Jianhua's Green Oil

the other thread http://davesgarden.com/s/352523.html#new , has been too long. it hard to open which is why i am starting this one.

thank you ma vie, i was getting irritated with waiting for it to open too, and i can see it's gonna continue for a while...

it won't surprise me, basing on all the help u get from Jianhua to find ur next of kin. i hope it turns fruitful for ur mother's sake. good luck!

thank you ma vie...hey, did you want me to send the white one also (i forgot what that plant was called...the pink one)

yes and thank u. am having senior moments here LOL. i do not remember either, but u called it pine cone plant.

If there is a bottle left, I would be happy to send money for it, or anything desirable from USA. If not, I understand. Jianhua, you are one of a kind! The help you are giving Meiyu is priceless, and can only come from an individual's goodness, and you just held out your hand to her and gave it. What a kindness you have extended across the seas. I hope you are successful, and that the family is able to meet you in person to show their appreciation. I am trying to keep up here to watch this miracle. I have had difficulty locating records of ancestors born right here in the good old USA, so this is truly astounding to watch your efforts to locate that needle in the vast haystack of China.

Aimée... i could just imagine the 'red tape' Jianhua has to go through. those long 'red tape' is so horrendous and rediculous! unless one had the experienced to deal with records in the asian countries, they would not and can not comprehend the hassles one has to go through. the sad thing is people are wary to post this kind of info on the net. otherwise, it would make the research far more easier.

come to think of it, by comparison to China mainland, the Phils. is merely a small dot in the huge area China covers!

Jianhua is so sweetest man my dear friend. He has beautiful outside and inside. =) I can tell.

I would love a bottle also if one more is available. My Father had several kinds of salve that he used up that were bought in China before WW11. He said that they were all better than anything he ever got in the USA. I love Tiger balm and use if for the uses that JianHua said to use it for. Thank you Jianhua for any help you give us on this. Lani

Gosh, jianhua, you're becoming quite the hero here...no matter what you may or may not be able to find out, I think you've got the DG's kindest soul award!!!

Aimee, if you never tracked your ancestors' records down, I'm quite good at that kind of thing, and have a membership with ancestry.com...the one where you get to look at census reports, etc. I could certainly help you!!! I was also a private investigator for years, so I know a bit about searches...hehe!!! Feel free to email me.

Meiyu, you are very kind to offer. However, the problem is in the kind of ancestors I have. They were Smiths! On three sides! Many of my ancestors were American Indians, and they deliberately clouded records or avoided them in order to avoid being sent to reservations. So a man might marry an Indian woman and never give her maiden name, and there might never have been a birth certificate or school records. In other words, the women were never officially recognized and recorded in any way except as John's wife. One grandfather apparently married three different women, producing children by two of them, but the wives' names never were entered anywhere except by a first name which might have been a nickname. For instance, one wife was Libby, maybe, and the next one was Elizabeth, but no document gives more than that. It's unclear when and where he married Libby, or if she is Elizabeth and there was a delayed recording of the marriage. Then he married a third woman, who can't be traced because of many different spellings of her maiden name and few of them actually documented, that being by word of mouth. Many of my ancestors were born in the country in some southern state, were never registered because of fear of being "discovered", lived and died without ever going to school or holding a job that involved paper work, never paid or received social security, as it wasn't in existence yet, and simply passed through the world with no papers. If they weren't property owners, a census might just list them as "Jane, housekeeper" or "male of uncertain age, farm helper". I have tried the census reports, my sister has spent three years researching those and the Mormon records, but when a person was simply never on paper, it becomes almost impossible to find them after the people who actually knew them are gone. Some were listed by more recent ancestors in attempts to compile a record, but with mispelled names, conflicting birth and/or death dates, nothing that will tie together. Some were apparently buried in private, unmarked graves, or with a natural stone with the scantest of facts hand carved on it. Sometimes cemetery records were entered erroneously, and were the only public record available except for something someone told a census worker, possibly in error. I thought I had found some pertinent data recently, only to learn that it was a different line of Smiths with many similar first and middle names. I will email you some of what I have in a few days, and would welcome any input, but unless someone can find a living relative who has information we haven't known before, I am afraid we have a permanent brick wall here. Even my own birth certificate is incorrect, and my first, illegible, name is stricken through, then an illegible name written in above. I think this is one reason I was so interested in a project in the Middle East to modernize records and include the births of female children with full information. Somewhere, someday, it becomes important to someone, especially in view of the many uses of genetic records now. Thank you for your enthusiastic response. It can only come from someone who knows about this paper hole.

hmmm...interesting aimee. i hope you are taking steps to have your own birth records made legible and with correct spelling, just in case someone wants to find out who you were 100 years from now!! i would still like to see more specific information, if you'd like to share. i have never researched native american ancestry, and never considered all those difficulties. it's very interesting to me.

i will tell you a funny story, speaking of common names and maiden names. i searched for a woman's mother who had been stolen several decades ago, and raised all her life in another country. i had a lot of difficulty tracking her down, and didn't even know what her name might me now or how many times it may have changed over the years. when i found out that there may have been a half-brother, i got very excited, because i knew he would have the same name now and always. when i found out what his name was, you wouldn't believe it, but there are thousands with the same first and last name as his, just in this state alone!! just when i thought i'd gotten a big break, right??? hahaha!!! oh, well, it took a very long time, almost a full year, but i did reunite these families in march of 1997...i still don't know how, but i stuck with it and did it. it was truly cool.

That sounds like my own family! Smith is the most common name, but no one should have a mother whose father was a Smith, a maternal grandmother whose mother was a Smith but with no record of birth and a father who also was never born, and a paternal grandmother whose grandmother was said to be a Smith but isn't recorded anywhere, apparently because she was born hours after her mother landed without papers (WOP, officially), then was lost for years or forever in records.

My birth certificate - no, I haven't changed anything. The pertinent information, such as last names and birthplace and dob, are accurate enough to work, and my name is now in dispute. Oddly enough, my mother has an inconsistent memory when it comes to these things. She told me for years that I was supposed to be named after my aunt Amy, Daddy's sister, but that the recording clerk had made an error in spelling it as you see my member name. (When they were younger, they were friends. Much water passed under the old bridge in the past few decades, and bad blood developed in some quarters. My mother began to say I wasn't named after her, and that was why the spelling was different.) It looks like she might have written "Anise" or something similar. The document was apparently returned, but Mama doesn't recall that it was. Someone wrote yet another questionable name. Neither is really definite. Mama would have to make the correction, since she is the living parent, but she is just not dependable. If I do it, I have to spend a lot of money and actually file in the parish of my birth, since I am not a Louisiana resident any longer, a Texas court, at greater expense or in New Orleans, as if I am asking for a legal name change. Since it's not legible, it's whatever I say it is unless someone questions it, and they would have to prove it wasn't as I said. When I ask for a copy, I give the date and my parents' names, and I get the right one. I still have the original, the old black and white one called a photostatic copy. When Mama passes away, I will correct it, as at that time there will be no one alive but me with the information. (She always registered me in school as having the first name of Grace so I wouldn't be called Aimee!) I have used Aimee and Aimée on documents for years, which would prevail in lieu of any dissenting document. I do have files with enough information, such as licenses and certificates and other records in connection with school and work, to back up the change. When it's not a costly thing I will do the rest. Mama, meanwhile, still calls me Amy Grace, spells it Aimee, not my preference, and tells a variety of stories about it. The original document is close enough that it won't prove to be a problem to anyone needing to track me through history. Geez, why do I suddenly feel like this is familial or genetic, this clouding of records?

hahaha...maybe your parents were in a witness protection program, and couldn't remember what name the feds assigned them for you!!!

seriously, though, i think this is all very interesting. so your daddy's side is native american and your mother is from where? what is WOP? sounds like your mom is getting like mine...thank goodness she still remembers who i am!! most of her stories are confused also, and she thinks my daddy escaped his grave and now lives three houses down with another woman and their baby. it gets pretty scary when it's not just forgetfulness anymore.

you have mail, by the way!

No, I misled you, I guess. Mama's great-grandfather married an Indian woman, it appears. We knew there was an Indian in the woodpile, but never knew who. But he married often. All we know is first names. Absolutely no trace of the first license, and only the first name of the second wife. This is way too lengthy for me to go on, so will try to get the mail. Anyway, WOP is what was stamped on the entry records of Italians who came over "without papers". Got it? Consequently, Italians in Louisiana have been called Wops, and there is a famous salad on many Italian restaurant menus called a wop salad. It wasn't a name they liked, having been used in an unflattering and unfriendly manner, so I was surprised when the name actually was printed. We believe Daddy's line goes back to Scotland, or so one of his siblings wrote in a questionable history she published many years ago. They are given to pretentiousness, and would never lay claim to the likely Nova Scotia bloodline, but I am convinced it's valid. I will give you some names and let you work yourself into fits, okay? Don't say I didn't warn you, this is not a case of likely royalty in the wings. More likely, knaves and such.

jeepers, aimee...when do you sleep?? hahaha!! you're pullin' a joydie1 on me tonight!!...gotta go back and read your note now, brb

oh, yeah...i was just tired, i guess, and forgot that about the ggf and the wives. your bloodline stories sure make for interesting reading, however. send me an email sometime, and i'll play with it in my spare time...it'll be interesting for me to look at. your mix sounds like mine...i've got irish (with some english and scottish) on daddy's side, and japanese/chinese on mama's.

As a follow up for those who have read this far, and as an apology to Jianhua for sabotaging his thread, we emailed, and will post if she finds anything! Many of you have already read some of this in previous posts, when Roadrunner and others found long lost cousins and such, and one of them even turned up in my Union Parish records. Hi, Jim Bryan!

Aimee, I am very interested in what you can find out.My maiden name is also Smith and I have come to a dead end with grandfather. There is also a full blooded Indian woman who was married to one of them and it was like a big secret or a disgrace. He lived in Ms. at one time them here in La. where he is buried. I can`t seem to get past his mother, Ada. He was Thomas Levi Smith.

Maybe DG needs a genealogy forum -- there are lots of folks who would like to know more about how to search for their roots.

Busybee, we have both Ada and Thomas in our tree at least once!! I am not sure where Ada is in the records, but Thomas was my paternal grandfather and that was his son's name as well. But the middle name of that grandfather is Martin. I have a file on a Levi Smith, going back to the Civil War and some folks in Arkansas. Cute little guy younger than me sent it to me. He has researched it for several years and is a most entertaining writer. I spoke with him on the phone a couple of times when he came back into the country from his oil field job. If you're interested, I will try to send it to you. Might not be connected, and that might be where I remember Ada from. Are you my next cousin??? Everytime genealogy comes up here, there seem to be some cousin connections that turn up.

aimee and busybee..that's pretty wild. when i was reading busybee's entry, i was thinking could it be they're related?? i think i must've recognized the name, aimee. and maybe the signs again? i haven't checked my mail yet today, it's been a busy and exciting day for me, and i worked in the garden til 2 am!! (of course i was in bed until almost 2 pm yesterday afternoon, so i had to make up for it...hahaha...i'm nocturnal, as it appears aimee is also!) if you've written me today, please don't think i'm ignoring!!! i'm going to be swamped with work (new arena opening soon) for almost a week, aimee...and everyone else if i don't get back to ya right away, k?

Thanks, Mavierose,
For green oil picture,see---
http://davesgarden.com/s/359293.html