Climbing your dysfunctional family tree

This blog is dedicated to and created for all who want to learn and share methods for tracing their ancestral roots in spite of having ancestors who were adopted, divorced and remarried, illegitimate, had inexplicable or bizarre name changes, disappearances or whatever.

I come from such a background and for the past 3 years I have had enormous good luck and successes in tracing my ancestors. Turn of the century Chicago was a great Melting Pot and I am one of its ingots. One set of my maternal ggps were immigrants from the Connemara region in Galway, Ireland while the second set were German Jews from Westphalia and Baden.

My father was adopted at birth, a fact he uncovered when he joined the Army in 1945 and found he needed his adoption certificate for some bureaucratic reason.  One of my half-brothers from his second marriage has told me that our father was troubled all his life by feelings of deep betrayal by both his adoptive parents and the unknown parents who gave him up. I have since discovered the identity of my paternal gm and she was the daughter of Bohemian immigrants who was 16 and unmarried when she became pregnant. And as for the identity of the father -- that's a complicated matter. Testing done with my brother's Y-DNA reveals that our ancestry goes back to a well-researched branch of the Decker family tree and that we are descended from a Jan Broersen Decker who came to New York in the mid-1600's from Husum, Holstein-Schleswig. But how we got here from there is still a genealogical mystery! There are literally hundreds of male descendants and it has been a challenge to identify the best possible candidates for our paternal gf.  So watch this space for further updates on this search.

So discovering your roots can definitely be done. It takes a lot of time, patience and sleuthing (and sometimes money).

Now that I've given a bit of background as to where I come from, I will in future posts describe my genealogical journeys in greater detail. I hope they will be of benefit to those with entangled roots.  And I will look forward to others' stories and advice based on their research and hopefully be able to help those who have hit brick walls in their family research.