My Roots

Some of you know that I did some genealogy work some time back on the McGlone family tree. I was able to track that ancestry back to Ireland, but I never put a lot of work into going beyond that. I never knoew a lot about my Grandma's (my dad's mom's) side of the family, but Kara went and talked to Grandma one day and filled in a bunch of the gaps.

Well, as it turns out, if you want to know about your history, there's really no need to do any research. You need only to have a website and a blog that appear in Google. ;) Once you've got those things, you can just sit back and wait for someone like Jennifer Lees to drop you a line and show you your entire family tree. Really, that's all it takes. :D

Anyway, Jennifer, as it turns out, is my fourth cousin and living in Pennsylvania. She has a great deal of genealogy information online, here. If you click on Outline Descendant Tree: Descendants of Nicolaus Steilen, and then go on to Page 3, I'm even in the tree. She's gone that far. There's so much information there, it's just nuts. She's really done a great job on this. A few pieces of information are incorrect (and I'll help her clear those things up), but, for the most part, the information is accurate and pretty complete.

She even told me the story of how Steilin's are related to Stilen's. So here's an excerpt from an e-mail she sent to me.

"I just wanted to tell you why your line is spelled Stilen and my line is spelled Steilen. You may already know this. Your great great grandfather, Johann/John Stilen (his picture is on my webpage), was in the military. The military mispelled his name as Stilen instead of Steilen. His name had to match the military records in order for him to collect his pension so he changed it to Stilen. Your great great grandfather and my great great grandfather, Jacob Sr., were brothers."

So, there you have it, some trivia that you never even knew you wanted to know. Now don't say I never gave you nothin'. ;) I wonder if something similar might explain the different spellings for McGlone/McClone/McGlure. Of course, that doesn't explain why my great, great, great grandmother, Mary McGlone (who came to the states from Ireland), has her named spelled as both McGlone and McClone on her gravestone. That I find to be very odd.

Anyway, while most of you probably found this post to be useless, my sister probably enjoyed it, so the rest of you can just suck it up. ;)