I don't often talk about the fact that I'm an eager genealogical researcher/family historian even though I spend quite a bit of time looking into the history of my lines. Ironically, my entire family is pretty much... dead. I was raised by grandparents, and got into genealogy after their deaths. I'm 38 now and have explored most of my lines. I am almost entirely French on my mother's side, albeit with a bit of Welsh that she, also dead, likely did not know about. This line can be trace very far back due to the breadth of French Catholic records in my native province of Quebec.
My paternal line, derived from a father whom I am estranged from, is far more mysterious. My grandfather's line is Slovak and I have had some success in tracking it. While I continue to struggle due to the fact that the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire left some of the pertinent records in the Ukrainian archives in Uzghorod, I have yet to hit a brick wall on this line. My grandmother's line however is far more mysterious.
Joan Teresa Leonard (1933-2016), was the daughter of Thomas Nelson Leonard and Agnes McGee. Look, it's the civil registry version of their marriage certificate. We will get into this another time. Agnes' father was named Francis "Frank" McGee. As we will find out in subsequent posts, he is a mystery wrapped inside of a riddle, inside of an enigma. I have so many pieces of information about him, but no narrative of his life... As we'll soon find out, it doesn't help that he was a pathological liar...
A story of... absent fathers? TBC
