saul -

Many of the old dormant refreshes are by SPAMMERS. The mudelves delete the SPAM post, but the thread stays up.

Responding to the spammer is a no-no, but once it's been deleted, or if you want to "go around it," there's no harm in kicking a thread back to life if you've got something interesting to add.

Not African American, but my daddy's paternal line disappears about two generations back. I think it's cause his family were hidin' from anybody associated with the gummit, and "disappeared" when the census takers came around. The male line on my mom's side goes back about one generation further, but disappears then, possibly for the same reason.

Only one line in my "tree" traces verifiably back to the early 1600s on the east coast. That line came over from Holland, but they were only there briefly after they got kicked out of England.

By anecdote, my mother claimed English, Irish, Scots, Dutch and German, and there's "evidence" for all of those. A couple of the "untraceables" suggest other origins, but that's just based on the common origins for the last names. If the census takers ask, I usually just say "mongrel."

Lin's pretty much pure Deutsch, from a scattering of "principalities" in the region. Her tribe came over much later, so they're mostly traceable on the ship manifests. A problem with the Deutsch is that many of them had their names arbitrarily "mAnglicised" by the clerks at the POE (most of hers came through Ellis Island) but she thinks she got all the changes pretty much sorted. Her tribe made a habit of giving the same name to several generations in a row, and to a fistful of cousins, but that's another puzzle that can usually be worked out for those recent enough for records to exist.

A great grandma had a little trouble with census takers misspelling her first name (Berthsheba), but we got that sorted, and then found out they misspelled her last name on her grave marker. (She was widowed, and married to ggpa after. The kids from the first marriage asked if they could put up the marker so they could put their daddy's name on the backside, and they probably didn't really know what her "new name" was.)

John