my grandfather died, no one else in the family seemed interested in this material, and it looked like it was headed for the trash bin. So I spoke up!

My grandfather did very little of his research with computers. Most of it is type-written, with family tree charts drawn on (I think) graph paper with type-written names. My grandfather was a compulsive organizer (and he was never far from his label gun), and it’s clear that this stuff was a labour of love.

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Mirrored from Under the Beret.