Grandma's Granny's Family Album

I couldn’t help him. Not with all my family tree charts, genealogy how-to books, and CDs of the Social Security Death Index. Oh, I had ideas, and methods, but none of that helped. My ancestors were traced back 200 years, and I couldn’t get his to the first generation. His mother. My first husband started searching for his birth mother when he was a teenager. Together, we searched on and off thru the 18 years of our marriage, in between the babies, jobs, and houses. These are the facts we had after decades of research: His birth name, birthdate of 1962, birthplace of Manhattan, all confirmed. A letter with “non-identifying information” from the adoption agency: she was a tall brown-eyed brunette Protestant, he a tall blue-eyed blonde Catholic. We knew people who had found their birth mothers, who had found “non-identifying information” to be complete fabrication, lies made up by the agency to entice adoptive parents to choose certain children. So we didn’t know how much, or which parts,...

  Our place in time. In the US, siding with England in the Revolutionary War makes you at best a loser and at worst a traitor. But in Canada, being a United Empire Loyalist is a badge of honor. If you can prove your descent from one, you can apply for a lineage society, earning the right to put UE after your name and on your license plate. Our place in time.   Our spot, in history. The town of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, where we visited my grandfather's family most summers, was the setting for my first genealogy discoveries. Shelburne has a tourism economy based on the town's founding in 1783. At the entrance, a large sign flanked by a redcoated colonist, ripe for photo ops, proclaims that Shelburne was founded by United Empire Loyalists. After one childhood photo op, I asked my mother's cousin Doris if our family were UE Loyalists. She said she didn't know. At age 8, I decided that someday when I was old enough, I would find out. My mother's cousin Doris Robertson and...