I’m trying to dig back through my ancestry. Getting through the 20th and parts of the later 19th century was fairly easy, but now I’m coming up with dead ends that require me to think quite a bit more and look for clues in ways I haven’t previously.

I’m trying to be as tough on myself as possible, too, culling anyone from my tree that I may have added when I was a little too excited and optimistic. Sometimes you add people and later you’ll see that due to dates or locations there’s no way you could be related. Unfortunately, those are typically people with fleshed out family trees and interesting histories.

I’ll share my dead ends one by one, perhaps to get help, but also so I just write out what I know and see if that doesn’t help.

Some of my paths into my ancestry now lead to foreign countries, and not all of them English speaking, so we’ll have to see how well I do with that.

Right now I’m looking through ancestors named McCormick, the original spelling of my last name. Not surprisingly, according to this wikipedia article, it’s pretty common. I learned it means warrior, which is interesting.

Found a page on the family crest and history. “Without fear” is the translation of the motto. Pretty cool! Apparently there’s at least one book written on the McCormick name genealogy.  Wow.

More interesting info and historical stories can be found here.