Random Acts of Adulthood

In 2001 I signed up with Ancestry.com for the first time. I say "first time" because I have cancelled and rejoined countless times over the past 19 years as my budget allowed.  At that time, I still couldn't find a damn thing about my Dad's family beyond what I already knew. All Ancestry had at the time was the info I put into my tree myself. Since 2001, genealogy resources have grown in leaps and bounds. This is in part because more people are using sites like Ancestry.com. Other reasons, I'd say, are the digitalization and indexing of old records from around the world, as well as increased access via the internet to heritage groups and fellow researchers. Around 2013 I learned about setting up Google Alerts (you choose keyword(s) and Google emails you when it gets new hits on that) I had set some up for the last names in my tree. Lo and behold, one day I got a notification that Google had a link for me to check out related to Tscherne.  It didn't have ...

If you grew up with an uncommon, oddly spelled or hard to pronounce last name, you're in good company.  With a name like "Tscherne" you can probably imagine all the ways people have attempted to pronounce it and all the incorrect spellings people came up with. My siblings and I would typically have to have pity on the poor person trying to figure out how to make sounds consistent with a last name with 6 consonants and 2 vowels, one of those vowels only finally coming into the mix after 4 consonants.  I can't tell you how many times we all went through hearing things like "Next up is (first name) T...Tch...Tich....Ch....Sh...Tuh...Tech..." and us finally just standing up so the person could catch a break from having to settle on some collection of sounds that never resembled how we actually pronounced it (which is "Tish-ern"). I was always curious about our name and where our ancestors came from. The only people I'd ever heard of with our na...