I can trace my ancestry on both sides back about 500 years. I’ve seen one line traced to about 1100, but was unable to investigate the source of the information and determine its veracity. The most recent Irish line can only be traced to about 1850, when, in order to avoid starvation, several of my ancestors arrived in America with nothing but their names and the clothes on their backs. Their names are very common so attempting to look at Irish records to find out more would be futile.
Beyond that, I know that my ancestors literally spent the past 500 years trying to kill each other (my French ancestors–from the same family–fought on different sides during the 30 Years war), trying to escape from each other (my Scottish ancestors fled Scotland in a hurry because they were the wrong religion and about to be arrested for this offense), or killing other people (don’t get me started on how my ancestors responded to the Indians when they arrived in the New World.)
One of my French ancestors claimed to be descended from Charlemagne, but there’s someone like that in every family. Oh, and my mother recently discovered a new line of cousins in Texas. Their last name is Bush.
My father was a Historian. He loved to trace family histories. Everyone he met, got their’s traced, whether they wanted it or not. He traced his own back to the early settlers. and my Mom’s, back to a castle in Scotland.
I grew up with my Confederate ancestors staring at me from photographs (they were privates, which has to be some sort of distinction- every other Southerner’s ancestries track to Generals or at least Majors). Most of my family is British, but some came from Ireland during the potato famine, others from England in the 17th century (Charleston), and one of the Irish branches we recently learned is actually Polish (they descended from Poles who settled in Ireland during the Reformation era). Oral histories go back to the 1830s and thanks to an elderly relative who is obsessed with genealogy one branch is tracked back to 15th century Switzerland, but for most branches I’ve seen records that go back to the 18th century and there they get lost.
I know the least about my paternal grandfather’s family, but would love to know more. His grandfather was a surgeon born ca. 1870 whose family (I learned a few years ago) were descended from a black Virginia family whose members were light enough to “pass”. I would love to learn if there is any truth to African-American ancestry as it could make for the best Christmas present ever for my racist sister.
My family tree in general goes back about five generations or so at the most, but unfortunately almost always hits a brick wall with the generation that came across the Atlantic. The initial family history that I started with came from a great aunt or uncle, but it was mostly just names with a few birthplaces, and an unfortunate mess of misspellings and misinterpretations.
In the past few years, I’ve managed to fill out some interesting details, mostly thanks to the fact the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point library has published an obituary & cemetery index on the web. My proudest moment was uncovering the names of my 5xgreat grandfather & mother who carried my surname (the unforunately common Müller, since anglicized) across the Atlantic from the agglomeration that was “Germany” sometime in the early 1800’s. Another proud moment was searching an Austrian telephone book on the web with the family name of my 3xgreat-grandmother and finding people with the same name still living in the same small town in Austria where she was born, a town that barely survived “the cut” to stay German rather than turning Hungarian when they redrew Europe in 1919.
I also spent $100 to take part in National Geographic’s Genographic survery to find out my deep, deep, deep ancestry. Still waiting for my results there…
On my dad’s side I don’t know much–I can name both sets of his grandparents and all their children (along with some weird family drama), but nothing beyond that. Someone’s done some serious work to figure out the geneology of his maternal grandfather’s family, but I’ve never seen it.
On my mom’s side–well, I never met my maternal grandmother and I don’t know anything at all about her side of the family, but her father’s side is very well documented, at least back to an ancestor who immigrated to Massachusetts in the mid-1600s. I don’t remember whether or not the work went back any further than that.
Honestly, it’s never mattered that much to me. It’s kind of interesting to know where my ancestors came from, but due to one thing and another I’ve never felt that connected to any but one branch of the family, and then only sort of.
All I know is that on one side I am related to William Penn (maternal). I can also trace a great grandmother as a French immigrant. Otherwise, I have no idea.
grandparent’s on the russian/ukraine side did not talk about it. i do know the names of the great grands because the grands got married in the states. that is about it.
the danish side is even worse. grandpa came over after his parent’s deaths as a toddler. ran away from relatives at a very young age did not talk about them. did not want to even know there was such a thing as being danish or denmark. (they must have been real fun to live with.) if you are doing a search having a name like jens peter jensen does not help in the slightest.
grandma’s side was a bit better, as there were siblings, but a common first and last name muddies things there as well.
She has traced us back to the first white settler born in Rhode Island and she has gone back on the other side to England/Scotland(I am white, Anglo-Saxon Prostestant for about oh, all generations so far).
Then again, one branch completely dies out–a man on her father’s side moved to KY and changed his last name to Jones and never said what his real name was. We call him the horse thief of the family.
My cousin did some research a few years ago that got my mom’s family from Edinburgh to Dublin to Canada to the US in the 1850’s. I’m hoping to go further back. We thought the family was Irish for a long time because we’d only found records back to Dublin. Had no clue the family was actually Scottish until about 10 years ago.
I’m hoping to work on my dad’s side. My grandmother belonged to the DAR, but whatever records she had got lost, or at least, they haven’t surfaced yet (although I wouldn’t put it past my aunt to be sitting on them just because she knows I want them), so I know someone in her family was here during the Revolutionary War. I also know her paternal side was Scottish; in fact, it’s been confusing - all the Aberdeen Keiths I’ve found - and there are many - apparently really liked women with names that are variations of Susan or Suzanne. I get a headache just thinking about it!
So far, I have traced my Mom’s family back to her maternal great-grandparents (in Italy and Spain) and her paternal grandparents (in Italy). We know the family name originated in Manzanares, Spain. On Dad’s side of the family, I can only go back to my paternal grandmother. My paternal grandfather died before I was born, and my father never mentioned him or his family - we do know I’m a second cousin to a well-known actress with the same surname, and that a rather infamous character (Anton LeVay) married another of my Dad’s first cousins (I think that one was on Grandma’s side of the family, but I can’t remember.)
My husband’s father has a family tree that has been kept in the family and diligently updated since 1684, when it was begun in Ireland pretty darn close to the Blarney Stone (which is on “family” property.) Somewhere about a quarter of the way down the tree is the Adams family (not, not Gomez and Morticia - John and Abigail.) My husband’s mother can only trace her family tree back one generation - her grandfather fled Latvia with only one of his six children (her father). Of her mother’s family, we know very little, although we have some really neat photos of people she says are her mother’s sisters and aunts.
My wife’s family tree information just grew dramatically. Hearing that I was documening all this, my sister-in-law sent me a CD that she got from a relative earlier this year - she couldn’t open the files that were on it, but said it had family information on it.
It did! It was a Brother’s Keeper database - exactly the program I’m using - and it had over 2,000 names… her grandfather’s brother’s descendants and ancestors, which, of course, plugged in neatly to what I already had, with only 11 duplicates. So now I’ve got my wife’s paternal line back to the 1700s, still in the Dominican Republic (it was, after all, the first outpost in the New World!).
I wish I could explain why this is so fascinating to me…
For most of my life, I’ve had a very small family. As I said, my dad’s side basically had nothing in the way of family. My mom had two brothers; one died before I was born with no children and the other lived in California… he had two kids but I never even met my cousins until I was an adult on a business trip there. And that was it.
Now, with a son of my own and a wife who comes from a very large family, and the discovery that there are hundreds of people on my mom’s side that are related to me… I don’t know how to describe it. As I say, I’m not at the point of calling up any of these folks and announcing myself as a tenth cousin… it’s just an unexpected and not unpleasant shift in world-view…
I’m Icelandic on Mom’s side. We’re anal about geneology, so it’s been traced back a looooong way. Icelanders are so good at keeping track that scientists wanted to do the human genome project on them.