Houston-Kubow Ancestry

My ancestry is one of the hardest things I've ever tried to find. With most of it being missing on both sides, it was difficult to track and piece together. However, the pieces that I found were interesting, to say the least. 

Uncle Sam Houston, as seen in
the "I Want You" posters

My father was adopted with my aunt by a Ukrainian family shortly after being born. However, to this day, my baba and dido (grandma and grandpa) are still debating their past. We recently found a polish ancestor named Karol, who stayed with us for a weekend before resuming his tour around the world, seeking out our ancestors. When he did this, my baba started to rethink her Ukrainian roots. Before, she assumed that her and her family were strictly Ukrainian, her family moving to Canada to seek out a better life. Karol changed a lot when he visited.

With my dad's side being complicated, it doesn’t help that my mothers is even more so. My family ancestry is only known back to my great great grandmother on my mum's side, who immigrated from Germany, and my great great grandfather who, as far as we know, was from Canada. From there, my great grandmother was born in Canada and had 6 boys and 8 girls. My grandmother Norma had two children, one who died almost immediately after birth, the other is my mother, Daphne. My mother had two children, myself and my half-brother Aaron. Before that, my history is lost, aside from a few fragments. My grandmother told me that one of my ancestors married a slave, and ran away with them, starting a family. It isn't known for sure, but she said that the slave might have belonged to Sam Houston. For those of you who don't know how slavery worked, when a slave was bought, they automatically changed their last name to their owner, hence my distant relations to "Uncle Sam" Houston. Another one of the fragments is that Colonel John Butler is another one of my distant relatives. You can read hore about him here.

My ancestry doesn’t really matter to me, as it is a growing world. New traditions can be made as well as new memories. However, it is nice to keep traditions that I know and pass them along to my brothers or my own children. There are some traditions, like christian holidays, that I want to pass down, but others, like some traditional Ukrainian foods, that I don’t want my descendants to see as tradition or normality. For future generations, I’m the only relative that can carry on the Kubow and Houston bloodline and traditions, as my brother is only Houston. With this weight on my shoulders, I hope to carry on traditions from both bloodlines.

Works Cited

Houston, Norma. Interview. 1 Dec. 2017.

Ann