When my sister and  I got into genealogy about fifteen or so years ago, I didn’t know what we would find out about our elusive family and how much fun it would be, or how difficult it would be.  We first started out by going to a library in a nearby city not far from our little town. At that time we had no internet and it was very difficult to find information, but we kept plodding along. We collected the stories we heard from various family members and as it turned out, many of the stories were wrong. We’d been told so many different stories about our ancestors that it was difficult to know what to believe. One example was, one of my gr-gr-grandfathers had been thought to be of Cherokee ancestry. Stories were told that he was an Indian scout. His father was a Captain in the Mexican American War and was given a large land grant in Texas for his service. He died in service and his children went to claim the land, but was driven off by local Indian tribes. But they soon returned with their wives and was successful in claiming their land.  Later, we found that one of his sons, our gr-gr-grandfather, was  the first Sheriff in Llano county Texas, and his younger brother was the Justice of Peace.
     My maternal grandfather always believed  that he was at least a quarter Cherokee. As hard as we searched though, we could never find any clues that there were any Cherokee blood in our family. Since we live in Oklahoma, a lot of people living here have American Indian ancestry. So we naturally assumed we did too.  Surprise, surprise, we eventually found that our supposed Cherokee ancestor was in fact of Scottish ancestry, and his wife’s family came from France. As we dug farther into our genealogy, we found that one of our gr-grandfathers had been a trail boss for Jesse Chisholm, and had also been a Texas Ranger.
      Our Texas Ranger was married three times and came from Illinois. He married at age nineteen and  came to Texas. His first wife either died or they divorced and then he met my grandpa’‘s mother and that’s where my grandfather was born. Grandpas’ mother died in 1907 before he married my grandmother. Then, Texas Ranger married again a few years later, to a Bohemian woman named Josepha. She had two sons from a previous marriage. Mom says she was the only grandmother she ever knew and she adored her. She was a very strange, but nice lady that had odd beliefs and superstitions, but the family loved her. They called her grandma Josey.
      Originally we believed Texas Ranger’s  father was born at sea, and  we still haven’t found whether he was or not. But, we did find that he had a different name we’d been led to believe. At least I believe we’ve found that he was partly of German ancestry, because my grandfather told us his father’s first language was German, and as a child, he spoke German before he spoke English. I’d always assumed that since my mother’s father had been born in a German town called Fredericksburg Texas that it was natural he learned to speak the language, since his playmates were probably German. Since then, we realized that he too was of German ancestry. Recently, we’ve  discovered that Texas Ranger’s first wife’s father was a Texas Ranger too.
     My maternal grandfather was a very mischievous man and full of life. He was small in stature and had what one would call a little man’s syndrome. He always said that if he couldn’t whip the largest guy on the block, he’d fight like hell and damnation trying. Mom always said that he like to gamble and drink. And many times when she was a child, he came home drunk and raising hell. But she said he was never abusive, just comical. Grandma must have had quite a time with him. Once, mom told that  he came home and his wife asked him what he’d like for supper. He saw my mom standing outside, peeping in the kitchen window and said, “let’s fry Effie’s eyeballs.” Mom said she ran like the dickens and Grandma finally had to make her come in the house. Grandpa finally stopped drinking and settled down a little better, but he still had that mischievous air about him until the day he died.
     On my dad’s side we’ve been able to find a lot of history, except his father’s side has been hard to trace beyond a certain year. His third paternal gr-grandfather’s past is very elusive and he appears in Wayne county  Kentucky around 1810, but before that he’s a mystery. There are no records of him anywhere. He was apparently in Virginia before 1800, since his children were born there, but I believe his records may have been burned by the British during the Revolutionary War. We’re thinking that he possibly came from Scotland because a family member told my brother Don that one side of the family came over on ships from Ireland and the other from Scotland.  My dad’s father was nearly 70 years old when he was born and his mother was his third wife. His father had been in the civil war fighting for the Union side and when he died, dad and his family had a very difficult time surviving, and then his mother died a few years later.
     As a result, the children were put in a poor house as they called them at that time, or orphanage. But soon relatives took them in and raised them, except for their younger sister who had polio. She was returned to the orphanage and died at the age of 19 in a tuberculous Sanatorium in Booneville Arkansas.. Dad was always bitter about the way his sister was treated and  always felt that they all would have been better off in the orphanage and that perhaps they would have been educated better. I don’t know, but maybe they would have. All I know is, he never went beyond the fourth grade in school because his relatives made sure he earned his keep, but they sent their own children to school. At that time, they apparently believed that education wasn’t as important as earning one’s keep. For years, my dad suffered mentally for the way he was treated as a child.
      We’ve found, however, ancestry on my Dad’s maternal side is Jewish, Swiss and some Cherokee and Seminole both. There is also German, English and French into the mixture of our strange ancestry. We’ve found Sheriff’s, Texas Rangers, Ministers, Knight’s, Kings, Queens, Noblemen, Ladies, blacksmiths, farmers, Military Captains in Mexican American War, Union Soldiers during the Civil War and King’s Heralds. Every kind of person that one can imagine is in our ancestry. It takes a lot of work to trace genealogy, but in the long run if you get it right, it’s very rewarding. I think it’s a lot of fun to find out what kind of people we came from. Who they were, what they believed and what they looked like. The hardships they went through to make life easier for us, their descendants. If it hadn’t been for them facing what they had to, we wouldn’t have it so easy now.