Grandma's Granny's Family Album

When a war starts in a divided town, which neighbors do you trust? Good day to you!  My name is Mary Coon Rushton, and here I am, an old widow more than 90 years on this earth. 1 I tell my story humbly, as best I recollect, if any care to hear what went on last century, when one country turned itself into another.

  “Agathe! Come look!” Adam whispered, appearing at the bedchamber door of the small cottage where she was tucking in the children with prayers and kisses. She shook her head at him and he silently backed away. “What is it Mama? I want to see!” came a shrill little voice. “Sshh. Go to sleep,” was the firm command in return. Agathe tiptoed out of the dark room to the kitchen, lit only by the corner stove, and sank down on the bench. A chilly breeze shook her as Adam entered the cottage. “Look!” he whispered again. Feet planted on the floorstones, she sighed. “Look at what? I am sitting down. I haven’t sat down all day.” “I don’t know what it is. A star, maybe. It’s huge.”

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.

When I was 15, I went looking for my Grandfather Sulzbach's hometown in Germany. When I was 60, I found it. (I wrote this to celebrate the glorious find.  It contains pieces of other posts, so it may sound familiar.) Growing up, I heard the story of How-our-Family-got-to-America many times from my cousin Ann Smith. Exuberance and familial feeling were her strong points; accuracy was not. However, as a kid, I had no reason to doubt her, especially because the story was consistent down to the exact wording. It goes this way: "Our family, the Sulzbachs, came from the town of Sulzbach in Germany. Our grandfather Pop Jake's father was a  teacher, a musician, and a dreamer,  who had no head for business. Pop Jake's mother came from a wealthy family, and her father had been a burgermeister of Frankfurt, where Pop Jake was born. (A burgermeister is the equivalent of mayor). Pop Jake's father lost all his wife's considerable money on bad investments. When she found out,...