Old and new roots
The most fruitful source of information on my family tree flows through my maternal grandmother. The clipper Great Republic All the other lines peter out but not before showing ancestors from Germany and England, which gives me German heritage on both sides of my family. And that makes my Irish heritage rather puny at this point, since I've not found anything on the grandfather who is the primary source of Irishness on my side of the family. I bring this up because I've always been proud of my immigrant heritage because my parents often referred to their parents as immigrants. If you've read any of the early posts in this series, a certain amount of doubt has crept into the origin stories I was told about two of those grandparents, leaving only my German grandmother with solid bonafides as an immigrant -- I even found a listing for her on the Ellis Island website. Imagine, if you can, my surprise in finding that I also have relatives who go back to some of America's fo