Researching ancestor immigrant records

Friday, August 31, 2018

It does not pay to be too sanctimonious about your ancestors when you are researching them. They were after all, humans, just like all of us. As a point, I got a kick out of some early history of Iowa and the Catholic-Irish settlement that my great-great grandparents were a part of when I read that because clergymen were usually circuit priests (traveling between sparsely populated “towns”) scheduled to be only in an area for a short time and then returning a few months later, there were times when the birth of a child proceeded it’s parents’ marriage. What to do? Well, since births weren’t always recorded immediately you could always change the birth date when you recorded it years later! African-American families have a hard-enough time researching their ancestors without the added fact that in the 1800’s some areas denied them a legal marriage hence the ceremony of “jumping over the broom” which was a sealing of a marriage vow without openly violating a ridiculous law.

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