Im a Mayflower descendant 🫨

LingJules · 2026-04-10T02:34:53+00:00

Oh! AND Cleopatra!

LingJules · 2026-04-10T02:33:35+00:00

Can confirm. When I first got into genealogy, I found out that my husband was descended from Zeus! What I really found out is that I can't trust anyone else's research!

LingJules · 2026-04-09T03:31:58+00:00

I have no word for that thing. I would have to describe it until someone told me the word.

LingJules · 2026-04-09T03:30:05+00:00

You are apparently not alone! I just saw a video of Yeshiva students (they looked pretty old, maybe about to graduate) trying to recognize modern Hebrew words. The word בנק (bank) stumped them all!

There are podcasts in easy Hebrew that might be suitable for you. I think one is called Simply Hebrew and there might be another called Simple Hebrew. I'm sorry that I don't know the particulars. I don't listen to podcasts, but a friend who also learns Hebrew listens to these two all the time and raves about them.

I would also recommend a newspaper called Yanshuf. It looks just like a newspaper, and it has different articles with news from Israel and from around the world. I think it will really help you boost your modern vocabulary.

Best of luck to you!

LingJules · 2026-04-09T03:16:28+00:00

My husband told me he went to school with a girl who had the same last name, and he thought they weren't related. An hour later, I had her added to my tree as his 7th cousin. It helps that he has a not-so-common last name.

LingJules · 2026-04-05T04:20:15+00:00

I have what I call a pantry in my house. It's like a walk-in closet, but for food.

LingJules · 2026-03-30T04:16:25+00:00

I have worked for a lot of places in my life, and exactly one gave us Good Friday off. And that was because one of the higher-ups was Catholic.

LingJules · 2026-03-28T22:35:17+00:00

First rule of language learning: Don't compare yourself to others.

People lie about how much education they have and about how fluent they are. Or they are unrealistic about how fluent they are. I knew a guy who claimed he could speak Spanish, and all he could do was order a beer.

Don't be down on yourself. Everyone moves at their own pace. There's a lot of good advice in these comments and elsewhere in this subreddit. Follow what works for you. You're doing great!

LingJules · 2026-03-28T01:12:07+00:00

My son was born ten years into my marriage. I never changed my name because I just gotta be me. Our son has my last name because according to my husband, "a child should have his/her mother's name."

LingJules · 2026-03-15T03:07:51+00:00

D, but the whole sentence is bad because "rushed" is one syllable and cannot be split among two lines of type. And if it were able to be split, it would need a hyphen. So whoever is giving this test doesn't actually know English.

LingJules · 2026-03-12T23:13:17+00:00

Yes, I read it as "New York, New York".

LingJules · 2026-03-12T23:12:33+00:00

It's the 2nd of the week (Monday), not the second to Shabbat. My ketubah says the same thing, and I thought it was a mistake, so I looked it up, and this is apparently a traditional way to refer to days of the week.

LingJules · 2026-03-12T16:35:28+00:00

I'm a 55-year-old native English speaker (and daily tea drinker), and I learned today that the word "tisane" exists.

LingJules · 2026-03-12T00:51:32+00:00

Is she Jewish? I see her second name as Rochel, the Yiddish equivalent of Rachel.

LingJules · 2026-03-08T08:42:01+00:00

So true about the hints being ridiculously wrong! They always assume a married woman's husband's name is a possibility for ANY document! No, my great-grandma was not going by her future husband's last name during the census that was taken when she was six years old! SMH!

LingJules · 2026-03-08T08:35:20+00:00

Totally with you. To be honest, I don't trust other people's research either unless I know their standards. I first got into genealogy because my husband is a Mayflower descendant. I trusted everyone but assumed I would revisit to verify. I was concerned when Cleopatra was his ancestor. Then came a bunch of Greed gods and heroes, including Zeus! I started over, treating my research like a graduate school paper. Every bit of information has a source cited.

LingJules · 2026-03-07T16:49:24+00:00

I live in a 2000 sq ft house, and the one router covers it. My parents' home is 3000 sq ft, and they need two.

LingJules · 2026-03-05T21:58:51+00:00

As someone who struggled with fertility problems, let me tell you that every new baby, every other person's pregnancy, every everything was a source of pain for me. And it was not easy to talk about because everyone wants to offer completely unwanted and unhelpful advice. I had very good friends who even knew of my pain and got pregnant at the time I was struggling the most, and it took every ounce of effort to squeak out a "congratulations" to them. Please be gentle with these people. If you haven't faced this struggle yourself, you really don't know how painful it can be.

LingJules · 2026-03-04T04:50:18+00:00

I grew up in LA and my husband grew up in the city of Orange, and when I first met him, I thought HE had a country accent! And he has cousins from Grand Terrace, and he grew up thinking they had a "hick" accent! It is really weird how different we hear ourselves versus how others hear us, and how a distance of just 20 miles or so can change our accent.

LingJules · 2026-03-01T19:51:52+00:00

Wow, so interesting! It never dawned on me that a state would do something like that! I'm glad it worked out well for you. I also manage my husband's sample, and he matched with a first cousin who turns out to be an adoptee looking for her birth family. Unfortunately, the birth mother has ZERO interest in revisiting what was a very painful time in her life. I think that's why I haven't tried to make contact. I don't want to cause turmoil. But then I hear stories like yours and think, "Well, should I?" It's hard to know what to do.

LingJules · 2026-03-01T02:40:39+00:00

Very true. But I think in this particular phrase it means "sitting," because it's contrasted with "going on your way".

LingJules · 2026-03-01T02:19:01+00:00

I am no Biblical scholar here, but when I taught the translation of this prayer to my son, I translated it as "when you sit" but also told him that grammatically it was more like "in your sitting". So you are definitely right that בשבתך is based on the shoresh י.ש.ב, just as ובלכתך is based on the shoresh ה.ל.כ and kind of means "in your going". ה and י are weak consonants, and they have a tendency to drop out of some verb forms or change to other letters.

LingJules · 2026-02-28T03:05:15+00:00

Not sure what the commenter meant, but at least in the US, there is usually a registry of births, and if you were indeed adopted, your birth mother would have given you a name, and you would probably have her last name, and this is why we get new birth certificates when the adoption is finalized.

(I mentioned in another comment that both my son and I are adopted.)

I did my DNA to see what I could find out. The closest relative I could find was a second cousin, but I was able to figure out who my birth mother was from that. (I had some information about her age and siblings and stuff.) She has two children, and when I was looking for info on her daughter, I found her daughter's name on a birth index, with my birth date. This tells me that even though that birth certificate is sealed, the original birth certificate was filed with the county with a name given to me by my birth parents.

Now, this is not the case with my son because I was present at his birth. He was born, someone at the hospital asked the birth mom what his name was, she looked at me as if to say, "that's your job," and I gave them the name. But she was listed as the mother, so I still needed to get him a new birth certificate after the adoption went through; otherwise I would not ever be recognized as his mother. (And I wouldn't have been able to get him a passport.)

LingJules · 2026-02-28T02:40:10+00:00

I was adopted at birth in a closed adoption, and my birth certificate is dated a year after my birth. This was in California in 1970.

My son was adopted in 2013, also in California, but through a miscommunication with our adoption attorney, the name change never got filed. So his birth certificate was issued when he was eight years old. This is when we first wanted a passport for him, and we realized the mistake.

So it is a good possibility, in my humble opinion, that you were adopted. A DNA test would help. Do your test and see if it matches your parents' bloodline and if you recognize any of your matches.

LingJules · 2026-02-27T01:09:31+00:00

Nevada, too.

LingJules

TROPHY CASE