Who would you invite to a dinner party?

JASOH1 said:
I have such a common last name and the times they lived in produced few documents, so...lots of dead-ends.
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That's a shame as your family background sounds interesting. I'm lucky in that my last name is really uncommon. I was able to trace back a long way on both female and male lines. If you grandfather was half native American, do you know which of his parents?
 
No, I sure don't. My dad never talked about it. There was a stigma about it back then. My grandma's family shunned her, from what my mom had told me.​
 
Several years ago I tried, but there were no leads. For all I know, they may have run away and gotten married in a different parish, or maybe they weren't even married? It was backwoods bayou country in Louisiana in the early 1900s. I was able to find census records later for her and her new husband in Texas.

I am the youngest of 6 kids and none of my older siblings know anything, either. And they don't seem interested.
 
I think it probably depends on how developed the area of the US. New York, Virginia, Vermont, California, and many other states perhaps so. Not sure about Louisiana bayou country in 1920.
 
JASOH1 said:
I love bagpipe music so I thought it would be fun, especially with the kilted rock twist on things.

I would love to have dinner with some of my ancestors whom I never had met, including my great, great, great grandfather from Norway (on my mother's side) who was a watchmaker and immigrated to the US in the 1700s. It would be great to discover some family history from the old country that will now always remain a mystery.

Also my dad's father was 1/2 Native American. My dad's mother was Irish. I don't know a lot about either of them, other than that they met and married in Many, Louisiana and moved to Port Arthur Texas around 1920. My grandpa died when my dad was very young and she remarried. My dad's mom died when I was pretty young, and now both my parents and their siblings are passed and no one else seems to know anything. I tried to research, but I have such a common last name and the times they lived in produced few documents, so...lots of dead-ends.

Anyway.
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Hey, we've got a lot in common!

I love bagpipe music as well, and took lessons for a little over a year about 20 years ago.

I am also the youngest of six. We both live in O-Hi-O.

My great-grandmother (in Kentucky) was Native American. Every generation or so, a baby will still pop out who strongly resembles that heritage. She married my great-grandad when she was 13 or 14, and he was well into his 20's, and the story they liked to tell (which probably had a smidge if truth to it, but probably mostly not) is that he "bought" her from her family for an amount of moonshine. Whenever they'd get into a little disagreement, when we were kids, he'd end any argument he was losing with, "I surely do wish I'd never given your Pa that moonshine...I'm still paying for it!" :laugh:

On the male side, the first one of us got here in the early 1700's, but no one knows exactly if he was French or German. Came from an area that constantly flipped between the two, German surname, but came in on a French ship...and he had an English wife, from Bristol!
 
JASOH1 said:
Wow, playing the pipes looks difficult. I commend you. And I suspected you might be full of hot air :D
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The difficulty isn't really in the basic execution, you're mainly fingering the chanter much as you a pennywhistle.

Where the difficulty comes up is the precision that's demanded to "get it right." I was, at the time, a decent sloppy piper, and if you wanted a few tunes at your wedding or your grandad's funeral, I could oblige, and a casual listener probably wouldn't object, but anyone with any formal knowledge of piping would probably have taken them from me on the spot.
 
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