Last weekend, my sister dug a photo album out of the closet in her spare room, and my genealogy research took off. Or rather, my friend Mabry's did. She has a passion for genealogy, and she's doing the lion's share of figuring out where my dad's family came from and how his mother got here from England. The photographs in the album were labeled, unlike the most old pictures I have, and we got names to pursue.
Hearing about other people's genealogy can be as boring other people's vacation pictures, but if it's your own, it's fascinating. At least it is to me. My sister and I have no American relatives that we know of, and the only English relatives we know are on our mother's side. But my father's mother, Daisy, was English, too. How did she get here, I wondered, and where did she come from?
Well, she got here in 1912 via ship to Ellis Island and train to Oakland, where she joined her married sister, Violet. Before that, she was a servant in various capacities in London. She literally set sail for a better life. I don't know if she felt she got one: She lived 37 years as a street car conductor's wife in East Oakland and had two children, one my father. She died in 1949 in a bus accident coming home from a Piedmont society wedding that she'd crashed in a quiet, well-dressed way, a past-time of hers. My father never mentioned the servant angle, or that his grandmother Clara was married to a fishmonger, or that his forebearers hailed from a village in East Bergholt, Suffolk, where many people are listed in the 1891 census as "farm lab," or farm laborers.
Mabry says results of genealogical research can "grab you by the heart." You find out that you're anchored to a clan, even if you don't know them, and you might begin to get at the answer to some poignant family mysteries.
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