Hunting Family, or Passionate About Genealogy

I inherited my passion for genealogy from my mother.  I was barely 7 when her father -- the only grandfather I knew -- died.  I remember him as a slight man, quiet, a gardener.  In a shady spot next to his garage he grew pansies and violets.  They are not common in Hawai'i, especially on the dry side of O'ahu, but he grew them because they reminded him of his mother.  When my husband and I visited in Tennessee, I realized that they were a link to generations of his American family -- my ONLY American line among my eight great-grandparents.

My maternal grandfather's father was an Englishman, born in Germany, educated in France,  but from a family of English landed gentry, the Yonges of Puslinch.  Shortly after her father died, my mother decided it was time to learn more about that family.  She found an address for the ancestral home:  Puslinch House, Newton Ferrers, Devon, England.  Her letter of inquiry drew a  response.   "Find a copy of Burke's History of the Landed Gentry of England," the writer advised.  "It's all there."  Sure enough, it IS all there.   Never mind that everything from about 1650 back to the Norman Conquest is wrong -- as proved in the last 15 or so years by the Yonge Family Historian.

A more recent posting at http://www.devonruralarchive.com says,

Puslinch is first recorded as Posling on the 1238 Assize Roll.  The name seems to mean 'hill where pease grows'.  It must have been a farm developed within the pre-Conquest manor of Newton Ferrers, as it is recorded as having been given by William de Ferrers to Roger de Poslinch in the C13.  It was later held by the de Mohun family for several generations before passing by marriage to the Uptons of Trelask in Cornwall.

The Plymouth doctor and merchant James Yonge acquired the property on his marriage to Mary Upton in 1709 and is thought to have built the present house circa 1720.  The Yonge family still own Old Puslinch, the surrounding farmland and Puslinch House, but the latter is let.

  

Right, wrong, or indifferent, finding your family down to your own father laid out in a book like Burke's is pretty heady stuff.  It sent my mother into a research frenzy that lasted for the next 63 years, until just days before her death in January, 2013. She moved from her English family to her mother's Hawaiian family, then her English grandfather's American bride, and finally, to her Irish grandfather about whom she  wrote that she had very mixed feeling. 

I grew up hearing the stories of her research findings -- how her father used to say that they teased his American grandmother that her second husband must have been the notorious highwayman Black Bart (he wasn't, but it is still a good story!); of finding the same grandmother's memoir, typeset, lining the interior of a trunk belonging to her youngest daughter; of it being rude in Hawai'i (at least in our family) to probe into genealogy because if you were identified to the wrong people as a warrior on the loosing side of a battle, forever afterwards your bones (or those of your descendants) would be made into fish hooks by the victors and your teeth set into their poi bowls!  This last was no idle threat.  Here's an example from the collection of Honolulu's Bishop Museum.  See the  story about this bowl and the insult it conveyed at http://kareninhonolulu.wordpress.com.  Scroll down to the photo and article. 

When my brother entered 7th grade and a new school, he wrote the obligatory introduce-yourself-and-tell-us-a-little-about-your-family  essay.  Even in those days it was clear he was a budding journalist.  He wrote about "... my ancestors the British, my ancestors the Americans who were fighting the British, and my ancestors the Hawaiians who were eating the British."  A bit of journalistic license there as the Hawaiians were not known to be cannibalistic, but he did make a point. 

Yes, we were drawn early into the world of family history and ancestor hunting.  Now, 60+ years later, I am still hopelessly addicted.  Where my mother was interested only in her own direct and collateral lines, I will hunt my family or yours, a neighbors, a friends, a strangers.  I will hunt if you ask, or just because you are a part of my community.  Like physicians and teachers, genealogists and historians look for the right questions that will lead to the next piece of the never-ending jigsaw puzzle, the next clue in the matrix of family and community relationships. 

Keep hunting!