Documenting lineages from my littlest descendant to my deep ancestral roots

Submission Date

Fall 2019

Abstract

Documenting family history is an important part of my identity. For most of my life I can remember that my paternal grandfather, Charles Rudolph Schmitt was writing his autobiography, “61-11 and Olio”. My maternal grandfather, Robert Francis Calfee also wrote several stories of his growing up years. While I was in college, I was able to inherit the genealogy records that had been digitized in a GEDCOM file by my paternal grandmother’s brother, Benjamin Peters. This was a great find and I was able to pull the file off the old-style floppy disk with the help of my father, Charles Jeffrey Schmitt before that work was lost forever. Presently, my family tree holds 2,743 individuals housed on the myheritage.com website. I have focused my genealogical research on my direct ancestors. My maternal ancestry has the deepest historical record, going back 17 generations to Edmund Quincy and the founding of Quincy, Massachusetts, with these ancestors having left England in the 1600s. We also located my maternal grandmother, Minnie Marie Griffin’s high school valedictorian speech from 1931 Logan High School graduation in Logan, KS. My maternal ancestry is haplogroup H while my paternal ancestry is haplogroup R1b, with that side of the family immigrating from Germany to Brooklyn New York in the 1800s. Through the study of those who have gone before me, I have discovered that our family has a strong sense of traveling, having migrated throughout their history. I also learned that my paternal grandmother’s ancestors were among the first Scotts-Irish group of people to settle in east Tennessee, having arrived there in the 1700s. To my surprise an ancestor from this line fought on the side of the Union in the 5th Regiment of the Tennessee Infantry as a private from 1861-65. Through my genealogical journeys, history has become more personal. I wonder what stories my descendants (Alexander and Cynthia) will add to our genealogy in years to come. I hope that through studies of genealogy people will see that we are all more related than we might at first believe. We are all part of the human family.

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