From Randy (a cousin discovery!!) over at Genea-Musings:
it's Saturday Night -
time for more Genealogy Fun!!!
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:
(1) Pretend that you are one of the subjects/guests on the Who Do You Think You Are? TV show on the NBC network.
(2) Which of your ancestors (maximum of two) would be featured on your hour-long episode? What stores would be told, and what places would you visit?
(3) Tell us all about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, in a post on Facebook, or on Twitter.
Here's mine:
(1) Pretend that you are one of the subjects/guests on the Who Do You Think You Are? TV show on the NBC network.
"Liz Tapley is a blogger and genealogist who has been researching her family history since she was a child! Despite having over 19,000 relatives in her Family Tree Maker database, she is still chasing that one elusive ancestor..."
(2) Which of your ancestors (maximum of two) would be featured on your hour-long episode? What stores would be told, and what places would you visit?
(a) Genealogists from the United States and Germany would explore the mystery that is the early life of Liz's 2nd great-grandfather, George W. Schwalls Sr (1838-1908).
* Seemingly just appearing in the United States in the 1850s... how did he get to this country? Who did he travel with? How did he end up in rural south Georgia?
* Is the George Michael Schwall living in the next county over his cousin?
* What village/town/city was he from in Germany? Who were his parents? Grandparents?
* After only being in the U.S. for no more than five years, he fought in the Civil War on the Confederate side. What was his motivation? What was that time like for him?
During the course of the show, I would visit Johnson County, Georgia to see where George lived and raised his children... then I would go to Germany and visit the any and all locations the professional genealogists have found that bring me closer to knowing George and his family's history. As an aside, I would definitely want to be driven everywhere I visit, especially in Germany where I am not familiar with the ways of the road.
Now I believe the search for George's family would take the entire hour of the show. But if not...
(b) Information about the adoption of my great-grandmother, Bessie Carter Ranney (1883-1960).
* Perhaps through DNA, professional genealogists can find out the identity of her birth parents.
* Did her adoptive parents, Charles Kelso Carter (1843-1916) and Sarah Schoonover Carter (1840-1918) know their daughter's' birth parents?
I would visit Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Bessie was born and Eagle Grove, Iowa where she grew up. Since my mother and I have discovered through DNA testing that we have Scandinavian roots, which could only have come from Bessie, perhaps the show will take me to Norway or Denmark!
