RootsChat.Com

Thank you all so much for your replies.  You can rest assured that I will do nothing to spoil the vacation. I'm kind of excited about the trip myself:  Two two elderly adventurers setting out to discover the new world, what a time they will have!!

I worry of course. I keep emailing them that this is a VERY long drive and while they will find helpful friendly people along the way, they will be sitting (driving) for days seeing almost no one. I've made the trip 6 or 7 times and even when I was 22 on my first trip, it hurt getting out of the car sometimes; and these two are 76 and 78.  But I've warned them, given them the numbers of all the state police on their way, and told them how to flag down the cops if their phones don't get any reception.  I've told them that almost anyone they see will be willing to help them if they say, "I'm visiting from England and I need ....." They have arranged to have every kind of car insurance known to man and a big comfy car.  They are competant adults and I have to trust them to handle themselves.

The real bottom line fact is probably that I'm annoyed at my happy-go-lucky sister who is finding relatives all over the world and not checking anything out!!  I  admit that I sometimes follow my sister around behind pointing out the truth of things and ruining her joy. These folks ended up  on the tree during a time when I was dilligently explaining to my sister that we very likely were not descended from some Duke somewhere.

But I hadn't thought about them feeling hurt or deceived.  That's a very true point.  So.  The decision is made.  I will not say a word at least till they leave.  Then maybe in 6 months or so, I might say something.

Thanks again for all your help.  Talking it out with you folks really crystalized my thinking.

Great, thanks!!! I'm glad I didn't do anything wrong.  I don't see the point of copying wholesale, who knows who those folks are?  But if you can check it all out...

Thanks again!!

I have read a lot on this forum about people kidnapping someone else's tree. Here's what I did, was it ok

I got an ancestry hint about another tree which looked promising.  I contacted the tree owner and received no reply.  Since he had a different address for granny than I did, I checked the census with his address and voila, there she was!!!  I did this with a bunch of his info, that is to say, if he had different info than I did, I checked his stuff.  Some of his was for my family, some not.  Since I had checked out each and every document and person I added to my tree, I don't think I did anything wrong.  I just used a hint he gave me, albeit unknowingly.

I haven't copied any pictures or stories from his tree.  It's all public records.  If you can't use hints ancestry sends along, what is the point of sending them?  Did I do something wrong?

I have several times tried to look up info for someone.  I have never done it successfully and so I am in thrall to the greater skill of my co rootschatters.  Where are you all looking that you find things and how do you know you have the right info? 

I have had cause to go through every “Cotter” family in County Cork in the censuses and in so doing I have noticed a huge number of marriages where the ages of the husband and wife were vastly different, like a 40 year old woman married to a 20 year old man and visa versa.
My understanding is that after the famine, land, instead of being divvied up between the children, went to the oldest son, who would not marry till his father died.  This would explain the much older men marrying younger women.

I assume the older women marrying younger men were widows who remarried (often there were children with a different last name in the household) for help on the farm.

I fully understand that differences in age don’t necessarily mean that the marriage was unhappy, and I fully understand that romantic love as we know it wasn’t the main point of things,  but still, it seems desperate to me.  Were these marriages as sad as they seem.  Honestly, a 40 year old woman and a 20 year old man? She knows full well the burden of childbirth and probably doesn’t want any more kids, what about her poor husband? The 50 year old man marrying a 20 year old woman, what do they have in common?

And there’s proof that the situation was fraught—they left.  In vast never ending numbers, they left.

My question is, how does a society decide to move to primogenitary.  By the time of the famine it had become obvious in those nations practicing it that there were problems. And in the case of the widow remarrying, does the second husband inherit or is the land (or the lease on the land, I guess) held by her in trust for the eldest son of the first husband.  Whichever way it goes, what happens to the second husband or the eldest child of the first husband?

Are there any books that discuss this in depth?  Are there biographies or memoirs about these people? I just feel so sad for them; I would really like to know what they thought of their own lives.