I wonder if people in other states ask people where they are from all the time.  If you live in Illinois or Alabama, is it just assumed that you are from there?  Of course, here in California, most people are NOT from here, so that is a common conversation topic to get to know a new person.  That being said, I am often asked if I am from “here”, I think I must have enough of a California aura that people have a feeling.  I never quite know how to answer, in part because I am not sure exactly what it means to be from anywhere…and what does “here” mean to people?

So generally, I say “basically” then launch in to an explanation of what I mean.   “I was born in Santa Cruz, but mostly grew up in Sacramento.  I came to Berkeley for college in 1991 and have lived in the East Bay ever since.  I’ve lived in my current neighborhood since 1994.  My father and his mother were born in Pacific Grove, CA near Monterey. My father’s father was born in the Fresno area.  My mother was born in San Francisco and grew up on Sunnyvale, CA.”  My explanation is actually just many layers of demonstration that pretty much by anybody’s definition (except for the fact that I wasn’t born in Oakland), yes…I am from here.

I have never really known that much about my family.  We have a lot of fallen out parent-child relationships , bastard children, half-siblings and divorces.  My mother didn’t even know who her father was until a few years ago, shortly after he had died.  My paternal grandparents’ mobile home was destroyed in a flood in Soquel, CA in 1979, just after grandma had finished a family tree.  Family lore said that she had lost everything.

Apparently not all was lost. A few weeks ago, my brothers and I went down to Watsonville to go through the possessions that my father left behind.  There were a number of old photos and newspaper articles that we had no idea were in the family. Those remnants, along with all of the current technology has made reconstructing the tree my new obsession.  Some of the family lines are easy to follow, especially the paternal lines where there aren’t a lot of name changes.  In several places, I have been able to trace ancestors back to their arrival on the East Cost in the 1700’s.  This is helped by the fact that other people have done family trees on ancestry.com that I can glean information from.  Other lines, I am stuck at just a few generations back due to recent immigration or the presence of spotty records and multiple names.

Google has also supported my quest to get more information about my family, which is where I found the most exciting surprises. My great-grandfather (by birth, which is not my namesake), Andrew “Burt” Cudney had lived about 6 miles (as the crow flies) from where I live today.  I knew that he had been a ferry operator based on his clothing in a photo that I have of him. With a few google searches with variations of his name, I got several hits that panned out.

One was a San Francisco Call article where he is begging for a divorce from my great-grandmother, who was apparently crazy, like most women in my family.  He argued that she threw things at him and had cost him several jobs.  I found a patent for an automatic flash lamp attachment (he was a photographer) based in San Francisco in 1918.   Finally, I found a number of photos that he had taken that are now owned by the Oakland Museum.

I think I am drawn towards knowing more about him because he lived so close, although he is certainly the most controversial figure in that side of our family, which is intriguing, as well.  I have found nothing to sustain this, but rumor has it that Cudney died as a result of injuries sustained when taking a photo of one of the first cross-country flights landing.  Yes, he was hit by the plane.