How many generations or years can you trace your ancestors?
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Anonymous
Not my own maiden name, but my mom's maiden name (I won't say what it is, but maybe we're related??)--everyone in the US with this surname fits into the family tree. There were 2 people with the same surname who arrived in 1635 but nothing known of them after that, so they probably did not survive. Everyone else in the US came from a couple who moved from Nova Scotia to what is now the US in the early 1700s. The name is found in church records in England from the late 1500s and early 1600s but I don't know of anyone who has found the links between them and the US branch. There is also a South African branch and some in Canada. Someone did a genealogy in the 1940s for another long standing branch (my mom's paternal grandmother) that went back to at least the Revolutionary War although I have no idea what happened to it. My mom's cousin took on the genealogy task in the 1970s (he became disabled and never was able to fulfill his dream of traveling to England to research those records, and he died in the 1990s). A second cousin of mine (his niece) has put all the stuff online. Dh's family has never been as much into the stuff, but a relative of his has done a family tree from 1830 to present. His 4x (? I think) great grandfather owned a limestone quarry in southern Minnesota after starting in Iowa, and I found an online pic of his widow, at advanced age, standing in the doorway of their limestone house, which is now a county historical museum. They were Irish, and the tree shows a few generations where there are 10-12 kids and a lot of Patricks and Bridgets until they became white collar professionals and turned Presbyterian. There's census records you can see online as well. It's eerie because you can see the original writing of your ancestor's name, their kids, etc., and you know a census taker was at their house at a point in time taking that info. |
Anonymous
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Think about the fact that you are only here because of the people who survived being born, childhood, into adulthood. Think about the fact that this really, really does go back thousands, and tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands, years back, and then even further to pre-modern humans, further back to pre-hominid forebears, further and further to weird gloppy creatures oozing over mud flats or in oceans, and even further back. Think about ALL the organisms that had to survive long enough to reproduce so you could be here, and what they experienced and endured. It's mind blowing. Ancestors of yours survived plagues, famines, battles, didn't fall into holes in the ground into deep caves, didn't get sacrificed for religious purposes, didn't end up with a festering infection from a minor wound, didn't get lost as a child never to be found by anyone, didn't drown while fishing from a dugout. Seriously, how damned lucky are we??!!
To digress: if we get to see everyone when we die and go to heaven, does that mean we get to meet Lucy and also our yeast cousins? That would be one wild reunion. |
Anonymous
| Early 1800s for one. For another, the best I could do was a 1890s drunk and disorderly 10 days in jail in England, alongside a woman and child who were arrested for stealing coal. All Irish immigrants. |
Anonymous
| I can trace my Hispanic family back to 1600s (Mexican catholic records are great) and my husband’s family to 1600s as well. My interest is how world history relates to family history. How did a Virginian farm boy end up in Michigan married to a French-Canadian girl? He was a POW during the War of 1812 and was held near Fort Detroit. Why did a 16 year old French girl travel to New France on her own during the 1600s? She was a Fille du Roi. Historical events influenced family decisions such as when to marry, when to have children, and where to live and I use it to make history relatable to my kids. |
Anonymous
Absolutely. Poland is so difficult! Sometimes mixed Polish and Cyrillic, in cursive. Sometimes German and Latin church records. Too many people named Stanislaw. Too many Lewandowskis! |
Anonymous
Ah, do not fret m'dear! I know your heritage. Technically, once long ago, Keltoi lived in Central Europe and invaded the Balkans! Then they moved to what is today Spain and Ireland. Imagine being not just the savage Irish that the English conquered, but the despised Balkan people? ANd kind of German too? LOL! |
Anonymous
Whatever for? |
Anonymous
Not really. The British did not collect general information on Irish who were not landholders until the late 19th century—I think the death registries start around 1870 or so. Most of those records are still held by the Counties. Waterford County library has an excellent website — the death records are particularly useful. The griffiths valuations are also still intact but not useful for most poor people. The Catholic Church has baptism and wedding registries dating back many centuries. The Irish government has been in a process of digitizing them and making them searchable. They have a for-fee website to search them (it’s got an .ie ending) that is quite good but you need to puzzle out the priest’s handwriting and the Latin. |
Anonymous
| Two of my relatives from the 1600s had large families 11 & 13 many who lived. That makes a VERY large family tree. |
Anonymous
| Using Family Search and Ancestry, I can trace my dad's mother's family to Scotland to 1058. I can trace my dad's father's family to Germany in the 1700s. I can trace my mom's family to England in the 1500's |
Anonymous
Why wouldn’t PP be proud? |
Anonymous
Well, you know death and destruction? |
Anonymous
NP. That's kind of bigoted. Germany has made many positive contributions to world culture in music, philosophy, art, engineering and science. The United States hasn't been less genocidal than Germany. We just didn't lose a war and get held to task for it. |
Anonymous
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I know very little about the Italian side of my family. My great grandparents came through Ellis island. It’s hazy prior to that. They Americanized their names.
I don’t really care about the white, southern family. Once I learned they fought for the confederacy, I was over it. |
Anonymous
Aren't we kind of doing that now to ourselves? Acknowledging that settlers nad the gov committed a genocide, was not democratic and used the disguised of fighting to democracy and freedom to invade, murder, and achieve economic prosperity? |