Search Sisters: Adventures in Family Finding

We started with a simple question. Where were our great grand fathers born? We had a few vague stories.  Our Allison grandfather was from Texas… east or west… or maybe Pennsylvania. Grandfather number two was from Mexico, or Spain....or Chile.

Our info was vague.

But we were curious. 

We had always had been curious

We wondered why or parents knew so little? Was there something to hide?

If you ask most folks and they are likely to know where their grandparents came from, maybe even their great grandparents. But in most families living memory stops two or three generations back. That is unless there was a genealogist in the family who left records.  Either that or the family was so important that a random geologist took an interest.

Not in our family.  There was neither a family historian nor the lure of celebrity to hand us any easy hints. When we decided to find the origins of our grandfathers, we became the family genealogists.

We started a blog to track our detective work called Historias Maltos… Maltos Stories after our Mexican clan.  Our cousin Janice joined our search team.  Soon the Sisters were obsessed with the search.  We went online. We visited libraries and joined historical societies. And we started building a tree.  It wasn’t long before we noticed we had a LOT of last names in our past.

What started out as a simple investigation of great grandfathers John R. Allison (1845-1894) and Jose Maria Maltos (1838-1905) soon expanded across genealogical geographies into the lands of unknown surnames.   We began with Maltos, then quickly found many more streams to follow. We discovered a bewildering number of ancestral paths and soon were drowning in a raging river of surnames: Hart, Bussey, Dionne, Dias, Dubose, Saindon, Evans, Craig, Cannaday. McClanahan, Laird, Luna, Gurley. 

While our Historias Maltos blog continues with posts about our Mexican mining family in New Almaden and in California from 1850 to now: http://familiamaltos.blogspot.com/ . This new blog called Search Sisters: Adventures in Family Finding documents all our family searches: who we found and how we found them.  Our hope is that perhaps it might offer hints to help another readers in their family search,  because finding family can be frustrating and but ever so rewarding. And who knows, it might connect us with family we are yet to meet. 

Linda and Stella Allison

December 2014