My question is: Why didn't our emigrants like to talk about their ancestors? Many of them did even hide their portuguese ancestry! Luis K W Lisboa-Portugal ----------- TIPS FROM READERS: When Grandma Won't Talk How can you find your ancestors when grandma won't talk about them? Such was the dilemma for one of my neighbors whom I offered to help with her family history research. Her grandmother Susan (name changed to protect her privacy) is living in a nursing home. Susan had never talked about her ancestry other than to say that her mother Mary Mello had come from Portugal, lived in California and then moved to Utah where she died. End of story -- Susan would tell no more. Nothing was known of Mary Mello's husband or other children. The first thing we did was search the Internet cemetery transcriptions for Mary Mello. Utah has a wonderful Cemetery Inventory database that will search all of the transcribed cemeteries in the state at one time. Through that we found Mary Mello buried in the Elwood Cemetery in Utah. The burial record included Mary Mello's birth year. Because Grandma Susan was over 75 years of age, I knew she would appear in the 1930 census as a young girl. Knowing how old Mary Mello would have been in 1930, we did a search for her and her daughter "Susan" in the California 1930 census. To our happy surprise we found them and Mary's husband -- Frank Mello (a new name!). Then we stepped back 10 years and did a search for Frank Mello in the 1920 census. Even greater surprise -- Frank had not yet married Mary, but was living with his mother and siblings. We were able to positively identify him because of his age, the location and his occupation. Plus one of his sisters had the same name as one that he and Mary later gave their daughter. In just 20 minutes we had extended the family line back two generations, with many more names and dates than had previously been known. And as for the family tradition that the ancestors had come from Portugal -- they were actually from the Azores, a group of islands just off the coast of Portugal. I'm sure there is more that can be found easily -- now that we have more information to go on. Grandma didn't need to talk after all! -----------

It wasn't just the emigrants, it was just the way they were back in those days. And not just portuguese but all other nacionalities too. For some reason when someone in a family died the rest of the family no longer talked about that person. It was as if they never existed. The "let the dead rest" or " "leave the dead alone" is something older people truly believed in. My grandmother, for example, was one of 16 kids and yet when we would ask her her siblings names she would only list 5, because she was too young when the others died and her parents never told her anything about them. As I have helped people research their families I have found a lot of that happened to them too. Another reason was if they no longer were friends with someone in the family they treated them as if they had died. I find that in spouses that separated or children who ran away from home because of an argument of some sort. When couples split or the father ran away, especially if the father was a ! jerk, then he was as good as dead, and neither the mother or the kids would talk about him ever again. Go figure, I could never understand it myself but for our ancestors that was the way it was supposed to be. Luis Beal Luis K W <luis_k_w@clix.pt> wrote: My question is: Why didn't our emigrants like to talk about their ancestors? Many of them did even hide their portuguese ancestry! Luis K W Lisboa-Portugal ----------- TIPS FROM READERS: When Grandma Won't Talk How can you find your ancestors when grandma won't talk about them? Such was the dilemma for one of my neighbors whom I offered to help with her family history research. Her grandmother Susan (name changed to protect her privacy) is living in a nursing home. Susan had never talked about her ancestry other than to say that her mother Mary Mello had come from Portugal, lived in California and then moved to Utah where she died. End of story -- Susan would tell no more. Nothing was known of Mary Mello's husband or other children. The first thing we did was search the Internet cemetery transcriptions for Mary Mello. Utah has a wonderful Cemetery Inventory database that will search all of the transcribed cemeteries in the state at one time. Through that we found Mary Mello buried in the Elwood Cemetery in Utah. The burial record included Mary Mello's birth year. Because Grandma Susan was over 75 years of age, I knew she would appear in the 1930 census as a young girl. Knowing how old Mary Mello would have been in 1930, we did a search for her and her daughter "Susan" in the California 1930 census. To our happy surprise we found them and Mary's husband -- Frank Mello (a new name!). Then we stepped back 10 years and did a search for Frank Mello in the 1920 census. Even greater surprise -- Frank had not yet married Mary, but was living with his mother and siblings. We were able to positively identify him because of his age, the location and his occupation. Plus one of his sisters had the same name as one that he and Mary later gave their daughter. In just 20 minutes we had extended the family line back two generations, with many more names and dates than had previously been known. And as for the family tradition that the ancestors had come from Portugal -- they were actually from the Azores, a group of islands just off the coast of Portugal. I'm sure there is more that can be found easily -- now that we have more information to go on. Grandma didn't need to talk after all! ----------- ============================== New! Family Tree Maker 2005. Build your tree and search for your ancestors at the same time. Share your tree with family and friends. Learn more: http://landing.ancestry.com/familytreemaker/2005/tour.aspx?sourceid=14599&targetid=5429 --------------------------------- Brings words and photos together (easily) with PhotoMail - it's free and works with Yahoo! Mail.