Hunting History - Finding Family

I've thought all week about what my favorite discovery has been.  It was hard; I've been doing genealogy for about twenty years now, and I've discovered a lot!  Proving (or disproving) family lore, figuring out why my DNA doesn't reflect my Italian roots, many notable Weller's (whiskey makers, pottery makers, long lines of reverends...) even a murder.   The best discovery though, has been much closer than the rest: my husband had a half-sibling he didn't know...and we found her using genealogy! I started working on my husbands tree around 2013, he wasn't (and still isn't) near as interested as me, but I plugged away anyway.  When researching his dad, we had a wealth of information  Robert had been a lifer in the military and we had hard copies of all his documents.  He'd been the youngest of five, and passe when my husband Kevin was eleven.  Kevin was telling me of an aunt that came over when he was about nine, and he'd been around eighteen; he...

Last week I touched on the Italian side of my family, The Barra's from Brossasco and the Nardin's from Asiago for "So Far Away."  This week's prompt is "Same Name" and I'm going back to Asiago, to talk about the same family, only this time it's because of a mystery; because I have no idea how my Great Aunt ended up with the name she did - the name of a major battle ground in the Italo-Turkish War. Rena Paganin Giustina Maria Ain Zara "Rena" Paganin was born February 26th, 1912 in Asiago, Italy to Catterina Angela Nardin and Valentino Paganin.  Eleven months after Rena was born, her father would be dead, and less than two years after that she would be on the Duca D'Aosta steam ship with her mother and grandmother Mary Strazzabosco headed to Ellis Island.  But this time we're not talking abut what happened during or even after Rena's life, we're going to talk about what happened before.   December 4th, 2011...

Week four of the #52in52Ancestors prompt has been a difficult one for me.  Everyone is doing how far away their ancestors came from, and they all did; if you're American chances are your ancestors came from somewhere else, far across the ocean.  I thought about spinning a tale of that crossing, which I still may do one day, but not today.  While browsing some new features on my Ancestry app last night, I found this really cool section where it plots out where each of your ancestors were born and significant things in their lives happened.   It's super interesting to see it all out on that map, little dots spread out (in my case) all over Germany, England, and Scotland.  And then, all the way down in the bottom, are two little dots, far away from each other, in Italy.  One high in the Alps by Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia, and one far over towards France.  I actually never realized just how far away those two very important places were, until ...