Family Branches Emerge

I just found out that a few days after my grandfather's funeral, a distant relative gave my grandmother a copy of her family tree that had been floating around for years. I can't wait to get my hands on it--it traces her family all the way back to Wales, Holland, and England. Which is funny, because my grandfather, towards the end of his life, was obsessed with geneology and even wrote a book length study of one of his relatives, Thomas Bennett. (I mentioned this before, when I first wrote about his death.) But we never really talked much about Grandma's people. Perhaps because of this: her parents divorced when she was 5 and her father, a wealthy Welsh emigrant, ignored her for the rest of his life. She and her mother went to live with her grandparents (a couple who represented a genetic mix of Dutch, French and English ancestors), where she stayed until she went to nursing school and met my grandfather. She was an only child of an only child but Grandpa was the oldest of four exuberant brothers whose family roots reached down deep into the history of northeastern Pennsylvania.