Works for Me Wednesday- Ancestry.com

Last year I blogged about joining Ancestry.com
I initially joined to fill the void I felt in my life after my mother died, since mom was my connection to family history and stories.

But lately I have appreciated my Ancestry. com membership for other reasons. The kids and I had been studying early American History and the colonies. I started to wonder if I had any ancestors that were part of the early colonization of this country, or had the all come over in the early 20th century from Lithuania and Germany.

So yesterday I did a little digging by following along the lines of my ancestral grandmothers and to my delight and surprise I found that yep – some of my ancestors did indeed arrive in the colony of Massachusetts and in fact lived there from around 1617 until the mid 19th century when they went to Indiana. The earliest relative that I could trace to was a Sir Mark Sikes who lived from 1572 to 1602 from Cambridge England! I had never been told that I had any English blood in me and this is probably because I traced this back going primarily through all of my grandmothers, which probably got lost after marriage and taking the husband’s name.

I did have a discussion with this guy on the Huffington Post who believed that “anyone who identified with the oppressor class should pay reparations” to him because his ancestors were slaves. I didn’t think I had any ancestors that owned slaves but now I guess it is possible because there was a slave trade in Massachusetts during that time period and because my earliest ancestor came from some sort of nobility.

Well if that’s true, time had a way of making it even as the family history I do know about includes struggling to survive as farmers in Indiana and then buying farmland in Michigan with sandy soil!

Works for Me!