[2BNTV]

Originally Posted by senior citizen

A classic immigrant story. Go to ellisisland.org and you might find the ship that they came on. You will be able to read the original ship's manifest.
Or, go to ancestry.com and you can type in your family surnames to find your long lost relatives or the other branches of the family.

I started out ten years ago with only my grandparents and the town they came from, plus their parents, which thankfully someone had thought to write down...(my great grandparents on my father's side). I now have over 11,000 souls in my family tree........some of which are my mom's side and other people who married into our family and my husband's family, etc., etc.
It grows even without trying.........and people share their branches with you.

The Ukrainian side is more difficult to trace due to the Cyrillic alphabet but my grandmother's church was very helpful in translating after photocopying the records of births, baptisms, deaths, etc., etc. from early 1900's here....and it did list their village in Austrian Hungarian Empire of Franz Josef.

NOW THE ITALIANS were the easiest to trace......as so many of the microfllms are available and many other "searching cousins" who can read or decipher the Italian language were generous enough to help out........people are very helpful when searching for the same family lines...........NOT TO MENTION NAPOLEON. Napoleon was a stickler for record keeping.......so whenever a couple in Italy wanted to get married, they had to go to the town square or town hall and declare their intent and sign a paper with all their people who came before..........so the marriage records, morte (death records) and birth records have a wealth of information GOING BACKWARDS.

Very interesting. Thanks for posting.

A dear friend of mine is into geneaology.com and suggested that I visit their site and do a family tree. It might prove interesting as a family who lived a couple of houses away and we knew for years are like third cousins. They were never over anyone in the familys house during the holidays and finally talking to our elder family members, we discovered a distant link in the family tree.

In keeping with the thread:

We owe it to ourselves to eat as healthy as possible to at least have a shot at longevity.