I would not be surprised at all if your uncle got defrauded. Any good genealogist, or rather anyone that does much of anything, will be citing every last source they use. If there are no sources then I’d be very careful about believing anything. Professional genealogists are supposed to make it so that you can follow their work if you wanted to. If it was a pro and you have their name you may want to get a hold of them and see if they have the records as they should have kept their records.
I’ve been doing my own genealogical work for the past 4 years or so. I’ve never really found any one famous, though one of my great greats was arrested for being a separatist in the Maryland Assembly at that start of the Civil War. However, there are a lot of interesting stories and a lot of those are not found on Ancestry, but rather in the local historical societies and libraries.
This type of genealogy has existed for at least 100 or so years. When I did my research several of my sources traced back to such “histories”. They could be moderately reliable for easily corroborated information, especially information about family members still alive or within living memory at the time the research was done, but they always seemed to trace the family back to some kind of royalty with no evidence whatsoever. All religions have creation myths and seemingly all of these families also had mythical origins along the lines of “a merchant married the daughter of a nobleman against her father’s wishes and had to flee to America” or “the younger son of an English lord was denied property and had to seek his fortune in the Tidewater…”, crap like that. Not saying it’s never true, but it couldn’t be true as often as these histories claimed.
Unfortunately it’s really impossible to trace. I only saw the leather bound volume twice, when it was first produced I looked at it at my grandmother’s house one year (the great-uncle being her brother-in-law, and my grandfather deceased he didn’t often have occasion to visit his brother’s widow 2,000 miles across country); and then another time I saw it at the great-uncle’s son’s house (my cousin) when I was there for the great uncle’s funeral.
Without having ever been able to look through the tome extensively I can’t swear to anything, it’s just I know what specific Kings we were supposedly linked to and I found nothing to ever support those links some years later when I did my own research. The thing is, while Kings obviously fathered lots of bastards, the legitimate lines of pretty much any royal house are very well known back many hundreds of years, so even without genealogical source material just the known history makes the linkages impossible. So the only way I can see it having been the case is if the genealogist had knowledge of some bastard child of a third or fourth son of a King who was too minor for his infidelities to be in the historical record (well, the historical records I’ve seen, anyway.)
For me, the best thing about Ancestry.com isn’t so much the source materials there. Ancestry has a lot of Census records, birth/death records, and things of that nature. But the really interesting stuff came about because of names that I genuinely never would have found if not for Ancestry.com. Once I had a pretty solid family tree drawn up, I was able to utilize some online newspaper databases through my local library they have a program where if you have a library card you can see lots of newspaper archives scanned in dating back to the early 1800s from newspapers all over the world. It’s extremely hit or miss what they have or don’t have, as I think maybe a lot of newspaper archives are still not digitized, but the stuff you can find is still pretty interesting.
Ancestry.com.au uses a bloke as the ‘family detective’. He’s not hot at all. I think our lot must steal a lot of your ad ideas.
We don’t have slavery in our short history but we do have a lot of convicts. One Ancestry ad has a woman hinting that her ancestor’s convict history was kept a secret is cringeworthy. People probably felt that way about convicts in the closet several decades ago but that hasn’t been the case for a long time.
The U.S. 1940 Census will be released on April 2. PDF of the form.
Among other questions asked will be earnings, amount of rent if renter/value of house if owner, and military service.
My parents, grandparents, and a smattering of great-grandparents should be in this one, but I’m almost more interested in using it to look up various famous people.
No, it will be photocopies of millions of pages compiled by the Census takers and, I’m assuming, handwritten in the Census taker’s writing. A county was divided up into “doable” areas and people were hired to get the records for that area by literally going door to door. A Census taker in Chicago might have a territory of 4 square blocks, while a Census taker in Iowa might have one that was 60 miles long. They were paid a per diem, travel expenses, and (in 1940) 4¢ per name.
Census takers (CT) had to be able to read and write, preferably well obviously, but even so you’ll see some eccentric spellings and very wrong data. Some people weren’t home when he stopped by, a few were uncooperative, so sometimes the CT might cut corners by getting the info from their neighbors who only knew the approximate ages of the family members (“He’s about 40, she’s about 35, the oldest boy is around 14 and the twins are 11 and 9”) and names more complicated than John and Martha Williams were often misspelled as well. (Of course there was a problem in some areas with illiteracy- sharecroppers and day laborers in the south, immigrants in the north, and some other classes) and language barriers.
By law the records that contain names or other individually identifying info have to be sealed for 72 years, hence the 1940 census being released this year, so there are no copies of a filled in 1940 Census form, but this is a photocopy of a 1930 Census form for Cuyahoga County, New York to give you an idea.
I wish my ancestors were more interesting. All I have is a bunch of drunks. (Irish, German, Polish? C’mon!)
I’d love to try Ancestry.com. My dad did a bunch of work years ago, tracing our family history, sending away for a bunch of documents. He gave them to my grandfather to look at – and my grandfather managed to lose everything. :smack:
I don’t very a very interesting ancestry either. A couple of convicts but only minor stuff.
I really wish I’d listened to my grandmother when I was little. She used to talk (at great length) about her own childhood, growing up and her own parents. I was bored rigid at the time but I’d love to have a record of the stories she told me back then.
Ancestry.com is by far the most complete and easiest to use source. Ancestry offers free trial memberships (a month IIRC), but most public libraries also have subscriptions that can do most of what a private membership can do.
Family Search is a LDS sponsored site that will give you most of the info, though to my knowledge it doesn’t include photocopies of the info. (One of the best things about photocopies is seeing their neighbors, often relatives themselves, and how your family matched up compared to their community.)
Lots of local genealogical organizations will host various censuses on their websites, but how easy to navigate (or even find to begin with) their sites are varies widely.
