Comment by showmenemelda on 02/02/2025 at 20:53 UTC

2 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)

Generations of people who lived in Montana and had children here. One side of my family homesteaded, and the other mainly with the railroad. One branch of the tree in particular i counted back 35 generations—not to montana/USA obviously, but my great grandfather came to MT working for the Milwaukee RR. His lineage makes me a Mayflower descendent but it goes back to like 1200 or earlier. It's incomprehensible to my brain.

If you're fortune enough to have traceable lineage, the familysearch.org website and app is FASCINATING. I wish I'd been able to do all this when both my grandpas were alive.

But I am the 5th generation of our family's ranch and my sister's kids are now the 6th. My dad was the 4th,y grandpa the third, his dad the 1st (my great grandpa), and his father (my great great grandpa) was 1st generation for the homestead and coming to MT (from NY where he was born and so on)

But once I started tracing back to freaking shields of royalty and names that sounded like bodily functions, it occurred to me it's not necessarily a "good" thing to trace that far back—the implications are grim (people "owning" people, exploitation, etc). It is really special to be able to understand the lore i heard as a kid. And to be able to see documentation, photos, etc. Not everyone is as lucky as I am and I recognize it's the epitome of privilege in a lot of ways.

Regardless, it exists, it's part of my DNA and it's interesting to learn. The census data can tell an entirely different story because a lot can change in 10 years so that's why it's nice to have people you can ask while they're still alive.

The best way to understand this from a Montana perspective is [hate to say it] the Taylor Sheridan franchise. 1883, 1923, Yellowstone. Those are a really good sequence of events to understand your question. It has "easter eggs" too. Specific antiques, accessories, etc are re-used thru the series as they are passed down in my family too.

It's not exactly the "flex" it sounds like though. I fully acknowledge that homesteading was just colonizing stolen land. And there is a whole different level of corruption once the white settlers came. A lot of interesting info to be gleaned from the death records too. The wild west was no exaggeration. I really encourage you to watch the aforementioned series even tho Taylor Sheridan is partially responsible for the downfall of MT (ha!) and some MT municipalities. But it is a good depiction. You can also reference the Yellowstone Wiki [1] because sometimes Sheridan is sloppy and doesn't follow his own plots very well.

Comment by showmenemelda on 02/02/2025 at 20:53 UTC

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