Okay so as a little break from all the Emily stuff, I want to share the little autistic adventure I went through this afternoon. Amberlynn has always touted how she has Portuguese ancestry- an oddly specific place to claim ancestry from. I've seen some people doubt this claim because amber likes to make shit up, including that one time she awkwardly made her mom state that she was Portuguese to the camera. I've seen people speculate based off of mamalynn's appearance that she might be of native ancestry and that maybe the portuguese is supposed to cover that up? I'm not sure- I feel like if amber got a whiff of being able to claim to be an indian princess, she'd absolutely fly with it. anyways- One of my family member's big hobbies is geneology and I often help them with some legwork trying to connect people through newspaper scraps and census records and I decided to say fuck it and figure out if there was any truth to the portuguese thing because I can.
first thing i did was look up mamalynn's name on newspapers.com in Petaluma, which she states she's from on facebook. I couldn't find much with her name on it except this one story.
A clip from 2007. Sounds like something she'd do at the time. This gave me her age- born roughly 1969.
Plug that into ancestry.com-
Looks like she had another surname at some point. This is usually the thing that makes looking women's lineages hard. Through this though I found her birth record.
Again scant info, but birthdate, name, and location matches up. Fossell is grandma lynn's maiden name i guess. However, it's a deadend on ancestery.com, so I go back to newspapers
As it turns out, Fossell is a pretty uncommon surname and furthermore, the majority of hits *do* come from Petaluma.
As it turns out, a man named Eugene Fossell was a photographer and pressman for the local paper, which is pretty convinent. Now I need to see if this is the right family.
Looks like Eugene had a daughter named Eugenie. I tried looking for a Eugenie but couldn't find any and even wondered if this child died early on, only to realize that she could have gone by a nickname- which she had: Genie.
And would you look at that- Married to a Robert L Smith. (consequently they divorced in the 70s, but that doesn't matter to this narrative).
So now I have a connection from Amberlynn to her great grandparents, this inqury becomes much easier because the 1950s are the point that census records are publically available.
Looking at great grandpa eugene's parents, we get his father coming from polish stock and his mother coming directly from france.
So I stop looking down this line and start looking at his wife, Laurenda nee Medeiros, which is sounding pretty portuguese, ngl.
Then I follow her parents.
Well I'll be a monkey's uncle. There it is. Amberlynn does actually have portuguese ancestry through her mother's mother's mother.
Anyways idk why I did this and what I achieved by doing this, but there you go.
