Hunting History - Finding Family

 When my husband's daughter was young, she did a family history project at school.  She came home and proudly told us "I'm descended from an Indian princess!" To which we scoffed, because literally everyone born and raised in America is fed that tail. Well, yesterday I was following my husbands line up from his mother, a Woolsey, to the Hendersons, and started working on the Reno side. 'That's interesting,' I thought, as I followed the trail, 'they're French.'  Then, when I got to my husband's 9th great grandfather, things got REALLY interesting.  He was a man named Martin Chartier, and I was not prepared for what I found! Martin Chartier was born June 1, 1650 in Poitiers (St-Jean-de-Montierneuf), Poitou, France to Rene' Chartier and Madeleine Rangier. from France to Quebec in 1667 when he was 17, joining his paternal grandfather and uncle in Canada, but he wouldn't stay there long.  At age 22, in 1672 Martin and his brother Pierre ...

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...