Wisteria

Ah, the wonders of modern DNA testing! With it can be found long-lost kin and surprises along the way. DNA has been key in several discoveries in some of my family lines in recent months. A recent DNA cousin find even led to solving a mystery on a mutual collateral ancestor for which no DNA testing was involved. After taking a DNA test and enthusiastically adding to her online family tree, my niece connected me to a cousin (one generation removed) who lives out west. His father (who was actually my first cousin) died when he was young and the family drifted apart. Though I had asked kin for more details years ago, I was never able to keep up-to-date with that branch. Now I know his birthday (we were born in the same year) and that of his brother's as well as the names and birth dates of his children. His eldest son is among those of the tenth generation of the Watts family with roots in Halifax County, Virginia and shares a namesake that goes back about eight generations within t...

When visiting my maternal half-sister this past spring, I started a recipe project using her mother-in-law's old handwritten recipes. While there, my sister showed me a large black case and said she believed it was my paternal grandfather's. When I opened it, I discovered an accordion.While my grandfather played the fiddle all his life and at least one of his uncles played the banjo for local dances in Western Kentucky, I did not think an accordion had anything to do with the musical influence on that side of my family.  I have always correlated accordions with polka music and late-nineteenth or twentieth-century immigrants which does not fit with my paternal family's history whose roots go back to the 1700s in Virginia. I suggested instead that the accordion might have belonged to her husband's family instead as they immigrated much later from Poland. He did not recall it being part of his family either, though. I left the accordion there when I headed back home ...