The messy tree

 We recently had our trees trimmed, and judging by the time it took, they were a mess. Branches growing every which way, sticking themselves into places they didn't belong. They're all very tidy now, with only the stubs of the removed branches giving a hint as to the mess that once was.

My first look into the results of the investigations of my family members into our past was nothing like the lore I grew up with. Our family tree branches off every way. Some of the branches are long with many offshoots. Others are mere twigs, bereft of any useful information. 

The main outlines are there and confirm what I remember being told -- that we come mostly from German and English stock, with enough Irishmen tossed in to create a real claim to our Irish heritage.

But the details are much messier than the little bit of family history I grew up with. Take the story of my paternal grandfather. The story as I remember it was that he immigrated to America. But a document I found in items my sister sent me, a form filled in by my father, shows he was born in New York City. Unfortunately Dad didn't list a date of birth, so we can't easily trace his lineage. That branch ends with Grandad for now.

It doesn't help that my faulty memory had screwed up his middle name a couple of times, presenting obstacles to tracking him down. We now know his middle name was Joseph, giving us at least three consecutive Michaels with distinct middle names.

I've discovered that other parts of the story were garbled in the telling.  My mother often said that Dad's mother, an Orthodox Jew, had immigrated to escape persecution in Germany. That may well be true, but Sis and I always understood that she came to the States  between the world wars.

We eventually worked out that she had to have been in the U.S. well before the rise of the Nazism. My daughter's research turned up Grandmother's citizenship application, which showed she came here in the 1890s. 

Antisemitism was growing in Europe in the late 1800s -- in fact a German journalist invented the term in 1879 -- but a significant number of Germans immigrated to the U.S. throughout the latter half of the 19th century for all kinds of reasons -- political, religious, commercial. Why Grandmother came here is lost to the ages.

I'll discuss some more pruned branches in the next post.