Name: Anduin Anduin
From: California, United States
About me: I'm a So Cal girl born and raised. I've known my husband for over 19 years and we've been married for 15. My cat is also 15 years old and his name is Yoshi. He is the ruler of the house and has me under complete submission using his super feline mind control abilities.
Anduin's World
FAVORITE SAYINGS, THINGS I LIVE BY: If you don't ask, you don't get, What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Who Are We?
I was thinking about this subject the other day. About how people nowadays don't know their heritage. We know about our parents, maybe our grandparents but not much more. I wonder how we lost that. All my life, since I was a little girl, I always wanted to know who I was and were did my family come from. I would ask my mom and she didn't know, my dad didn't know, even my grandmother was reluctant or not interested in answering my questions. About 4 years ago my cousin found me on the Ancestry.com website. She had started doing her family tree and came across my small family tree with some of the same names listed. Turns out our grandfathers were brothers. She sent me an email and we began corresponding. I was so thrilled when I began reading through all of the names of my ancestors that she had put together. This was it. This was something I had wanted all of my life. My identity. Even though it's just one line, my father's paternal line, it still gave me a great deal of satisfaction to know where part of me is from.
My dad's grandmother came over from England. Her great, great, great, great grandfather left France during the mid 1600's to escape religious persecution by the Catholic church. His name was Abraham De Vantier and he was part of the Protestant Reformed Church of France, also know as Huguenots. The Catholic church didn't like these reformists and did everything in it's power to obliterate them. The Huguenots were discriminated against, murdered, tortured, and harassed. They were beaten, their property stolen and their churches burned down (most often with the people still inside). Many of the Huguenots fled France and dispersed all over the world. My line settled in England. I've been trying to figure out if that makes me French or English. Anyways, they stayed in England until the late 1800's, then came to America where they settled in Michigan. They've been there ever since. I'm very proud of this line of my family. They were strong people, willing to stand against tremendous odds to fight for what they believed in, even to the extent of losing all that they had. I recognize that spirit. I'm not political, I don't walk in protest lines or anything like that, but I will fight for what I believe in. There's a fierceness inside of me that doesn't deal well with injustice. I believe it's in the blood. We are who we came from to some extent or other.
My dad's grandmother came over from England. Her great, great, great, great grandfather left France during the mid 1600's to escape religious persecution by the Catholic church. His name was Abraham De Vantier and he was part of the Protestant Reformed Church of France, also know as Huguenots. The Catholic church didn't like these reformists and did everything in it's power to obliterate them. The Huguenots were discriminated against, murdered, tortured, and harassed. They were beaten, their property stolen and their churches burned down (most often with the people still inside). Many of the Huguenots fled France and dispersed all over the world. My line settled in England. I've been trying to figure out if that makes me French or English. Anyways, they stayed in England until the late 1800's, then came to America where they settled in Michigan. They've been there ever since. I'm very proud of this line of my family. They were strong people, willing to stand against tremendous odds to fight for what they believed in, even to the extent of losing all that they had. I recognize that spirit. I'm not political, I don't walk in protest lines or anything like that, but I will fight for what I believe in. There's a fierceness inside of me that doesn't deal well with injustice. I believe it's in the blood. We are who we came from to some extent or other.
I would like to find out more about the rest of my family history. There's supposed to be Native American ancestry on my mother's side. I would like to prove that once and for all. It's a lot of work, digging for your family roots. It may be a little dirty too.
