# Tracing my family tree **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [November 13, 2010, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tracing-my-family-tree/560600 "2010-11-13T23:38:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![dzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/5f9b8f/32.png) [@dzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dzero)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2010, 6:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tracing-my-family-tree/560600/21 "2010-11-16T06:22:36Z")
> [@seanchai](#): > > 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 know the official line is that people came here to escape religious persecution, but that wasn’t always the reason. My ancestors were given a land grant of I think a thousand acres or so by Queen Anne. Essentially, they were bribed. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2010, 1:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tracing-my-family-tree/560600/22 "2010-11-16T13:04:36Z")
> [@Boyo\_Jim](#): > > 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? Diff’rent strokes I guess. For me, it’s the same sort of feeling that I believe others seem to get about their country or their flag (which I don’t get at all). I had a reasonably happy family upbringing, but it doesn’t feel to me as though that’s much to do with my interest in it. I think I just like the idea of things being nailed down in time. I felt very much the same sense of wonderment and historical connectedness when I discovered that the local pond where I feed the ducks was [over 1,000 years old](http://www.atomicshrimp.com/st/content/manor_farm_pond). ---
**Author:** ![E-Sabbath](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e19adc/32.png) [@E-Sabbath](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/E-Sabbath)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2010, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tracing-my-family-tree/560600/23 "2010-11-16T18:11:15Z")
> [@Boyo\_Jim](#): > > 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. Well, one thing we’ve found from tracing the family tree back to 784 or so (it’s sketchy at that point: no longer paternal, but clan.) is that a really, really large group of my ancestors share a lot of traits. Mostly involving drinking, fighting, lighting things on fire, and regretting it. Also a lot of ‘and then the son got really pissed off at the father and just moved the hell away’. It’s given my father, my uncles, my cousins, and myself, a really interesting perspective on our current family behavior. Another is that we’ve been using the same group of first names since pretty near St. Patrick was enslaved. Another is where some of our odder bits of ironmongery that have been booting about the houses for a few years, actually came from. Of course, there’s also the high-entertainment value, like when I find a monument to an ancestor who was shot as a Covenanter martyr, and he’s got the same name as one of my uncles. “YOUR DEATH IS FORETOLD!” ---
**Author:** ![rostfrei](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/7bcc69/32.png) [@rostfrei](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rostfrei)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2010, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tracing-my-family-tree/560600/24 "2010-11-16T18:56:07Z")
My aunt is a semi-professional genealogist. She got me started, and addicted. Together, we found a very distant female relative with the last name of Kunigunta. Because of this woman, I am distantly related to hundreds, if not thousands of people eastern Pennsylvania. It’s really mindboggling. ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2010, 7:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tracing-my-family-tree/560600/25 "2010-11-16T19:12:36Z")
> [@Boyo\_Jim](#): > > 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? It’s just a hobby like anything else. Some people are obsessed by golf, others by hunting down ancestors. I’ve learned not to talk about it too much lest people start avoiding me. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2010, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tracing-my-family-tree/560600/26 "2010-11-16T22:31:22Z")
> [@suranyi](#): > > 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). It ain’t that easy to find records of Hungarian Christians, either. 😉 Birth and death records in Hungary were, for the longest time, kept by the local church/synogogue. If you knew what town your great-grandparents were from, you might be able to track them from there, assuming the local synogogue hadn’t been closed, blown up in one of the wars, suppressed by the Communists, suppressed by the Nazis, suppressed by the Catholics, suppressed by the Reformed, etc. ---
**Author:** ![NDP](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ndp/32/55_2.png) [@NDP](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NDP)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2010, 12:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tracing-my-family-tree/560600/27 "2010-11-17T00:46:30Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > Thanks. [Ancestry.co.uk](http://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. I got hooked into [Ancestry.com](http://Ancestry.com) three years ago through a “Free Weekend” deal (that’s how they get you). I mainly got into to it because I was curious about what countries my ancestors originally came from. My mother’s side is easy because everybody came over from Norway sometime in the late 19th and early 20th century and settled in North Dakota. My father’s side, however, is more difficult because they’ve been in the US longer. There were rumors of French and Irish ancestry but, from what I’ve discovered so far, most branches of my tree go into England (often by way of Canada). One definite thing I have l learned: a lot of American census takers had terrible handwriting. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tracing-my-family-tree/560600.md?page=1)