Part 9: My great BIG family
The journey in finding my biological family, the ones who I share the same bloodline with has been a very interesting, intriguing and fulfilling experience and I feel so blessed to be able to have been put on this journey. I have discovered so much and there have been so many ironic moments in my path to finding family. It's a great BIG world out there but in my adventure to finding family it's also been such a small world after all!
I also want to add that my Adoptive family has also been a big blessing to me as well. With out them I do not know where I would have ended up at or with who. If I had the chance to have picked my own family out, I would have chosen them. With my adopted family, I gained a whole lot more cousins plus all my immediate family.
When I was adopted I was taken approximately one hundred and sixty miles away, that is a three hour drive one way. So you would think that the odds of there being any biological family in my new hometown that I was brought to, would be more on the slim side especially when it's a small town with not much to offer. But don't ever let those odds fool you.
After receiving my DNA results and discovering many more cousins from there, I have also discovered that I had biological cousins right under my nose. It's amazing the things I have discovered just in the past few years. There are different stories of discovering bio family around me that I either grew up with, met at some point in my life or just saw in passing. I'll touch on a few of those stories throughout this part of my story.
My maternal side is mainly from Northern Virginia and as I had mentioned in an earlier post, most of my cousins ended up being scattered so therefore a lot of us did not grow up together but eventually we have been finding one another. And a couple of dear cousins have spent countless hours putting our family tree together. When my maternal grandfather married his first wife, they together had a total of three children. One of the children passed away at just a couple months of age. And his first wife passed away shortly after. He then married one of his first wives cousins who was my maternal grandmother. They had a total of ten children together. I'm not too sure if I even got to meet either one of them or any of my Uncle's, Aunts or cousins before I was adopted on that sie of the family.
My paternal side is mainly from Virginia near the Tennessee border. Which is approximately three hundred miles from where I moved to after being adopted. I was able to find Ancestors from that area several generations back. These family lines are the ones that I spoke of earlier when I mentioned that I had met some distant cousins and that we were trying to break through some brick walls for our Ancestors and verify our connections to them. It's also the family lines of the same ones that I spoke of earlier, that lived in the same area as I did.
Three hundred miles is way further away and for there to be several people move to the same small area as I did from the same family lines is very ironic to me. It's been amazing to know that we all descend from the same line or multiple lines. Yes, multiple lines because some of this side of the family liked to marry within the family. I feel like I am probably related to almost everyone in the county where my ancestors lived and inhabited because several of my lines were residents of that county. In fact one of my paternal grandfathers and one of my paternal grandmothers lines trace back through the same line to a common Ancestor.
I'll post more stories to come of my past and my journey in meeting my family members. I wish that I could have known some of the family that passed on before I was reunited with my biological family. I have now had the pleasure of meeting many new cousins even distant ones. If you have not read my other parts of this story yet, please scroll down to read them all!
This is part 9 of many parts! I hope that you are enjoying them all so far.
I also want to add that my Adoptive family has also been a big blessing to me as well. With out them I do not know where I would have ended up at or with who. If I had the chance to have picked my own family out, I would have chosen them. With my adopted family, I gained a whole lot more cousins plus all my immediate family.
When I was adopted I was taken approximately one hundred and sixty miles away, that is a three hour drive one way. So you would think that the odds of there being any biological family in my new hometown that I was brought to, would be more on the slim side especially when it's a small town with not much to offer. But don't ever let those odds fool you.
After receiving my DNA results and discovering many more cousins from there, I have also discovered that I had biological cousins right under my nose. It's amazing the things I have discovered just in the past few years. There are different stories of discovering bio family around me that I either grew up with, met at some point in my life or just saw in passing. I'll touch on a few of those stories throughout this part of my story.
My maternal side is mainly from Northern Virginia and as I had mentioned in an earlier post, most of my cousins ended up being scattered so therefore a lot of us did not grow up together but eventually we have been finding one another. And a couple of dear cousins have spent countless hours putting our family tree together. When my maternal grandfather married his first wife, they together had a total of three children. One of the children passed away at just a couple months of age. And his first wife passed away shortly after. He then married one of his first wives cousins who was my maternal grandmother. They had a total of ten children together. I'm not too sure if I even got to meet either one of them or any of my Uncle's, Aunts or cousins before I was adopted on that sie of the family.
My paternal side is mainly from Virginia near the Tennessee border. Which is approximately three hundred miles from where I moved to after being adopted. I was able to find Ancestors from that area several generations back. These family lines are the ones that I spoke of earlier when I mentioned that I had met some distant cousins and that we were trying to break through some brick walls for our Ancestors and verify our connections to them. It's also the family lines of the same ones that I spoke of earlier, that lived in the same area as I did.
Three hundred miles is way further away and for there to be several people move to the same small area as I did from the same family lines is very ironic to me. It's been amazing to know that we all descend from the same line or multiple lines. Yes, multiple lines because some of this side of the family liked to marry within the family. I feel like I am probably related to almost everyone in the county where my ancestors lived and inhabited because several of my lines were residents of that county. In fact one of my paternal grandfathers and one of my paternal grandmothers lines trace back through the same line to a common Ancestor.
I'll post more stories to come of my past and my journey in meeting my family members. I wish that I could have known some of the family that passed on before I was reunited with my biological family. I have now had the pleasure of meeting many new cousins even distant ones. If you have not read my other parts of this story yet, please scroll down to read them all!
Paternal Side
Maternal Side
This is part 9 of many parts! I hope that you are enjoying them all so far.
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