RE: family resemblance. My maternal grandmother, who died at age 27 in 1941, myself and my next to older sister share the same hand/foot characteristic/shape. There is a certain space between certain fingers/toes that, when we hang our left hand loosely, they ALL are the same! How odd, I know. But the ONLY picture we have our our grandmother has the very obvious trait!

My 2nd cousin on my mother's side...her 1st cousin once removed, resembles my mother.

Di, we've been working on our families histories for years. We are fortunate to have a cousin's wife, who is Morman, to be able to go to the caves in Utah and do research on my father's side. They've got it back to when the first one came here from the Bonn, Germany area in the 1700's. Can't find any records of them in Germany because some place where the records were was burned to the ground during the war. So I don't know how we'll be able to go further.

My mom's side are from the Netherlands, Denmark I think. We've got them from the 1700's also. We're still working on it though.

My husbands mother's histories are more difficult. We don't know many of her people and we found her mother's people could have been from the Mediterranean area in Europe. I can't seem to find anyone who knows about that line.

My husband's father histories brought us an unexpected wealth of information. I found someone had posted their work on the internet and I traced it down to his line. It was fantastic. However, there is lots to do to get my hubby's cousins paperwork and such done.

It is addictive and I'm so glad people are working on their genealogies. I'm trying to put down as much as I know about medical, work, special talents histories also. It just seems to me that it's important to include those things also.

I wish I could research further back from my grandparents' generation and backward. But the language barriers are huge..I can't read Chinese. And right now, don't have the motivation just for the sake of geneaology.

Like some of the European countries, the huge disruptions of war, change in government probably resulted in destruction of many valuable records. Remember, in the 1960's and 1970's, Communist Chinese govn't was on a rampage to destroy anything bourgeoise and hurt people associated with such ownership of things. books were also destroyed if they contained "imperialist" ideas.. and by default probably alot of valuable records were destroyed.

However I suspect prior to my grandparents, there's a good probability that the literacy level to read and write was very low.

My father has expressed his wish that when he dies, he wants also a memorial plaque for his father near him. My paternal grandfather never came to North America. I know my paternal grandfather coordinated the building of local school in their village..a powerful effort to improve education and literacy locally.

And my father REALLY wanted all his children to become more educated than him and in order to have access to better jobs and less "harder" life. He got his wish even though sometimes we footdragged along the way..all his 6 children are university-educated.

But he himself is an inspiration, he taught himself most of his English. ESL classes was not an option, given demands of a big family and restaurant shift work.

But I will say this: My great uncle paid the Chinese head tax that was imposed on Chinese immigrants in the early 1900's when they stepped onto Canadian soil. It was $500.00 which was alot of money in those days.

Same immigration law was in effect in the U.S. at the same time for the Chinese entering the U.S. there as well. The purpose of the head tax was to reduce probability of the "heathens" who might pollute North America..or keep out the Chinese. Already the Chinese men were released from their labour for building the national railroads in North America..

My maternal and paternal great grandfathers did work for a few years in Chinese laundries and restaurants in the U.S. but returned to China several times, where they eventually died. The immigration laws in both U.S. and Canada did not permit Chinese men to bring their Chinese wives. Again fear of overpopulating these countries with heathens.

The federal laws were changed in 1950's ...and so my mother came as a picture bride, as part of the staring wave.

Orchid what an interesting history you have in your family. You know we are so connected to our past no matter how far we travel. I'm a history buff and loved reading your history. Blessings on your family for their struggle.

I get so tired of all the immigration problems people encounter here. We are a nation of immigrants so I don't understand why those here would try to impose problems on those coming. Grief!

Would love to hear more if you'd like to share.

We've gone to the Mormon office here locally but it was long ago and I did not have enough info. Now that I have the immigration papers of my great grandfather and his proper name, from Disnik Yugoslavia, I can probably find out more.

Oh, if there were more hours in a day!

FYI: a woman just joined the NABBW and she is an expert on genealogy. I'll have to tell her about this post.

Okay, her name is Sharon and you can visit her at www.sharoncarmack.com. Tell her I sent you.

I tried some years ago, back when... haha.
When I was concentrating on my mom's side, I got so frustrated with her dad's line... his family name was apparently (could have been) spelled differently in the old world. It became too confusing - I stopped. I also used rootsweb.com... in fact, if the database carries from way back, it might still have some of my correspondences with other searchers. I used ancestry.com also... it was free then. Another to try, which is still free I think, is familysearch.org. If I'm not mistaken it's Mormon based - a Mormon family member uses... she was able to connect my maternal grandmother's (her mom - the wife of the aforementioned maternal grandfather) line back to the LaFontaines from France.
One thing that was interesting... there were so many preachers (all flavors) up the branches, on both sides.