Some shocking revelations from the family tree
Some shocking revelations from the family tree
By: Bill Mead
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Posted by editor Tue Nov 30, 1999 00:00:00 PST
Viewed 311 times
0 responses 0 comments I'll bet I'm the only guy on Dennison Road who got to choose his own name.
My birth certificate refers to me as Edward William Barnett. After my father and mother were killed in separate accidents, I was declared surplus property and the ladies at the orphanage went about trying to unload me on some unsuspecting family. For reasons I still don't understand, they succeeded and I ended up with a wonderful couple named Mead.
It's customary for an adoptee to take his adopters' surname, which I did, but I made an additional request. Tired of hearing my frustrated teachers yell “EdWARD!” whenever some other kid did something despicable that seemed more typical of my behavior, I asked that my middle name become my first name. I then appropriated my new father's middle initial, J, which doesn't stand for anything. I looked forward to becoming just plain Bill. How was I to know that my doting adoptive mother would fondly refer to me as Billy J. and that it would be taken up by the entire town?
I had to join the Navy to finally get away from that odious moniker.
Having been orphaned at the age of eight, I didn't know a lot about my birth parents which later on bothered my kids. My daughter Carol, our science teacher, recently was able to draw a bead on my mother's background which, to our consternation, went all the way back to a man named James Chilton who arrived in this country on a ship called the Mayflower. Knowing the checkered background of most Puritan Pilgrims I begged her to stop her search before it revealed even less admirable people.
Then she went to work on tracing my father with almost no results. This caused her to hire a geneologist who soon discovered why Dad was so elusive. At some early point in his life his actual last name of Bennett had been misspelled into Barnett.
Finding this glitch was the key to unearthing all kinds of biographical information, some of it painful, such as the fact that like my mom, my dad was Ulster Irish all the way back to the 1700s. I have always hoped to discover some respectable leavening in my background but it is not to be. This has been disappointing to my second-generation German wife. Based on my appearance and overbearing nature she has long believed me to be at least partly German.
On the upside, a little genealogical research can be properly humbling because almost everybody's ancestors include some you wouldn't want hanging around your place today. Public records show that my dad's parents divorced not long after he was born and both married other people. So far so good. But then they moved into adjoining houses and had more kids with their new spouses. Is that kinky or what?
My advice to you is don't shake your family tree too hard. Having a bunch of Micks and Limeys fall out could be the least of your embarrassment.
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