Reduce My Overhead to Fund an Exploration into Personal Mendelian Madness

Late in her life, my maternal grandmother and I became friends in addition to being relatives. I spent time with her socially, getting to know her friends which framed her in an entirely new light for me. One of my great regrets is that I did not spend more time learning my Scottish genealogy from her...and my grandfather for that matter. I remember bits and pieces of oral history: relatives dispersed on arrival in North America to Canada and Boston, family gone to South Africa. I recently freed family photographs dating back to the beginnings of photography from basement shoeboxes and have been using all of my professional skills to catalogue them. Without access to my grandmother's mental archive, I've been applying principles of archaeological seriation to identify individuals and places in the photographs. A very big project indeed.

Resolution #3 is to travel to New Caledonia, the place of my father's birth, later this year, while I can still collect oral histories from my grand-aunt and my paternal, biological grandfather. Through public records, I've been able to piece together a bit about my paternal grandmother's lineage back to Bretagne and Haut-Saône in France in the late 1700s...my living family may not even know of this. Makes sense, as many inhabitants of the island descend from French convicts sent to paradise or farmers sold a bill of governmental goods about paradise. Right now, I can only speculate about which stock I descend from...

My paternal grandfather's history is a complete mystery right now. My father only learned the identity of his biological father about ten years ago (a story for another post). I am intrigued by his surname, Stumpf, and by his South Asian features. I am hoping he and his family (my family) can fill in some blanks. For that, I will need to aggressively improve my basic French. Any suggestions would be most welcome.

This will be an expensive trip in terms of what I have to save and some inevitable un-paid time off. So, my sub-goals will be to cut what I spend and produce more income. I am going to be a socially-dull and professionally very busy friend this year. I'll still make time to read Julie's wonderful blog about life in New Caledonia, a source of great motivation.