v37.1: Lineage

Good morning folks,

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Have you ever sat there and wondered whether you had any ancestors in power?  Perhaps a great great great grandfather was a Lord or King of some country somewhere hundreds of years ago or perhaps you have royal blood flowing through your veins due to some royal love affair.  At the end of the day we are all just people but people like to be tied to something important, to feel important and to have something that nobody else has.

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A few years back I started researching my family tree through ancestry.com.  For the most part, this website is free to use and you can trace back through the generations to find people and connections you never knew existed.  Thankfully for me, I had a friend at work who had paid for a month on this site and was able to do a little more digging and find other things for me that were not available to the free account.  I was able to find documents, immigration papers and even a signed document from my great great grandfather.  It wasn't easy finding these people and thankfully through ancestry.com I was able to trace my lineage back to a point and then found where someone else had done some more in-depth research which helped tied my family tree into theirs and go back even further.  I haven't checked the site in awhile but I believe I was successfully able to trace back the my lineage to the early 1800s or late 1700s.

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Of course this site only really has names and some documents.  It doesn't tell the story which is what I'm most interested in.  Who was my great great grandfather?  What sort of things did he accomplish?  Why did he decide to come to Canada?  Unfortunately I may never know the answers to these questions which only deepens the mystery of my lineage.  I wonder how far back we can actually go?

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Anyway folks, just a short musing this Monday morning to get the brain going.  If you haven't tried ancestry.com out yet (ancestry.ca if you're in Canada) I highly recommend it.  If you're a member of my family you should be able to hook into the tree I started and see if you can get any further than I did.  I think the reason I wanted to write about this today is because I was watching "A Knight's Tale" last night on TV and the Queen of England is visiting Halifax today.  I hope everyone has a great Monday!

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Cheers,

Al