John William Grace, ca. 1900s

 It was time to build my tree. I had raw materials, and I started the most basic way. I added me as the home person, then my parents. Then my grandparents, because those were the family lines I was going to pursue. Four main families; Grace, Rosiek, Dawson, and Gorchik. These were the lines that resulted in me. Four interesting lines in terms of ethnic background ... Irish, Polish, English, and Slovak. 

I figured the Irish and English lines would be the easiest to trace back ... after all, the sources will be in English, right? Easy-peasy. I figured I wouldn't be able to do much with the Polish and Slovak lines except go back as far as the ancestors who emigrated to the US ... which were my great-grandparents. So those were going to be essentially short branches of the tree, though I would be able to populate it with my family members on those branches, so they would be thick branches. 

So I quickly populated my Ancestry tree (backing it up on Family Tree Maker frequently), and once I got the basic people in, I started confirming what I knew with the primary source documents on Ancestry, making sure to also download those that were really interesting and important to my computer (and cloud backup) so I could keep those regardless of what I did in the future with my Ancestry tree (I knew at some point I would be canceling my subscription, so I wanted to make sure I kept everything). I was also careful with the hints, because again, I wanted accuracy. I wanted to make sure that everyone I added to the tree was as best as I could tell, really a relative who belonged on the tree. Though I soon learned that as much as I wanted complete accuracy, I was going to run up against case after case where things weren't going to be black and white, but rather 50 shades of gray. Because there were just too many common names in my family history, and often multiple people with those names, and it was going to be a judgement call to say that one was related and the other one was not. I don't know why, but this bothered me more than it should. I mean, I'm (or used to be) a professional historian. No matter how good you are about names, dates, and places as a historian, you soon realize that the interpretation of what went on on those dates, in those places, and with those names was often very subjective, and it wasn't always rock solid truth. And so it would be with family history. It wasn't going to be easy to find, and it wasn't always going to be easy to prove, and I had to live with that. After all, who was going to challenge me that so-and-so might not be our great-great-great-great-great grandfather? Or that a distant cousin was married to someone? 

The only real challenge to accuracy was my own. So I would just make extra-sure with everything I was adding.

And this even meant looking at the information I already had with an eye for skepticism. Because I quickly found out that my mom's family history indicated that her great-grandfather was a man named Cornelius Grace, and it was thought he may have been a ship's captain. And I found out after a little digging that there was NO such person as Cornelius Grace. Where she got this information, I don't know, and obviously can't ask. But I found that one of her cousins had a family tree online, and that tree also indicated that Cornelius Grace was her great-grandfather. But just a small bit of digging led me to find that the real great-grandfather was a man named Richard Grace, not Cornelius. But at least, according to one of his children's birth certificates, he had been a boatman in New Ross, Ireland. So not exactly a ship captain, but he had been on the water. Though he only had that occupation for several of his children's births. Later, he was listed as "labourer." But that was the first big breakthrough, finding out my great-great-grandfather's name, and then not only my great-grandfather's info, but all his siblings, including one that no one else in the family had listed in their trees. And in finding them, I also found where they were from, New Ross in Wexford, though the oldest children were born in Kilkenny. So I wasn't sure where the family was ACTUALLY from, but I knew at least that my great-grandfather was born in New Ross, Wexford.

For some reason, the Irish side of the tree, the Graces, fascinated me the most. I'm not sure why, but there was just something mysterious about them, and I think it was because oddly enough, my mom and her cousins knew the least about them, because what was known was that their grandfather, John William Grace, the man born in New Ross, had died young working as an oil driller. My mom had even gotten a copy of his picture from one of her cousins, so growing up, I saw this old black-and-white photo of a handsome-looking guy in a starched collar, who sort of looked like my grandfather, as well as a portrait of a beautiful black-haired young woman who was my great-grandmother, Ida Belle Grace. Now I wanted to know more about them.

Ida Belle Grace, ca. 1905

It seemed from my notes that my grandfather and his siblings didn't all know their father too well, as a number of them were quite young when he was alive, and apparently he hadn't been around the house very much, as he was always off searching for oil. The family joke went that every time he came back to the family home in West Virginia, he'd get their mother pregnant again. So in a way, it wasn't surprising that none of them really knew who their grandparents were, and didn't even really know their names.There was also a family mystery that intrigued me, that apparently John William Grace had a brother who didn't immigrate with them, and was in the British Army in India, and got sick and one of their sisters went to India to care for him. The details were always sketchy, but it was a really interesting story. I wondered if it was true, and if I could find out about it. 

Filling the other parts of the tree with the other family lines was fairly easy, because I was only going back as far as my great-grandparents, as they were the ones who came over from Europe, and I essentially figured I wasn't going to find anything farther back in Europe (and frankly, even if there were things about the family further back, was I going to be able to figure it out from foreign-language sources?). And at least one of those great-grandparents, my great-grandmother Rosiek, I actually had known when I was a child, as she was around until I was 7. Apparently my great-grandmother Ida Belle Grace was also around when I was very young, but I have zero memory of her, but she died when I was 5. My great-grandmother Rosiek I remember very well because she spoke broken english with a heavy Polish accent, and was an absolutely fabulous cook. I still remember the blintzes she would make us, and also that she never used a recipe, she had everything in her head. My grandmother, her daughter, also had all sorts of info about her, and I had grown up hearing all sorts of stories about their upbringing, so filling in the basic facts was pretty easy on all of the other lines.

But then it came time to do a deeper dive, starting with the Graces.