Watched Blackfish this morning. Very interesting from all aspects. Well done.
I still need to watch Blackfish. I found out one of the former SeaWorld trainers interviewed in that movie (Samantha Berg) is my long-lost cousin. Kinda strange how I found out...
Last year I was doing some digging on Ancestry.com trying to trace my family tree. I started looking at old census and military documents of my Great Grandfather from 1910, 1920, 1930, etc. We thought he only had two kids... my grandfather and his brother. But on a couple of those old documents, it seemed to suggest there was a third kid... a daughter named Gertrude. My Grandfather is 94 right now. I called him up and asked if he ever had a sister name Gertrude. I thought maybe she passed away young or something. He said no. I dug deeper. Turns out my Great-Grandfather had an earlier marriage none of us knew about. His young wife had a baby girl and then died a month after childbirth from complications. For reasons I can only speculate, the baby (Gertrude) ended up being raised by her mother's family... seemingly abandoned by my Great-Grandfather. He then went on to have a second marriage... they had my Grandfather and his brother... and nobody had any idea there was an abandoned half-sister named Gertrude. Sad times.
So anyways, I had the name of my grandfather's lost sister and a rough idea of when she was born (having seen the mother's death certificate)... so I started going through census documents trying to trace Gertrude's steps from 1916 onward. At some point she disappeared from the records... so I had a hunch that maybe Gertrude got married. I started looking for marriage records. I found one that seemed to match her name/birthdate/birth location. She married a man with the last name Berg. So then I started trying to find records in her married name. Eventually I found a death record from 2008 that seemed like it might be the right person. I then searched Google for obituaries. I came across an Obituary that listed the name of the surviving daughter and grandchildren of a woman who may or may not have been the Gertrude I was looking for. Then I hopped on Facebook and tried to track down the grandchildren listed in the obituary. Eventually I came across Samantha Berg... I awkwardly explained who I was and how I found her. I relayed some information I knew... she confirmed a bunch of details... it was indeed the correct Gertrude. From my research, I was able to fill them in on all sorts of details about the family that they weren't aware of. Her family seemed to appreciate it. So Samantha's grandmother (Grandmother) and my grandfather were half-siblings. It's a shame Gertrude passed away in 2008... my grandfather is still around.
Anyways... Samantha is my facebook friend now. I saw her post some status update about "Blackfish" recently. Apparently she's one of the main people featured in that movie. I've heard good things about it. It's on my Netflix queue.
And as for the whole "family tree" thing... if anyone has ever considered doing it, I totally recommend it. Don't put it off... especially if you have grandparents that are still around. There are so many details they can share with you that will help you on your search. Don't let it fade away and die with them. I found it to be a really interesting experience. I found all sorts of information on both sides of my family... some interesting stuff. Some heartbreaking stuff. Some dark family secrets. Some awesome stuff. I think it's good to have some perspective on where you came from and what bizarre series of events lead to you wasting large chunks of your privileged First World life on Celticsblog.
Topic: What's the Last Movie You Watched? (Read 959072 times)