My Social Media-less Life

Bloganuary Writing Prompt:
How far back in your family tree can you go?

A few years ago, I got Ancestry for a discounted price because I wanted to answer this very question.

The answer?
Pretty far back.

Now, if it were from word of mouth, both of my parents’ sides of the family didn’t really seem to like talking about the family history that much. No one really sees the point, I guess? Or they just don’t know…

Of course, if how one’s memory works is as much a part of nature as it is of nurture, I may have inherited my inability to remember a lot unless it’s written down (or committed to memory) from my genes.

When I got Ancestry, I was able to find a half-brother of my grandma’s and recently we got to meet his son, which would be my grandma’s half-nephew.

I also found out one of my dad’s great-grandmothers lived in the same county in Wisconsin her entire life and only left the county once because she needed the hospital that was outside of the county… and that wasn’t until she was closer to the end of her life.

However, it was hard to find a lot of history once I left the United States. With the World Wars and all of the unrest throughout history, a lot of documents were destroyed. Especially in Germany, which is where I believe a lot of my family is from.

I did find a website with my surname and there’s a lot of history there, but I don’t know if it’s my specific branch of the family or how far back it goes or how surnames work because I know in England it was whatever your job was that became your surname. Did it work like that everywhere? I don’t know.

Pretty sure at one point the Henning surname was something else. But without a real reason to look up more history, I kind of lost interest.

I did however, use Ancestry to make a family history of my grandpa’s dad’s side of his family since he only knew of his mom’s side back to the 1200s. I got as far back as the 1700s with his dad’s side, so I guess I didn’t do too badly. 🙂 I surprised him one year for his birthday with all of the history I found and printed out. He loved it, so Ancestry was worth it just for that if for nothing else.

For my own enjoyment, I got as far back as the early 1800s reliably before I started to really doubt if I was finding the right people or not.

Not too shabby, I’d say.

I can for certain say very few people in my family got drafted or were in the military, aside from my dad who served 22 years and a few uncles who served as well. But obviously I meant before my lifetime. 😛

And for some reason that was very fascinating to me at the time. Still is, I suppose since many of my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were close to that age for different wars. I think the amount of children they had or what their jobs were (one of them was a farmer for a time) affected their ability to be drafted? Not sure how that worked really and at one point I did a lot of research on that as well.

Anyway…

I hope my rambling wasn’t too terrible and you enjoyed it. 🙂