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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Too many years since high school history. What was before Jamestown?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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? Stephen Hopkins (Mayflower passenger) - Wikipedia
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :D.
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!
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!
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.