Ancestry.com

Today as I was updating my journal with a Tyoma video, I recalled that Dad's uncle was a Vaudeville performer. Of course, I got to googling to see what I could find out, and whoa, I was surprised. The only Miller in the Vaudeville listings is Emmet miller, a semi-famous musician, know for influencing country music. I couldn't find much more, but apparently he did alot of his performances in blackface. I'm a bit shocked. The Mueller's were abolitionists and it seems incongruent that a generation later we'd have minstrels in the family. Probably not him.

Curious, I signed up for a free trial at ancestry.com. I sucked me in like an immense blackhole. I spent almost my entire day engrossed in searches, trying to piece together my Dad's family. His three uncles were quite brilliant, and one of them had an "eidetic" memory like Tyoma. Of the other two, one married a Native American and disappeared into the mountains (prospector/trapper) never to be heard from again. The third wound up working for the Bureau of Investigation, (what the FBI was before it was FBI). I am very curious to track these men and see what became of them, especially since one of them might have been similar to Dad and Tyoma. We shall see.

Right now the most phenomenal thing I have discovered is the peculiarity of names a century ago. I recall childhood stories told to me by Grandmam, with such lovely sounding names as Pearl, Ruby, Olive, Della, Rose, Lillian and Ivy. I somehow had the impression that these named were unique to our family, but as it turns out, these were just popular names for the time period. Here's a great link for popular names for each year. Be warned, this site is addictive!

Anyway, I was quite surprised to find household after household full of iterations of these familiar names. I was also surprised by the size of the households, it seems that women had children until they burst. Thank God for suffrage, Bless you Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood, Ortho Tri-cyclen. What would I do with seven children? Lordy, what am I going to do with even one during winter break?!