This isn’t something that I’ve just recently noticed, but it has become ever more apparent as I’ve trudged through my family tree, cleaning up source citations.

Some genealogists have shared how similar the branches of the family tree are, sometimes through endogamy, other times just because both sides of the family lived in close locations for many decades, if not centuries.

My paternal and maternal branches of the tree have nothing like that – they have absolutely nothing in common until my parents met and married.

Because I started researching on the late 1970s, long before the internet age, it also meant tackling records in two different ways.

First, my father’s side of the family tree is almost 100% Carpatho-Rusyn and they immigrated to the U.S. from villages near today’s Presov, Slovakia. Although my grandparents were both born in America, my grandmother’s family returned to Europe when Nana was five years old. She came back to New Jersey permanently when she was 17.

Add to that the fact that my great grandfather changed the family name from Kucharik to Sabo in the early 1900s., those early censuses didn’t help much, nor were there family history books to pull of library shelves.

Oh, and I didn’t even know the family name was Kucharik until the 1980s and the census indexed the name as Ruharik, so I couldn’t find for ages even when I knew about it.

So, how did I learn about this side of my family? Well, many of the “old timers” were still around and Nana had names and addresses. I asked Nana a lot of questions and wrote to her cousins around America, contacted local churches and begged for records and did the same with cemeteries. Little by little, I pieced together the family who lived Stateside.

Then, my dad’s cousin and I split a $200+ bill from the Czechoslovakian Embassy, who had a pile of records found in the archives.

What else is different about my paternal tree? Church records in the villages only go back to the late 1820s. Therefore, aside from adding new distant cousins I find to later generations, there are no more resources to search and that side of my tree will never be extended back any further than 3X great grands and three names of 4X great grands.

My Rusyn family were literally serfs before 1850 and had no opportunity for education or bettering their lives until the Industrial Revolution tapped them in the 1890s.

In summary, my father’s family tree happened through slow, local and personalized research and one giant step to the Czechoslovak archives that cost a pretty penny and took 18 months for a reply.

Now, my mother’s side of the tree was a completely different experience because, for the most part, my maternal grandparents were descended from colonial New England families. Yes, I had some Loyalists thrown in the mix, plus one Danish great grandmother and a 5X great grandfather from the Netherlands, but my research experience was completely different.

I still asked my grandmother questions and I had my grandfather’s cousin, Charles, mentoring me along the way, but, often, I used the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s book loan program by U.S. mail and found generations of family members in huge batches.

I also spent hours in the Pomona Public Library, the Los Angeles Public Library and the Los Angeles Family History Center whenever I could get to them. I absolutely loved the NEHGS journal The Register because so many articles had been published about my ancestors.

After 46 years of researching, the maternal branches of the family tree extend as far back as 15 generations, thanks to a few ancestors living in the 1300s and 1400s who left wills and probates that allowed professional researchers to piece together those families and share their findings.

Overall, I think I’m a perfect example of the American “melting pot.”

What about your tree? Do you have overlapping families, completely separate lines like mine or is your tree somewhere in a the middle with just a touch of common ancestors?