I’ve just begun tracing my family tree, kickstarted by a half day’s consultancy from an expert genealogist (my sister gave me a voucher for this as a birthday present back in the summer).
It’s been fantastic . (I’m not intending to share the actual details here, for reasons of (notional) privacy). I’ve just this evening traced my paternal line all the way back to my Great x 7 Grandfather, born c1760. He’s actually buried in the churchyard a literal stone’s throw from my house. Most of my paternal ancestors are local, within 40 miles of here, but it’s interesting that I’ve moved back to my ancestral village completely by chance.
It’s fun but just be warned, it’s also addictive. You’ll always be trying for just one more generation.
My Irish side can only be traced back to 1870 when they appear in the US. During the 1800’s the Irish national sport was revolting against authority and most all of the various censuses were burned.
My French side can be traced back to 1600. Meticulous documenters, those French and Canadians.
My sister, the genealogist of the family, is becoming somewhat of an expert on reading Quebecois handwriting of the 1700s and 1800s. If she ever gets tired of nursing, I think she has a fallback career assisting historians.
Good luck with future searches. Get back to us when you hit your first brick wall. As mentioned, it’s addictive; it’s also frustrating. I have large blank areas in my family tree and there is little likelihood that they will ever be filled in.
A side note: be very careful what you take as gospel from Internet sources. An example: today I found information from seven sources on Ancestry.com about one of my ancestors. One of them said she was born in England. The other six said she was born in Barnstable, MA. In 1600. Yeah, right. People don’t pay attention to history in many cases and just blindly copy what they find because if it’s on the web, it must be true.
It’s addictive, for sure. I’m planning to spend a day in the regional records office, where I should be able to look at and take copies of all the census documents supporting what I’ve found so far.
Got some photos this morning of the memorial to my great-great-great-great-great-great uncle, who is buried in the local churchyard - the inscription says “builder of this place” - we already knew of this headstone, but didn’t know how we were connected, and had assumed that ‘builder of this place’ just meant that he was a builder living in the area, but the evidence is building that he did in fact build the church c1835-6
I’ve never had any luck tracing anything further back than my grandparents on both sides. All four of them were “off the boat”. On my mother’s side I did find their immigration papers. Father’s side? Absolutely nothing. It’s as though they never existed.
Mangetout I believe you live in the UK. If so, it’s worth joining the website called Genes Reunited which costs about £10 a year. You can build your tree via this website, and every week or so you will be informed of “hot matches” of names and birth years to other trees on the site. Using these matches I have been able to contact various cousins I never knew existed, and have been able to exchange information about various family members going back several generations.
Thanks. Ancestry.co.uk is a pretty useful resource too - partly searchable for free, but to get to the sorts of facts you need to confirm your hunches, the subscription is about £100/year. I think I can use it for free at the library, though.
Another free website is Freebmd which gives basic serchable information about births, marriages and deaths from about 1837 onwards. Another free useful tools is the Commonwealth War Graves Commission which will give details of any of your ancestors who lost their lives during the various conflicts since 1914.
I must admit I subscribe to both Ancestry and Find My Past. Expensive, I know, but really useful tools for a hobby I enjoy.
I am related, through my maternal grandmother, to early US/Dutch Mennonites, who kept records - some shirttail cousin posted quite a few family trees online. It’s not too difficult to find my “line/s” but it does require a bucket load of patience.
In the local library I occasionally read a magazine called something like ‘Genealogy’. Lately I read an excellent quote regarding family history, something like, ‘If your mother says she loves you, find 2 more good sources …’ Back up everything, again and again, with factual evidence.
Sometimes you get lucky. I ‘knew’ my father had a paternal aunt named Thomasin, who married a William Halliday in Scotland and moved to Nova Scotia, where they had several daughters. Well, the town in Scotland was/is alive with Hallidays, and the males are rife with Williams. But I did find a cemetery’s gravestones and inscriptions online, in NS, and now have her death certificate. Just luck.
Yes, genealogy is addicting. And my sister’s daughter has started emailing and phoning me, wanting to find out about the family history. What a wonderful woman she’s turned out to be, eh?
I am an amateur genealogist as well and I have spent many hundreds of hours on it in the last two years alone. Most of my lines are fairly easy to trace. I always knew that my last name came from my great-x grandfather who came to Jamestown in about 1610 from England. My main tool is the subscription version of ancestry.com and it was easy to redocument that one in an hour to duplicate the documents I already had as a test. Family knowledge is also fairly good so it takes little effort to go into the 1800’s and usually back to the 1700’s for other lines. I knew some very old relatives as a child and even those 2nd hand accounts can take me before the Civil War and confirmed just from memory.
The problem that I have is that I have too much information now. My formatted Family Tree maker chart that interfaces with my ancestry.com subscription is over 1000 pages long at this point and I don’t know what to do with it. I know about some mistakes in it already so so I can’t share the whole thing with anyone because that wouldn’t be responsible research. Most lines completely correct going back to about 1700 but it takes effort to go back from there and you have to want to for a specific line and it grows and grows well, like a tree so there are a whole lot of grandparents to research. I also encountered the problem of finding white grandparents born in Massachusetts before the Pilgrims arrived and that won’t do. You have to be careful with older records and compare sources and take educated guesses sometimes.
I have found a whole ton of interesting things though. An off-hand conversation with my 86 year old grandfather a few weeks ago suggested that his grandfather was one of the last surviving Confederate Civil War Soldiers. It took me about 10 minutes not only to find and document that, but also locate the 1949 photo shoot in Life magazine about him and the last of the others. I located and bought a pristine original of the magazine for $20 and have it on my desk as easily as some people order a sweater. The internet is really cool in that regard but it never ends.
This is off topic and I’m thinking about starting a separate thread, but it might be a quick answer so here’s the question. I have a genealogy that was done by a distant relative for my and “allied” families (apparently there are families with whom my ancestors tended to intermarry). I’ve checked and it is out of copyright (was never renewed after the initial copyright expired).
I’ve scanned and OCR’d the text. I’ve done the same with an extensive maternal genealogy that was never published and so should be unimpaired by copyright. What is the best way to make this information available to amateur genealogists?
I really don’t mean this in a snarky way, but… what is the attraction? Why do you care that your 7 generations back grandfather… shot grouse with the Duke of Earl, or something?
I hardly feel much connection to my own father, and none at all to my grandfathers, and perhaps that is my loss. I didn’t experience a happy family environment, and I wonder if that’s what makes me disinterested, or if the opposite is what makes you very interested?
Until molecular biology can tie specific genes to particular behavioral traits - assuming it’s ever possible - I think knowing where you come from can give you some insight into yourself. For example, my male ancestors were farmers and soldiers. Until relatively modern times, the two occupations went hand in hand. A king would reward his noblemen with land in return for military service, which often meant military conquest. I won’t go into specifics since it’s mostly conjecture on my part, that makes a lot of sense to me in terms of the type of person I am.
I know it’s easy to make the argument that there’s no connection and that that it’s only a tiny part of one’s genome, but even if that’s true, I think it has other intangible benefits. Everyone wants to know where they come from even if it makes no practical difference.
When I hear stories that start with “My family has been soldier (or whatever) for X generations…” I’ve always though of that… well, in a couple of different way. One is that parents or grandparents use the phrase manipulatively to push their children into the same pursuits. Another is just as a kind of interesting historical fact.
I wouldn’t really think to attribute my own behavior or personality to it, though why I shouldn’t, I don’t know. Maybe because I don’t know what “it” is. Certainly I’ve come to realize there is an almost scary amount of my dad in me.
It does make a big difference in my family. We are almost pure-bred Southern Americans. If there is any such thing as Native Americans that aren’t the ones that came over the Bering Strait land-bridge, we are it starting at Jamestown. That isn’t just a point of pride, it starts to explain lots of things and how things got to be the way that they are. It also has some serious financial implications in my family going back a long way as well as things like naming traditions.
It is amazing what families can pass down over time without even knowing exactly why. All first born males of my paternal genealogy, including me, have the same first name but we go by our middle name at birth. No one really knew why that was other than the fact that it was the family rule. I researched it and found it went back at least to the 1600’s which is just something nice to know for me.
There are a whole bunch of things like that you can piece together with current genealogical research. I also have this concept I call generation jumping which are second and third hand historical accounts that can go back really, really far. My oldest great-grandmother was born in 1889 and was already an adult when the Titanic sank and WWI broke out but I knew her well. She knew Civil War soldiers personally and could tell you lots about them. If you have a family that has been stable for a long time, you pick up furniture and artifacts that you want to know more about. It just so happens that I share some exact parts of my genome with some people going back a long way that I can learn about with modern technology and they had an impact on my life even if they were long dead.
It wouldn’t be the same thing if my family was just a bunch of immigrants straight out of Ellis Island that got mixed in the American blender in the early 1900’s but I would still want to know more about where they came from. Collective family consciousness lasts for a while and we have the tools to learn a lot more about it today than ever.
My parents came to the U.S. from Europe in the 1950s. I knew most of my grandparents, since they also immigrated to the U.S. I have heard stories of my great-grandparents. Beyond that I don’t know what I can do to go back further in time, since records of Hungarian Jews are not easy to find (and besides, I can’t read Hungarian).
Many people simply like to know the specifics of who their ancestors were, and when and where they lived. It’s just a matter of satisfying one’s curiosity.
[sub]Grouse? I don’t see any grouse.[/sub]
People who are happy where they are don’t up stakes and move thousands of miles away. So, why did it seem a good idea to, say, come to America?
I want to know the stories. Some people like to brag about their ancestors’ achievements; some like to know where their families came from, and why. As I’ve said, genealogical research is akin to a storyteller’s chest of family history. For example, my Scottish grandfather came to Canada in 1907 because he thought the ‘free land’ meant he would be able to set himself up as a laird, with tenant farmers working his land under his direction. The idea of a quarter section as one farm was alien to him. The man had been a schoolteacher in Scotland, and that is what he ended up doing here in Canada -
Saskatchewan needed teachers more than lairds:) Knowing that about him tells me quite a bit about a fellow who died long before I was a gleam in my father’s eye. I know Grandfather M. attending the University of Aberdeen but I don’t know if he graduated, or if he did, when. How do I find out more? Well …
I wouldn’t be surprised if your lack of close family connections is the difference. I adored my grandparents, lived near them and spent lots of time with them. Wanting to know about their early lives, their parents and grandparents seems natural, and from there it just keeps going back up the generations.
