Delving into Family History aka Genealogy

Soon I will resume painting after a hiatus. Besides keeping up with family and friends and the occasional social event, my time has been consumed by four main areas this spring: garden, house, family history, and rest.
When I get antsy from researching and typing, I sort/clean a closet, vacuum/dust, bake/cook, and weed/plant... and I also like a nap now and then. 
I have discovered some very interesting things about my family background on both sides of the family. It is hard to describe the impact these discoveries have had on me. Knowing more about where my forbears lived and what remains of their lives and life stories - often very little - brings home the truth of how very important it is to make good use of each and every day we have during our very short time to live, and also to keep records that go beyond birth dates. Clerk's records do not a life describe!

Red dots represent where ancestors of our family came from.

My mother's father  - my grandfather in his garden- a feature article on him in
The Thermos News.

One of the four mills from my grandmother's family. 

My Great Uncle Fred was a mentor/friend of Eugene O'Neill the playwright and was the newspaperman and editor who gave him his first encouragement when he hired him to work for him as a reporter on the morning Telegraph in New London, CT.

Through my mother we are related to many of the founding families of Norwich Connecticut

My paternal side Grandmother worked at the Triangle Shirt waist factory but quit her job before the fire because she didn't like the management. She fought the fight with the likes of Samuel Gompers.

My Great Great Grandmother Rosina was related to the artist Peter Pelham who was stepfather to John Singleton Copley. An accomplished artist himself - he worked primarily in mezzotint engraving -  he taught Copley painting when a teenager in his home after Copley's widowed mother remarried to Pelham,
 my great-great-great-great-grandfather.

My father's father - my grandfather - was a singer and actor in the Jewish/Yiddish theater scene - Lower East Side, New York in the first two decades of the twentieth century. He performed with Molly Picone. 

My Great Great Grandfather took a clipper ship to California in in the Gold Rush by way of Cape Horn and kept an illustrated journal that was eventually published. I discovered a copy of the journal, a collectors item, recently sold at auction for almost $2,000. I wish I had one!  He also wrote of his trip to the Sandwich Islands - Hawaii.