Inside Gigi's World

“What are you?”

“Ummmm…..Human?”

“Where are you from?”

“This super shitty small town that you probably never heard of…..”

No? Not the responses you were expecting?

I’m just messing with you, they aren’t the answers I was looking for either when I started asking myself these questions a little while ago.

Let’s rewind a little bit.

I have always been told that my Father’s family was Canadian French and my Mother’s family was Polish. But, I am sorry, you can’t get through this many generations of “pure blood” Polish or “pure blood” Canadian French, can you?

I know more about my Mother’s family then my Father’s. 

His father, who would have been my Pepé took off long before my Dad could even know who he was. I have only seen one picture of him in my whole life and it is also the only picture my Dad has ever seen of him as well.

I am not looking to know who this man is. He was never family to me. I do not feel like I ever missed out on anything by not knowing him and I have been told he died long before I was ever born but I would like to know about my family’s history. I know there is a lot of family from Holyoke, Chicopee and South Hadley that I have never met. There was an exceptional amount of siblings that this man had, if nothing else it might be interesting to put faces with the names.

I have dabbled some time with doing a DNA genetics test to see what my blood line says but I never actually did it.

But somewhat recently a great friend of mine (name with held for privacy reasons) decided to do theirs. This person was adopted and they knew it. However they wanted some answers about their heritage and lineage.

I was hoping this person would find the answers they were looking for and unfortunately the cards didn’t play out that way but the thing that stuck out the most to me is they were suprised about the lineage. That was what inspired me to pull the proverbial trigger and do my own.

So I made my spit deposit into the funnel, shook my “deposit” for the “atleast 5 second” allotted time that the instructions suggested, placed it in it’s respected sealed bag and placed it in the self addressed box.

Now I wait.

It can take 6-8 weeks it said.

Ugh. I have no patience.

In the meantime I have started a family tree with the information I do have from data collected from other family members, documents and photos.

I have gotten pretty far. I do think there must be other family members somewhere that also did trees because Ancestry also had a lot of information in the blanks that I did not.

I have always been told that my Grandpa’s parents were from Poland. However almost every document I found had both of their birthplaces listed as Austria.

I couldn’t figure out why. Come to find out after some help and a whole lot of homework I learned that part of Southern Poland was divided by King Joseph in 1772, absorbed by the surrounding territories, one of them being Austria. So does that make me German? I’m so confused.

I also came across some photos of my Memé’s parents and their families when they were younger.

In the picture above is my Great Grandmother’s family. She is in the back row in the middle. I think my Dad looks kind of like her father. I so see similarities of my brothers and my son in some of her siblings.

My Aunt sent my this picture. This would be of my Great Grandfather, his siblings and his parents. I think my Pep would have been the man next to his mother.

So far this is all I know.

I am so anxious to get my results back.

Has anyone else done this? What were your experiences?

To be continued…..