Tell me about your family tree

[Omega Glory]

The new NBC show on genealogy made me start thinking about the subject. How many generations back have you been able to trace your relatives? Has anyone found anything interesting, or been able to confirm or disprove things that were rumored to be true? Or, have tips for posters who are interested in doing this kind of research but are just starting out? Feel free to share anything that would fit in this kind of thread.

[RealityChuck]

On my father's side, to my great grandparents. Same on my mother's side.

The only really interesting thing is that my great grandmother's maiden name was the same as my wife's maiden name. Since the name is very rare (it doesn't appear on the list of top 10,000 names in the US), it's a strange coincidence.

[silenus]

Well, Mom is a pretty good amateur genealogist and an ex-librarian, so we have a pretty extensive knowledge of our family tree, termites and all. She's traced my paternal line back to the early 1800s in Germany, where the family were farmers who moved to the Ukraine until they got fed up with the Tsar and headed back to Germany (or France. The family hails from Alsace, which is either French or German, depending on who won the last war.)

The maternal line she has traced back to the 1600s in Scotland, where we are related to the most hated man in the Highlands. That group got deported to Ireland, then lit out for the colonies at the earliest opportunity. We had people over on this side of the Atlantic before the founding of Jamestown. All farmers and horse-thieves.

[Bearflag70]

I recently traced one branch back to the year 900 or so.

Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Harry Truman, and Charles Goodnight (the guy who invented the chuck wagon) are all distant cousins of mine (and of each other for that matter).

I am only recently discovering one of my grandmothers had a different birth name than the name I knew her as since I was born. I also recently found out she had three brothers, two of whom committed suicide by self inflicted gunshot about 10 years apart from each other well before I was born. None of my relatives told me this stuff before, even when I asked them about our family tree years ago.

I found one relative who was a Revolutionary War soldier and another who was a soldier in the battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812. Another was a Confederate soldier in the Civil War.

I can't locate my father's father's father in cursory research at Ancestry.com. It's frustrating because the research on my own my family name stops cold only a couple of generations back.

I'm just now getting into the family tree so I don't have a lot of stories, just a list of names and dates. Getting some conext would be nice.

[Oslo Ostragoth]

A relative managed to trace a certain branch back to 1400's (or was it 1600's?) Germany.

I really would like to learn more about it, what with the internets and all.

[Oslo Ostragoth]

Originally Posted by silenus

We had people over on this side of the Atlantic before the founding of Jamestown. All farmers and horse-thieves.

Too many years since high school history. What was before Jamestown?

[jasg]

I can trace one or more lines from all four grandparents back to at least the 1600's in Scotland, England, France and the Netherlands.

A couple of ancestors were in the Revolutionary War, likewise Civil War. One a Battle of Dunbar Scottish POW sent here by the English in the 1600's, one was in the first settlement allowed by the Dutch on Long Island. One ggggg-uncle went west in the Pike expedition.

[Hokkaido Brit]

My husband's family is directly traceable back to the late 700's because they are from a line of priests of an ancient temple in the north of Japan. Luckily their records survive mostly intact. I am not sure of how much actual blood still runs in their veins because there's been a whole lot of adoption going on through the generations to ensure the line. Most of the adoptions were of family members such as nephews and brothers but still... Our name isn't actually the same as the rest of them any more for the same reason. VERY complicated! (But all documented in detail, with original names and lineages.)

My grandfather traced our English family back to the late 1600's. There were some cool names back then - a man named Griffin and a woman named Easter, among them.

[Hilarity N. Suze]

One my mother's side, back to England. (The Mayflower? Missed it by that much. Seriously. My ancestor's brother came over on the original MF. My ancestor got to Plimoth eventually, though.)

Father's side: Great grandparents. (Mine, not his.)

The thing is, once you go back 4 generations, to the round of 16, I feel absolutely zero connection to these people. I figure they wouldn't particularly care about me, either.

[Maastricht]

Originally Posted by Hilarity N. Suze

The thing is, once you go back 4 generations, to the round of 16, I feel absolutely zero connection to these people. I figure they wouldn't particularly care about me, either.

You're right , of course. Still, it is nice to see what kind of people they were, waht "breeding stock" you come from. But for that, you need more then names, you would also want details like professions, reputation, that kind of thing.

Me, I have photo's and names and lots of detailed info up untill my great grandparents.

[Nava]

Carlos II of Spain (actually, Carlos II of the Kingdoms of Aragon, Carlos II of the Kingdom of Castille and Carlos IV-should-have-been-V of the Kingdom of Navarre, but who's counting?) died childless in 1700.

Castille had no clear heir; the closest heir for Aragon was an Englishman; the heir of Navarre was Louis XIV of France, who promptly passed the inheritance to his grandson Philip and made him a loan of an army or two. After a few battles and many discussions, Philip became Felipe V of Spain (actually, of Castille and of Navarre separatedly); he declared Aragon "conquered land", destroying their legal systems, parliaments, etc. He tried to do the same to Navarre, Guipuzcoa, Alava and Vizcaya, which had Parliaments and laws of their own, but he couldn't: to Navarre, because it was the Kingdom which had gotten his ass on a throne (so in any case, he would have had to declare Castille conquered land, but the legal system of Castille was more "monarchist" than the Navarrese); to the other three, because they had been a part of Castille for centuries and their separate Parliaments were therefore an integral part of Castillian law.

So he came up with the notion of making anybody who claimed he could sit in any of those four Parliaments prove it. There were two rounds of these so-called "probanzas de sangre" (lit. "proof of bloodline"). Many of the families affected, after having to dig in records from when people wrote in Latin, have been keeping family trees since.

On my mother's side of the family, I can only get to the great-grandparents; on my father's side, we have copies of the two Probanzas and of the Tree at home. By opening only the Tree, I can get to 1700. With the Probanzas, c. 900...

[Av8trix]

I found family in a couple interesting places:

Blue/Blaw family goes back to some dutch folks who immigrated to Recife, Brazil, to found a colony there. It failed, and they fled to New Amsterdam, where they owned a chunk of land on a road now known as "Broadway."

The Bowen family name turned out to be the anglicization of "Ap Owen" and the line disappears into conjecture and assumption around the 1200's in Wales, though it seems they were at least landowners.

Most famous ancestor I've found? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hopkins_(settler)
Stephen Hopkins- First attempted to come to the new world on the "Sea Venture," but was shipwrecked in Bermuda. He attempted to raise a mutiny months later on the island, and when discovered was saved only by his impassioned pleading for the welfare of his wife and children who would be ruined by his death. The castaways eventually escaped, and made it to the struggling colony of Jamestown. I've read that the story of the "Sea Venture" was part of the inspiration for "The Tempest," but that's the sort of thing that's hard to prove.

Hopkins later sailed back to England, and a few years later, booked passage on a ship called the Mayflower. He continued being a bit of a scoundrel in Plymouth, being fined for assault and battery, and later, serving alcohol and playing shuffleboard on Sunday. (!) I've found three family lines that include Hopkins in the list. He was a prolific guy, and I guess there just weren't that many mates to chose from in the early days... weird to discover you're 3x inbred, way back.

[HazelNutCoffee]

Seung-gae Lee founded the Joseon Dynasty in 1392. His first son should have become king after him but basically acted the fool so he wouldn't have to, or so history tells us. The second son did ascend to the throne but the real power behind the throne was his ambitious younger brother, the fifth son. During the second son's reign, the fourth son staged a rebellion, but the fifth son kicked his ass and sent him into exile. The second son was terrified that the fifth son would eventually find a pretext to dethrone him and exile him as well, so he gave the throne up voluntarily to the fifth son and lived out the rest of his life in peace. The fifth son fathered King Sejong, the king who brought about the invention of the Korean alphabet.

In all this chaos, the third son quietly stayed out of the fray and lived to have many descendants. He is the furthest ancestor my dad's family traces their roots back to. I suppose we could trace it back further if we tried.

[auRa]

My father's father was very into genealogy and did quite a bit of research on his side of the family before he died. It helps that his family have owned the same farm since the 1600's at least, so it was quite easy to get that far. However, further back starts becoming more problematic because even though we have a pretty good civil register system in Finland (parishes were under royal order to keep comprehensive records of births, deaths, marriages, etc. since 1628), apparently we're not so big on the whole creativity thing and there are long strings of Matti Mikko's-son fathering a Mikko Mattis'-son who fathers a Matti Mikko's-son and so on.

My mother's mother's side has a traveling salesman from Chechnya or thereabouts who wound up in a small Finnish town and fell in love with a local woman. They stayed together for the rest of his life although they never got married (because he was one of them heathen Musulmans, don't you know) and apparently that's where the crazy-dark brown eyes on my mother's side comes from.

Also, if you go back far enough on my mother's father's side, you end up at Charlemagne, but that's hardly surprising because approximately half of Europe is somehow related to him.

[MissTake]

My dad's paternal line has been traced back to the 16th century in the Holstein region of Germany. They were quite well to do, and supposedly there's still a castle there his family lived in. However, by the time they came to the US in the late 1800's they were drunkards. What I found interesting about the line - the initial person on the family tree was Ernst, and every generation had a son named either Ernst or Ernest.

My mom's family line is interesting -
Her maternal grandfather was a Yiddish mobster in Chicago at the turn of the century. In the early 20th century many gangsters moved to Minnesota - he was one of them. I'm trying to find info about that side of the family, but some of the names have been so bastardized, it's been difficult to find them. I found her maternal grandmother with her maiden name spelled at least 6 different ways.
Her paternal family is a bit more staid and steady. My great great granduncle Adolph came to Minnesota from Bohemia around 1880. He wasn't a fan, so he wrote back to my great great grandfather Joseph, offering him his land here. Joseph packed up his wife and 4 year old son and moved on over. He made the land work for him, and liked it here. Adolph, on the other hand, did not find his fortune in another city and moved back to Minnesota. Joseph's family became farmers, Adolph's family (using money from Joseph) became a business man. Sadly, the land is gone (sold by my grandpa 30 years ago - it's all expensive McHomes now), but in the southside of the cities there are still quite a few businesses handed down from Adolph's work.

[Marley23]

My great grandparents all died before I was born. I'd have to check my notes but I was able to find out a little bit about them, including the name of the ship one of them took when coming to America. That's the generation that immigrated to the U.S. I have a general idea where they all came from, but nothing specific about towns or countries. I'd have to sit down with my parents and grandparents to get all the details, but I haven't gotten around to it. On the other hand I was able to find a ton about my girlfriend's family when we did some research on this in December. For some branches, we went back to the mid-1800s.

[An Arky]

On my father's side, I can trace back to France in the mid-1600s. My ancestor was a Huguenot who came to Virginia in 1700.

[Frodo]

My uncle went full genealogy nut recently, from his updates to our genealogy site, I see my first known relative was called Owsciej B. born in 1774(!) and he lived in the improbably named town of Szszuczyn, Poland.
Since his youngest descendant (that I know of) is named Amanda (my 4 year old niece) and lives in Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina, I observe a alarming decline in the number of consonants in the family .

[septimus]

I know my ancestors back, in most lines, to the point where they immigrated to America. Connection of that immigrant to the Old World is usually very difficult (most of such connections shown in Internet pedigrees are conjectural or nonsensical). It's said that everyone with any European blood descends from Charlemagne, but most would never be able to say exactly how. (I do have one such chain with every link "expert-approved.")

My pedigree has several interesting unresolved mysteries and unconfirmed legends; for example my gggg-grandmother supposedly evaded France's Reign of Terror as an infant by being smuggled across the Channel in a wine cask!

Originally Posted by Av8trix

Stephen Hopkins ... attempted to come to the new world on the "Sea Venture," but was shipwrecked in Bermuda.... I've read that the story of the "Sea Venture" was part of the inspiration for "The Tempest," but that's the sort of thing that's hard to prove.

This connection is pivotal to the Shakespeare Authorship debate since Edward de Vere, widely touted for the authorship instead of the man from Stratford, had been dead 5 years at the time of the shipwreck!

[Sigmagirl]

On my mother's side of the family, I have names going back to 1490 in Bern. The Swiss keep good records.

On my father's side, I have recently learned two of his grandparents' names and then came to a dead end.

You never know, though.

[jasg]

Forgot to include the best story about one of my ancestors. Shipwrecked and attacked by native americans, but survived to see 502 descendants.

[Katriona]

My dad's family shares a Mayflower ancestor with a prominent political family. DH's family shares a last name, but is in no way that we've seen, related to that same political family.

[Marley23]

Originally Posted by septimus

This connection is pivotal to the Shakespeare Authorship debate since Edward de Vere, widely touted for the authorship instead of the man from Stratford, had been dead 5 years at the time of the shipwreck!

I can't believe I didn't know that. Next time we have a 'who was Shakespeare' debate...

[Baker]

I can go back to great-great-grandparents on all my lines, and one is a great-great-great-grandparent.

The line of my maternal grandmother's family can be traced to 1681, the year my most distant known ancestor was born.

My maternal grandmother also told me about her grandfather, who served in the Union Army in the Civil War, and was incarcerated in the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia. He survived but had health aftereffects for the rest of his life.

That distant ancestor came to the American colonies in 1722 with his wife and kids. Two sons fought in the Revolutionary War, and the one I am descended from was court-martialed when he refused to fight with the French soldiers who came with Lafayette. They were Catholics and he was Protestant. He later was pardoned.

[Ferret Herder]

My tip is to hook up with a genealogy expert that a fellow board member - who happens to be from your home area and the same general nationality of origin - recommends to you. Qadgop the Mercotan and I are from a similar background, and he gave me contact info for a woman who does a lot of genealogy around that heritage.

I already knew a lot about my dad's side as a great-great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother were fortunate enough (for livelihood as well as recording info for future generations) to survive a ship burning and sinking in Lake Michigan, during the last leg of their immigration to the US. But due to ignorance or other reasons on my mother's side, her parents couldn't tell us much about their genealogy.

I got a lot of names and dates, and gave that info to my mom so she and her siblings could explore further. No fun anecdotes. In fact, the whole lot of them pretty much stayed in the same two small 'provinces' of the same country until some of them got it into their heads to up and move to the US. Going back 12 generations or so in some branches, I think we found two that - gasp - actually came from the country right across the border.

*zzzzzzz*

[MLS]

I have a copy of a geneology tracing my paternal grandmother's ancestry back to 1360 in Germany. It is very factual and detailed, as in George had a shop in this town, married Greta in this year, etc. What I found fascinating is the stories you can surmise based on the data. For example, George marries Greta. One year later a child is born. The following year a second child is born and the first one dies. You get similar events for 10 - 15 years until Greta dies at the age of 35 with four surviving children, several others having died in childhood. A year later George marries Hilda. Repeat.

There are more details as you get to the 20th century. A number of family members moved to the U.S. around the late 19th and early 20th century, with additional folks following in subsequent years. In 1914 a few families from Germany travelled to the U.S. to visit with a couple celebrating a 50th anniversay. World War I broke out, and they could not return to Germany until the war was over! The older folks moved back, but the younger ones stayed in the U.S.

[Annie-Xmas]

My mother's and brother's middle name of Howard is from the same family as all the Howard Taft politicos.

[Don Draper]

My knowledge of my family tree doesn't extend much before the early 20th century. I do know that I am fully irish on my mother's side, and irish & german on my father's side. My mother's side of the family is the archetypal curly red-haired irish types, but my father's side (whom I take after) are 'black irish."

On my mother's side, my great-grandfather (or perhaps great-great-grandfather?) came to America in 1890. He went from Ireland to Canada first, then emigrated to Buffalo, NY. He was a fully licensed (in Ireland) doctor, but because he was Irish & Catholic, he was refused a U.S. medical license and had to work on the Erie Canal.

On my father's side, I know that his grandmother (my great grandmother) came to America in the 1910s. She worked as a live-in maid in a well-to-do family's house. When the matriarch of the house died, my great-grandmother married the man of the house, he was my great-grandfather. After he died, there was a huge fight over his estate, and the children from my great grandfather's first wife never spoke or communicated with my great-grandmother or grandmother again. Thus there is a whole contingent of relatives my family has no information about. (That story I didn't know until after my grandmother had died.)

[tdn]

Originally Posted by Bearflag70

Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Harry Truman, and Charles Goodnight (the guy who invented the chuck wagon) are all distant cousins of mine (and of each other for that matter).

I had no idea that they were related to each other. Having said that, I'm friends with one of your cousins.

My paternal grandmother did some extensive work on the family tree, and my father tried to do some follow-up. It turns out that I'm related to a former US president, a former FBI director, and a vacuum cleaner guy. One line was traced all the way back to British royalty in the 15th century.

I have an elderly relative on my mother's side who started a family tree project when she was a very young woman. It goes all the way back to a Swedish immigrant from 1850-something. There is a book with some info on every descendant. It's about 5 inches thick. A few years back I offered to put it all up on the 'Net. About halfway through the first page I reneged on my offer. That would have been a HUGE project!

[AuntiePam]

Originally Posted by septimus

My pedigree has several interesting unresolved mysteries and unconfirmed legends; for example my gggg-grandmother supposedly evaded France's Reign of Terror as an infant by being smuggled across the Channel in a wine cask!

That's awesome!

On my dad's side, all I have are names and dates, the earliest being a Joseph Richardson born in 1789.

On mom's side, a distant cousin has found a lot more details but going back only to 1785, a Robert Jacques born in Orange County, New York. She found:

• a farmer killed by a bull
• one given "Doc" as a middle name because his parents wanted him to become a doctor (he didn't)
• a few who died in car accidents at a time when you'd think cars didn't go fast enough for accidents to result in fatalities
• a "blue baby" who died after a few hours -- what's a "blue baby"?
• several deaths from flu in the early 1900's, including one WWI vet
• an engineer on the first space flight
• a Civil War vet -- 52nd Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers, died of typhoid while a POW in South Carolina
• a Civil War vet in the 4th New Jersey Light Artillery Battery D - the enlistment record gives a physical description!
• a great-aunt who committed suicide by swallowing lye

Mostly farmers, lots of soldiers, and a couple of doctors and a few bankers.

[Ferret Herder]

Originally Posted by AuntiePam

a "blue baby" who died after a few hours -- what's a "blue baby"?

WAG: blue/purple coloration due to cyanosis, probably due to some sort of circulatory problem, or perhaps choking. Could have been a birth defect of the heart, I suspect.

[Pleonast]

My earliest European ancestor in the New World was a Dutch farmer in Harlem on Manhattan Island, then a part of New Netherland. A local Indian girl married one of his descendants (giving me one part in 1024 Indian ).

Another of my ancestors was a prominent mathematician, who may have invented the division sign. His son had a large estate in what was by then New York.

I have a bunch of German ancestors who settled in Pennsylvania and Maryland before and after independence. Many were Dunkers. A lot of them moved west with the frontier. They met a village of Christianized Indians in central Ohio (giving me another one part in 32 Indian).

Somehow a Frenchman also got mixed in with my mostly German, English and Dutch ancestors (with the occasional Indian). And an Irishman in the mid-1800s was my most recent immigrant ancestor.

I'm married to a Korean, so my descendants will have an even more mixed ancestry.

[BrotherCadfael]

On my mother's side, to a man born in Amsterdam in 1599, well established in the New York area by 1638. (Twelve generations back.) Also, same generation, an "early Connecticut settler", whose granddaughter married the grandson of the Dutchman.

On my father's side, to a person born in Worcestershire around 1250. (Twenty-two generations back.)

[silenus]

Originally Posted by Oslo Ostragoth

Too many years since high school history. What was before Jamestown?

A wreck in Bermuda. The crew had to build a smaller ship from the wreckage and sail home to England. Shakespeare references the wreck in The Tempest. Granted, it's not like that ancestor stayed on this side of the Atlantic, but he was here, dammit!

[FairyChatMom]

My dad's parents and my mom's grandparents came to the US from Poland in the early 1900s. Before that, I think they were all either farmers or miners. We've probably still got relatives in Poland, but no one alive knows exactly which city or region holds our roots.

That's all I've got.

[Spectre of Pithecanthropus]

My father's grandfather fought with an Ohio regiment in the Civil War. He had part of his upper lip shot off in a friendly fire incident and wore a thick mustache for the remainder of his life. After being mustered out moved to northeastern Kansas and homesteaded, and there my grandfather was born. This much we knew. When we were contacted by a distant cousin who was looking for information for the genealogy he was working on, we told him what we knew and he was able to place our "twig" in the tree.

We have an unusual surname, so going back along that line from son to father, I can go back to about 1640 in New Amsterdam, which automatically gets us back to The Netherlands in about 1610, since he was a grown man when he left Europe. In the region where they lived, near Utrecht, most of the land was owned by the Church and leased out, often for generations, to the area's more established farming families. Ours was one such family, but before about 1600 the records become spotty and the best the genealogists could do was to make assumptions based on Dutch child-naming and other customs, for example the fact that grandchildren might assume the surname of their mother if her family was more important socially. Coats of arms also provide some clues. Going back this way we reach--putatively--the mid 1300s. In general they included numerous civic officials, a few minor landowners, soldiers, and so on. Nothing terribly exciting all in all, but it was certainly gratifying to learn about this even so.

[Angel of the Lord]

I've only been able to search a little bit online, and what I've found has been somewhat sparse. All I've used is Google. Additionally, none of my relatives come from England/Ireland/Scotland/Wales, so the records are usually in another language. The furthest back I've been able to get is a great^7-grandfather and grandmother in Germany. That takes me to around 1670 or so. Everything else dries out in the 1800s. My grandma was an orphan, so that actually dries out around 1900 (she knows who her parents were, but nothing further).

I envy people who can go really far back.

[MLS]

Originally Posted by Ferret Herder

WAG: blue/purple coloration due to cyanosis, probably due to some sort of circulatory problem, or perhaps choking. Could have been a birth defect of the heart, I suspect.

The usual reference was to a heart defect called tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart malformation that robs the blood of oxygen, causing the baby's face to turn bluish. The babies just about always died very early.

One of the first, if not the very first, open-heart surgeries was a bypass operation performed in 1941 at Johns Hopkins by Dr. Alfred Blalock, assisted by a young black man, Vivien Thomas. The made-for-TV movie "A Thing the Lord Made" was about their groundbreaking surgery, which everybody else at the time said couldn't be done.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled topic.

[Hilarity N. Suze]

Originally Posted by Maastricht

You're right , of course. Still, it is nice to see what kind of people they were, waht "breeding stock" you come from. But for that, you need more then names, you would also want details like professions, reputation, that kind of thing.

Oh, we've got blacksmiths, seamstresses, preachers (Quaker--I didn't even know they had preachers), a president (McKinley), and the odd black sheep...

[Bearflag70]

Originally Posted by tdn

I had no idea that they were related to each other. Having said that, I'm friends with one of your cousins.

Really? Who? PM me if you prefer.

[Ferret Herder]

Originally Posted by MLS

The usual reference was to a heart defect called tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart malformation that robs the blood of oxygen, causing the baby's face to turn bluish. The babies just about always died very early.

One of the first, if not the very first, open-heart surgeries was a bypass operation performed in 1941 at Johns Hopkins by Dr. Alfred Blalock, assisted by a young black man, Vivien Thomas. The made-for-TV movie "A Thing the Lord Made" was about their groundbreaking surgery, which everybody else at the time said couldn't be done.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled topic.

Huh, I forgot that was the most common reason. Been a while since I worked in pediatric cardiology, but I didn't have a lot of patient contact then. Wiki has an article on other common causes, interestingly.

A childhood friend of mine was cyanotic due to some kind of heart defect, to the point of having blue-purple lips and nailbeds when she was doing poorly. She was young enough when she finally did die (after many operations) that I either was not told or do not recall what her diagnosis was.

[Chefguy]

I've traced my father's line back to Prussia in the early 1800s. Prior to that, the information just isn't there. I've traced several lines on my mother's side back through the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, to the Mayflower and across the pond to England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland. One of my ancestors fought in Cromwell's wars, and prior to that the family jumped the channel from the continent. Some of the royalty ties go back quite a long way through King Edward I, King Henry III, II, & I and King William I (The Conquerer) to Alfred the Great (871-899). Most of the lines peter out around the 12th-15th century, however.

Also distantly related to George Washington, James Madison, William Henry Harrison, Benjamin Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, TR, Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Nixon, and both Bushes.

[Švejk]

It's all Dutch for as far as we can go back, which is about 400 years if memory serves. Pretty dull, when you think of it...

[Oslo Ostragoth]

Originally Posted by AuntiePam

[*]a "blue baby" who died after a few hours -- what's a "blue baby"?

I have heard that term in relation to babies born with the Rh factor incompatibility thing. I don't know whether that is incompatible with the other explanations offered.

[Spectre of Pithecanthropus]

Originally Posted by Švejk

It's all Dutch for as far as we can go back, which is about 400 years if memory serves. Pretty dull, when you think of it...

You mean, "It's Dutch all the way down!"?

[Av8trix]

Originally Posted by septimus

This connection is pivotal to the Shakespeare Authorship debate since Edward de Vere, widely touted for the authorship instead of the man from Stratford, had been dead 5 years at the time of the shipwreck!

Neat, I did not know this!

[septimus]

Originally Posted by Av8trix

Neat, I did not know this!

Here's a page which attempts to prove the play was inspired by a report from the shipwreck of Sea-Venture. This may be one of the strongest arguments against the "Oxfordian" theory. However there is other interesting and controversial evidence, so I find myself decidedly agnostic on the Authorship question.

Originally Posted by Marley23

I can't believe I didn't know that. Next time we have a 'who was Shakespeare' debate...

Prompted by this comment I Googled for old SDMB Shakespeare authorship debates. If there will be a new one it looks like it will need to be located in BBQ pit.

[AHunter3]

Nothing before 1600 yet but decently broad for as far back as I do know...

I have all my great-great grands, nearly all of my great-great-great grands; quite a bit thinner on some of the maternal lines in the generation before that.

I have some strands back to 12 generations ago and I have a fairly rich coverage of cousins: all the sisters and brothers of my great grandparents and who they married and all their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and most of that for my great-great grandparents.

I'm working with my own home-grown FileMaker-based genealogy app and have input over 8000 individuals into it.

[AHunter3]

ETA: Cute tales from the genealogy records. My G-G-G grandpa Thomas Welch married a Chapman, one of the youngest girls in a big family. His wife died young and he married an older sister of his daugher-in-law. Then his FIRST wife's Dad, who had been a widower for several years, ALSO married a yet older sister of the same family. Must've been confusing to the little ones growing up. Great-Grampa's wife is mommy's sister, etc.

[Clothahump]

The family on my father's side had the tree done by pros back in the 1890s. Since then, it's been catch as catch can until a relative put it all on the computer and on the Internet. My last name is Sears, and yes, I am related to the Sears of Sears and Roebuck, but not close enough to get in on the profit sharing

Our family tree is at the Sears Family Association. We trace back to Richard, who apparently came over on the Mayflower, but not on the original voyage. A second ship named Mayflower made several journeys and the dates of his appearance in the colonies tend to coincide with the third journey of that ship.