This thread is for discussion of genealogy, tips, methods, “brick walls”, etc. If you’re a genealogical newbie with questions, feel free to ask! I’m not a professional genealogist, but I’ll be glad to help if I can.
I had an exciting breakthrough earlier this year when I found the marriage record of my great-great-great-grandparents, which not only provided their place of origin, but also led me to their parents. Very exciting stuff! Now if only I could track down more on one of my great-great-grandfathers. He was born in late 1880 a few months after the census was enumerated that year, of course most of the 1890 census was destroyed so he doesn’t appear in that, I have his entry in the 1900 census but the poor fellow was killed in an accident in 1908, before the 1910 census! I have his marriage record and I know where he’s buried, but I’m hoping to find more records to connect him to what I’m pretty sure is his birth family.
Strangest finding: I was born 30 years to the day of my biological father’s mother’s death.
I’m currently researching in: Robeson co. NC; Franklin co. and Wilson co. TN; Cherokee co. and Etowah co. AL; and Copiah, Jefferson, Claiborne, Lauderdale, and Smith co. MS.
There’s a very useful trick, Mississippienne [Migawd, that name has more double letters! :D] – if you have trouble proving that ancestor X was himself related to probable predecessor Y, come at it from the opposite direction, attempting to trace forward Y’s descendants and see if X shows up there. I had to employ this technique with two very fertile lines of ancestresses – each dead-ended in terms of tracking them, but when I went “Presume she’s descended from this line, and attempt to prove or disprove that presumption,” I found a record of each of the two as infant daughter of someone in that line, with dates as provable as possible. Voila – nice linkages to early colonists and before them back to England/Wales.
I started doing research about nine years ago and have established a fairly good database. Some of the lines are just dead ends, so there are huge blanks in the ol’ family birch. I don’t have time to relate any anecdotes this A.M., but will be drop back in later. Some family lines: Gray, Colegrove, Saunders, Carner. I’m related to three Mayflower travelers, a Declaration of Independence signer, and multiple presidents.
Well, I’ll have to come back to this later when I can get at all my records, but one place I know I’m stuck is looking for my g-g-g-g-grandfather’s birth records in Dorset, Eng. or Bristol. Every record I’ve seen shows him being born in or around Weymouth, Dorset around 1805. And there’s…nothing…there. I saw one person from the LDS website who made note of him being born in Bristol, and I can’t narrow it down from there. Quite frustrating really, as it’s my direct ancestor, and I’m trying to figure out how someone with an obvious Scots/Irish name ended up as a cabinet maker in Dorset. Any Dopers in the Dorset/Bristol area who wanna do a little sleuthing are more than welcome to help out.
Marriage/Death records don’t record his place of birth or his parents, either, dammit.
I’ve had a bunch of successes, but I’ll have to wait until I’ve got some more free time at home to post it.
My parents have been into Genealogy for quite some time now and my mother is getting close to becoming a professional. Something that really helped them was getting DNA testing done. Some of my mother’s father’s line was proving to be very elusive to track. They had been listed as Irish when they immigrated to the United States but she had assumed it was in error due to other clues and factors. After genetic testing showed that my Grandparent was more Irish than previously thought, she went back and re-investigated the Irish link and was able to find records in Ireland. There was also a story that we were descended from a slave which was purchased by one of my white ancestors for some blankets. They later married and the line eventually produced my mother’s mother. When DNA testing was done, they were able to confirm what had previously been a myth. The DNA testing showed that we had Native American blood, and what’s more, the tribe that my mother suspected the woman was from was found to be most similar to that particular blood type. We also found African blood which was traced to a port city commonly used for the transportation of slaves. My mother theorized that the slave woman was mixed which would explain why some ancestors along that line were mistaken for Mexicans.
If your grandparents or great-grandparents have passed, it can be very useful to test their siblings or other close relatives.
Do genealogists deal with the occasional/hypothetical possibility that a child may have been the offspring of someone other than the stated legal father? Just curious if this is addressed at all because sometimes you’ll see mention of a family that can trace it’s roots to the Mayflower, a famous ancestor or maybe that of an old royal lineage and I just naturally wonder, what with stories of hanky panky among the nobility the world over, if there wasn’t, somewhere in those hundreds of years, a grafted branch on the ol’ family tree.
My question’s obviously directed more at say a English, Flemish or Castille family of the 1600s than about the Bigsbee family down the street.
I might be dealing with something like that down the line, if I can find the birth info for the aforementioned 4xG-Grandfather. I’ve found records of a man with the same last name, same first name as 3 of the past 4 grandfathers (all named Samuel) who died in 176x, his son John born 3 years earlier. His widow, John’s mother, married some other dude about 3 years after. Depending on what I find, my 4x-Grandfather’s father or Grandfather might be the son/grandson of John, whose mother married the other guy. If that is the case, then I might have to look up John’s information under the other guy’s name if he took it when his mom remarried.
Yes! In genetic genealogy, this is known as a “paternity event”, a fancy way of saying that the daddy wasn’t who mama claimed it was. Anyone who’s been involved in Y-chromosome testing will see plenty of cases of people who have a clear paper trail establishing them as cousins or brothers, but when the DNA comes in it tells a different story all together.
Of course, adulterous grandmas aren’t the only way a DNA line might be broken. There could’ve been an unrecorded adoption, a child of a first wife wrongly assigned as the child of a second wife, etc. One genealogist I know (not related to me) has an ancestor who was an illegitimate son of a “Jane Smith”, appears in census, court records, etc. as her son. Bizarrely, in one document this ancestor names his father as “John Smith”, Jane’s brother! This begs the question: did this ancestor just name his uncle as his father to avoid having to explain his illegitimacy? Or were John and Jane Smith doing the bad thing after all???
Biggest pet peeve: genealogists who don’t cite any sources. Help me out here, people! At least tell me if you got your info from a family bible or something so I can check on it myself. Grrrr.
Something I’ve found useful: As much as the various databases are helpful, sometimes finding distant family members can turn you on to some fresh leads. I did a one-name study of my grandmother’s paternal line, and then established web pages for each of the ancestors.
Now, a casual web user (as opposed to just genealogists) who Googles an ancestor’s name just for kicks will hit my pages and contact me. I have had previously unknown distant relatives from all over the world contact me over the last 8 years thanks to this. The primary link is here if anyone is interesed in seeing an example.
I also get shitloads of spam because my email address is on the web pages, but that’s another story… :rolleyes:
Also: Don’t always believe the LDS database. I had one that sent me to a brick wall; turms out tha the birthplace noted in the LDS system was both speculative and wrong. Overall they’ve been very helpful, but nothing beats primary sources.
I have also found wills and probates to be very helpful, as well as interesting in their own right.
Okay, thanks, Mississippienne. I really was curious what the driving force(s) was behind classical lineal research; if it was more to satisfy a claim that can’t be legally disputed (or any multitude of other possibly biased impetuses) or it it truly was a genetic trace, damn the inconvenience of awkward, extracurricular minglings.
Did the state he was in do mid-decade state censuses? Minnesota did and the 1885 and 1895 state censuses help take some of the edge off the missing 1890 Federal census.
For me it’s less interest in genetics than the family’s meanderings and origins and, as an American history buff, a case study in immigration patterns. It’s a great way to learn regional history or the history of why America itself was settled and why it was such a freaking awesome concept long before the Revolution.
For example, all of my ancestors who were alive in 1860 were in central Alabama and within 40 miles or so of each other, but how they got there is interesting. In researching that I’ve learned a lot about the Georgia Land lotteries, the Creek Indian cessions, the Swiss Huguenot colonies in the Carolinas, reasons people chose Virginia rather than Massachusetts as a place to settle, etc… Sometimes events 200 years ago can even explain current oddities in your own family- where the cheekbones come from, or a possible theory as to why we all have passionate dislike for pretentious people, or why we’re so clannish (more than most families), etc…
There’s also what I call the Sudoku aspect. It sharpens some critical thinking and research skills and it can be a fun exercise connecting Deadend Grandpa X to his ancestors through detective work (let’s see… the surname would indicate he’s Irish or Welsh, the family was definitely here in 1785, let’s check the emigration records over here… where does anybody of that surname first show up… what other spellings could there be?) and logic (okay, this one had sons named Peter, Lawrence and Jameson, and up here is a woman named Jameson who married a person with that surname, and her brother’s name is Lawrence… hmmm… let’s look at some land records).
Then there are the mysteries that will never be resolved. Sometimes these stark old records tell stories you’d love to know even if you never will. (Why did she marry her first husband’s brother so soon after his death? Why did he suddenly marry after being a widower for 24 years and why of all people his first wife’s grandniece and why on earth did they name a child Adulation? etc.) which can be fun to speculate upon.
I don’t pretend it’s going to lead to a cure for AIDS or make computers cost $3 and operate on oxygen, but it’s a fun and diverting pasttime that helps you understand much more about how people once lived and how we got to where we are.
My biggest surprises, incidentally:
I assumed my family was English/Irish with other stuff thrown in. We’re far more German.
I probably have an African ancestor within the last 250 years.
My mother’s family, which is for the most part religiously indifferent (Christian leaning all around and with some fiery exceptions on the individual level, but as a rule we’re not that religious) stems in the recent past from people heavily persecuted for their religion and who were then intolerant when they came to South Carolina. Odd.
How many slaveowners were in the family and which lines used to be really rich but are far from now and vice versa.
Just how often people once moved around. People 200 years ago when travel was a major burden and risk were far far more likely to die very significant distances from their birthplace than they are today, and it’s also not at all uncommon to find 40 years worth of censuses in which the same person is in a different place many miles from their last location in every census, yet then they settle down and their family remains stationary for more than a century. Trace it back further and you’ll find a similar wandering- they settled in Virginia for a century then wandered for “forty years” before settling in South Carolina and then wandering and finally…
Anyway I digress. But the point is I like it better than sudoiku and you can learn from it.
Apologies if you know this already but: The LDS site is far from complete. Many parish records are not available anywhere online. You’d have to visit the Dorset county record office in Dorchester. Also, much of the LDS site is inaccurate, though it’s certainly not the load of rubbish some people will tell you it is. If the only evidence you have for a birth in Bristol is one record on the LDS site (particularly if it was submitted by a LDS church member), I wouldn’t give it too much credence. It’s also possible that the Bristol record relates to somebody else with the same name. Bristol and Weymouth are 60 miles apart.
Oh good lord, yes. I completely agree. I’d argue, however, that the LDS site is a great starting point for someone who knows absolutely nothing about their past. Up to when I started looking, I knew my g-g-grandfather’s name and that he was born in Manitoba and that’s it. Not knowing anything else, the LDS pointed me towards Dorset where I’ve been doing my research completely independently since then. I’ll occasionally return for a new lead if something’s panned out, but it’s far from my first source. The big problem I’ve got with Weymouth right now is that there actually is an online parish clerk service that’s been transcribing all the BMD records, and has recently added all the records I’ve been looking for (for naught!). I’m also looking in other parishes around Dorset, but so far have come up blank, hence poking around Bristol (nowhere near seriously yet).
Oddly enough, my research found a guy who claimed to have information about my family and included his e/mail address and nothing but. I got in touch with him and it turns out that he’s a distant relative, knows everything about my ancestors including the triumphs and the tragedies. And he lives about 10 minutes away from my parents…
The biggest problem with researching ancestors from overseas is access to records. My research has been pretty casual up to this point. but I’m starting to hit walls that I can’t break through until I can actually visit the places in question (like you said, to see the actual records). One day I’ll have the time and resources to be able to do so.
Two of my many mysteries involve finding the ship manifest for my wife’s paternal immigrant and my paternal immigrant. The frustrating part is that I know pretty much what years they immigrated, and in one case the name of a ship is noted on the citizenship application. But it appears that the ship (SS Gull) never existed, nor is there any record of it arriving in Philadelphia. My father’s surname appears on the ISTG site, but it’s the wrong people and the wrong year. I’ve had researchers look for this information with no luck.
Going off from Sampiro’s post, genealogy is fascinating to me because it forces you to examine history in the span of human lifetimes. You have to study migration patterns, wills, deeds, and even DNA to understand the story of these families. It’s also an intensely personal science because genealogy is, in a way, the story of you and how you came to be.
lieu, as far as genetic genealogy goes, I tend to assume the legal father was the biological father in the absense of any data to the contrary. If genetic data surfaces to show so-and-so wasn’t the biological father of such-and-such, I’ll be happy to update my records, but there’s no use in speculating about the sexual habits of people who died two hundred or more years ago and for whom I have no good basis to believe were adulterous.
Obligatory shout-out to the USGenWeb Project. For the furriners, there’s a related WorldGenWeb Project.
There are different ways that records get into the LDS. If it’s user submitted then only use it as a frame work on which to hang your own sources. But some stuff they have is transcriptions of records. Like the 1880/81 census for the US, UK and Canada as well as many Parish records for the US and the UK, although it still pays to check things out for yourself. Also they’ve filmed records that other’s haven’t so might want to check out their reading rooms. I just finished checking out the 1869 census for Slovakia. My grandmother came from a small town called Sastin not too far from Bratislava. Got to check out my 3g grandfather, Gaspar.
I also recommend checking out the various state archives. Some are better then other. Maryland and the UK (PRO & A2A) have amazing stuff. Also check out your local library. Mine has full access to Ancestry.com in library and HeritageQuest from home needing only my library card #.
My main roadblocks are that my mother’s birth-mother claims to have forgotten who the father was. Which really pisses me off since I should be able to look in the 1890 Kindgom of Hawaii census and see my ancestors instead I can only look up other people’s ancestors. Looks like nothing will come from that.
Elvin Mathis Johnson was born in Tennessee around 1853. I found his marriage in 1879 in Franklin county and he’s in the 1880 census twice in Marble Hills in Moore Co. I cannot not however find him in the 1870 or 1860 census. And I pretty much checked out every single Johnson there. Been stuck there 10 years now.
I’m very slowly(sorry, FFXII) working on moving my info over the wiki form. Not sure if it’s worth it but I’ve pretty much exhausted all the cheap stuff I can do so it’s something to keep me busy when I need to be. I still haven’t figured out how best to source everything though.
Apologies for the genetic hijack, but I have a question about genetic genealogy.
The Y-chromosome test: does this tell you about your father’s ancestry in general or only his straight up paternal line.
Suppose your father’s father was born in Dublin in 1890 and his father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father came to Ireland from Poland around 1650 and that man’s father’s father’s father (etc) came to Poland from Latvia in the 1400s. Meanwhile your father’s mother had ancestors from from Wales, Spain and Sweden in the last few centuries and even one who somehow came to Europe from India around 1800.
When you pay your money and do the swab and all, will it show that you have Indian, Polish, Welsh, Spanish etc. ancestry (that through your father’s mother’s line) or will it only show that "you match genetic subjects in Dublin, Poland and Latvia (the places of origin of your male line ancestry)? I also have the same question of the mitochondrial DNA testing: does it trace your mother’s entire ancestry or the maternal line only? (My understanding is that mitochondrial testing only tests very distant [as in thousands of years ago] ancestry since it takes mitochondrial DNA far longer to develop new sequences.)
Is there any type of test or series of tests that will tell you “your DNA has found matches in Cuba, Korea and Uzbekistan from this side of the family and Australia and Paraguay from the other side” or is it still too much in its infancy to tell you much about more than just the straight father or straight maternal line?
One reason I’m curious is the rumors in my family that research gives evidence of that I have a black African ancestor in the past two centuries. I can actually use the Y-DNA testing as my surname line is the one ironically I’m least able to trace- I can only get it back to 1800 and before there are about several families with the same surname. My father always said they were Welsh and came over in the late 17th century and DNA may help me find them. However, I’d REALLY like to verify or refute the African ancestry and the native American ancestry.
Thanks for any info-
J
PS- European migration habits are pretty interesting too. One line, my mother’s mother’s father’s line, I’d always heard was Irish and in fact they are, but I was surprised to learn that they only lived in Ireland for about 60 years. Before that they were Poles who refugeed to W. Europe during the time of Peter the Great.
Michener and Rutherford and other authors have based novels on the history of one place [Hawaii, Alaska, London, Sarum, etc.] over the course of thousands (with Michener millions) of years, but has any novel ever traced a single family over thousands of years? Alex Haley* traced his from Gambia to Tennessee but that was only over the course of 3 centuries; it’d be interesting seeing a family change nationality, race, culture, etc., several times with scenes set in 50000 BC Ethiopia, 10000 BCE Mongolia, 1200 AD France, 1700 Virginia, etc., and very feasible they could go through all of the major races (Australoid and Capoid would be a bit difficult to work in) and religions several times over the millennia.
The Y Chromosome passes practically unchanged from father to son. It wont really tell you about the ancestry but it mostly useful for comparing against other male lines. If you think you might have a paternal descent from some ancestor but can’t prove you could find another male descent line from him that is well proven and check your Y chromosome against his. If it matches that is a strong clue that you do descend from him.
Mitochondrial DNA passes down practically unchanged from mother to child, although as I understand it very rarely you can get your mDNA from your father. But it works similar to the Y, only for female lines.
There’s also a haplogroup that you can check which can give you the odds on where you ancestor’s came from. But there’s no guarantee. I’m pretty much R1b1. Maybe R1b1c. I don’t think it’s worth it.
The best use I’ve seen with this are family projects. Everybody with the last name Beauchamp will get together and get their Y tested. Then they use the results to organize a predictive tree even though they don’t always know how the lines are connected.