Genealogical data for Bertrand

Being among family here in Georgia has led to an unexpected treasure trove of genealogical data for Bertrand. We now have centuries of names and dates to track down for causes of death and symptoms of genetic disorders like Bertrand's. (It also seems that I am roughly 50% German--not the 25% I'd once thought.)

Mights are rare in the United States, and now I know why. A sole Might came to the American colonies, and we are all descended from him.

A nurse here in Georgia named Robert John Might bumped into my local relatives while they were at his hospital. He spoke with my grandfather, who's been doing extensive genealogical work on the family over the past two decades. My grandfather had traced American Mights back to the early 1800s, but the nurse had the whole family tree (containing even my grandfather) going back to the first Might in the United States---John Might, born in Prussia (now Germany) in 1757. He had what appears to be maternal history on John Might going back deep into the early 1600s. (I suspect that "John Might" is actually an anglisation of a German name.)

That original John Might came to the colonies to fight with the British as a mercenary. At some point, however, he switched sides and fought with a North Carolinian regiment during the Revolutionary War, beginning a long and unbroken sequence of Mights in the U.S. military. In peacetime, Mights had been farmers in Ohio until the end of WWII, when my grandfather, my father, his siblings and some of his cousins began a small diaspora. Because so many of Bertrand's ancestors and their relatives were in the U.S. military, we may be able to find medical records for them, and perhaps, clues for the origins of Bertrand's disorder.