totchipanda

So far not overly impressed with my service coverage from the new phone. I switched carriers as well and according to their maps, my normal haunts (home, work) are well within their network. But (and its only been less than 2 days) I am getting horrible coverage. One bar or two, no data connection, which limits pretty much everything I do on a phone.

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My friend has an Ancestry.com account, and she was so very kind as to look up some of my family tree for me a few months ago. All I know about most of my family branches is that all of my grandparents were born in Canada, but their parents were immigrants.

When I talked to my Geepa in May (I don't know if I talked about this before), he told me he was born on a farm near Red Deer, but the actual information on his birth certificate is numbers that indicate county and plot, that sort of thing. He also had a family Bible that was written in German and had been printed probably in the 1840s? The first name in it had a date of 1837 (or thereabouts), and it has the only record of his dad's birth in either 1900 or 1901 (the 1 had been changed to a zero, I think, based on the way it was written). He told me that his family left Germany "with Catherine" and immigrated into Russia, and from there into the US and Canada. Some branches Anglicized their surname.

For Gamie, all I know is that she was born in Canada. She had told me once that her family was a big hodge-podge of backgrounds, but I never talked to her about it again, and now she is gone.

On the other side, I knew my Grampa's family immigrated to Canada from Russia in the early part of the 20th century ahead of the Bolshevik revolution, and that our surname has to be translated into German before going back into Russian. I knew that his mum was Polish. But that's it. Earlier this year, I talked to my Gramma about it, and she said she still has their immigration papers. Then she told me that her dad had immigrated to Canada from Russia first, when he was about 20 years old, and brought the rest of his family over later. His last name is a shortened version from a longer Russian version. I haven't had a chance to talk with her about it again.

When my friend offered to look up my family tree, it was my Grampa who was on my mind, so I told her what I knew, which was precious little. But amazingly, she did find something, in a tree done by someone else by a many-times-over cousin through one of my great-grampa's siblings, and yesterday we finally had a chance to look at it together. Going back through the tree, that branch of the family is VERY VERY VERY German, with one matriarch having been born in France (one year before it became part of Germany again, apparently. In the 1700s. Hee.)

It was so cool to look back through the ages, in a way, and see history unfolding in a tiny tiny way.