My Family History Journey

I Traced My Family History All The Way Back to Ancient China

I consider myself to be a student of all histories, mostly ancient history, but lately of all histories. It all started out when I was 14 years old when one day I asked my dad about who his dad was. He started to tell me what he remembered of his dad and then I almost became a nuisance of unconsciously interviewing my dad about his dad and his mother. I started to ask questions about who his grandparents were and inevitably asked about what he knows about our ancestors. He finally gave me the genealogy book about the Bradlee family called, The History of the Bradlee Family with Particular Reference of Nathan Bradlee of Dorchester, Mass., by Samuel Bradlee Doggett. I started to study and look through my own looking glass about our family history and I opened up almost a Pandora’s Box of all histories. It was a black whole that would suck me in through the mouth of history with no return, and I didn’t want to come back.

When I was in my youth growing up, I was sick a lot and didn’t have much time to play or to make friends. I am not trying to get any sympathy from anybody, I’m simply telling the story of the very thing that just may have saved my life, the void of history. At first the only thing I was really interested in was just studying as much as I possibly can about my ancestors and who my ancestors were and to me and who my ancestors are. If you talk about a loved one who has passed into the afterlife or somebody that you never met and that you learned was related to you a thousand years ago, you can almost animate them just by talking about them. To me I feel like I have met my father’s parents who I never met and my ancestors. Knowing your family history and where you come from can really bring up your self esteem as I read in two articles in the New York Times.

Reading was never exactly my forteigh, which is another reason how genealogy lured me in like fish, because genealogy is mostly names and dates, and maybe a story about a person if you are lucky. So the next best thing for me to learn was from pictures, and on my paternal side there are a lot of pictures. This is another great reason why genealogy is such a great tool for people with dyslexia, because it can be very visual, and normally there are not a whole lot of words to read; and you can learn a lot about history. My father had a great collection of pictures from the past that were almost like a time portal for me. The best photo album that he had and that I have now was and is of his father, Frederick Josiah Bradlee, Jr. He was born on 20 Dec 1892 in Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts to Frederick Josiah Bradlee Sr. (1886-1951) and Elizabeth Whitwell Thomas (1868-1952) and died on 29 Apr 1970 in Beverly, Essex County, Massachusetts; my paternal grandparents had a house in Beverly where they spent the summers. The next cup of tea that I drank, if you will, was when I discovered ancestry.com when the internet came out; I believe I have been a member since I was about sixteen or so and I am now 39 years old. My father had already done a lot of research about the Crowninshields, which was my dad’s middle name and one of my middle names; I have four names, Josiah Quinn Crowninshield Bradlee, but I just go by Quinn. A quick side note, a lot of people pronounce the s and Josiah as a z, but it is a hard s like in the word snake. The Crowninshield family had married into the Bradlee family so there was more information on the Crowninshields, because they were a much more accomplished family, but there was some info on the Bradlees as well.

When I do my family history research, which is just about every day and used to be almost all the time; I was obsessed with it and still am. I now have a website called quinnbradleesancestry.wikia.com, which I have done all by myself over the last four years or so, where I have put all my research in a lineage format so that I can find my way to an ancestor if I am look for them on ancestry.com. I found many interesting discoveries using the internet. However when I find information or think I found a new lineage, ancestor or ancestors I always try to prove it using books first and then the internet. The one thing you should do if you get into genealogy, is when you find an ancestor or relative is to study and do research about the time and place that they were from, you might find something that you never would think you would find. Genealogy is like journalism and it’s also like being a detective; you have to find clues and sometimes and if you are doing research on your own family, then you have to ask family members what they know about whatever it is that you are looking for. Obviously if you come from a prominent family, the easier it’s going to be to research them; but if you don’t it’s almost even more exciting to find information. 

I have always known of my current ancestry in which I will put the following in order from what the most ancestry I have to the least: English, Irish, Scottish, German and Polish. However, just by asking around and sometimes a distant cousin will email you or message you on social media which is what happened to me and I found out that I had Latvian ancestry on my father’s side. I have found that I have royal ancestry and through them I have discovered that I have; Austrian, Italian; Georgian, like the country not the state; Netherlands, Scandinavia: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian; Portuguese; Spanish, before Spain was a country, Bohemian; Bulgarian; more French than I thought I had; more Polish than I thought I had; and my ancestry in antiquity is Byzantium; Chinese; Mongolian, Persian, Parthian, Egyptian, Indian, like the county; and Turkish. I think that if everybody knew their ethnicity, a lot of race would evaporate in the air. One more thing, we are all at least 1% African and all of us need to accept it and move on with our lives. Happy huntings.