What were your ancestors up to in the 1300s? Where did they end up?

So, what do you know or imagine your ancestors were up to in the 13th century? Where did they end up that’s contributed to where you were born?

-My great x 13 paternal grandfather was William the Conqueror (took the English throne in 1066).

-Some piece of the family wandered off into Scotland and built Dunollie Castle in Oban (ca. 1150). As a proud member of Clan MacDougall, I’m something like 12,000th in line to inherit the castle (I’m thinking it won’t happen in my lifetime). The MacDougalls hung out in Scotland making war and deciding on our tartan design. I imagine my peeps were soldiers, tenant farmers, charwomen, and so on. Some MacDougalls trickled over in the Revolutionary War era, lived in Upstate New York, then pushed West with a Mormon handcart company.

-At some point someone wandered into County Cork, Ireland. The genealogy is fuzzy on these folks, but my last name is uniquely Irish (except that it isn’t – the other group that the name occurs with are Ashkenazi Jews; pretty certain that my people were poor Irish farmers and shepherds).

-Some of the English peeps immigrated to America in the 1600s; my great x 8, John Howland, was the guy who fell off the Mayflower. He was rescued, so therefore I exist :smiley: A grandmother got pregnant by a British Soldier ca. 1755 and its possible that the resulting child was shipped off to England to be raised by the soldier’s family.

-My matriarchal forebears were Dutch and lived in Rotterdam. I imagine there were wooden shoes, windmills, and tulips involved in the story :smiley: They hung out until 1872 then some of them migrated to America, bought a handcart, and walked from Massachusetts to Utah. I do have extensive genealogy my gr- gr-grandma did but it’s in Dutch and I haven’t (yet) tackled it.

So this is how I came to be born in Utah. I did the reverse immigration and now live on the East Coast.

How many ancestors would you have going back 700 years?

My family lineage went from France --> Canada --> US

Of course that is just one part of the family. I know I also have German ancestry, I’m not sure when or why they came over. But I’m sure I have ancestry from all over Europe.

In retrospect, Canada was probably a better country to live in.

The start of my family history really only begins in the early 1600’s at the 1st colony at Jamestown in Virginia (before the Pilgrims). From there, it was just a slow crescent shaped migrations South into the Carolinas and then west where I was born in Louisiana near the Texas border only because my great-x grandfather wasn’t able to walk back home after the Civil War was over so he married his nurse, my great-x grandmother and stayed to help found my tiny little home town.

My paternal line is extremely well documented because of the unbroken Jamestown connection. I recently took specific tests to prove it and they came back positive. I also took a more general ancestry.com DNA test that told me what I basically already knew. I am about the whitest pure American that you can be. The vast majority of my deep ancestry is from the British Isles with just some tiny contributions from other groups.

All lines of my family have been in the U.S. for hundreds of years so there is no “old country” for us. Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolinas are about it. The closest thing I have is a medieval church still in use in London that has the marriage records of my great-x grandparents from the late 1500’s before they set sail for America. That is when Shakespeare was still around. No older records seem to exist even though literally thousands of people have looked for them.

The grounds of their plantation still exist outside of the Jamestown colony. I have been there and they have a plaque in the church in the center of the Jamestown site proper that commemorates them.

Be careful about specific records that are older than 1700 or so unless they are very well supported with detailed lineages, land records, wills, deeds and even DNA tests. I have spent thousands of hours on mine and will not give it to anyone until I am sure that it is right. All it takes is one mistake or deception in one generation to make everything older than it wrong. That said, you probably are related to European royalty just like almost everyone of European descent. The power of exponential growth means that everyone has an incredible number of grandparents after a few hundred years.

1300s? Pfft. our people don’t even know anything before Reconstruction. Rumors have my maternal grandmother’s side settling in NC from Germany.

-Speaking of rumors and Germany, my wife’s father’s family arrived in Chicago supposedly because their grandfather, a local burgher, ran off to America with the milkmaid.

I know they were farmers on one side and miners on the other somewhere in Poland in the 1800s, and both sides of the family emigrated and settled in Baltimore in the early 1900s. My best guess is that I come from a long line of peasants and laborers. But I can’t find out for sure where my grandparents and great grandparents were from - anyone who might know anything is long dead.

Here is The Mater’s article on the doubling grandparents after each generation problem. After 700 years, you end up with more grandparents than there were people in the world if you just use simple doubling for each generation. There is an explanation though. It means you end up with a whole lot of duplicates. That doesn’t mean that you come from a perverted family. It has to work that way. Everyone still has a huge number of grandparents though.

Well, I did one of those DNA test thingies…otherwise I wouldn’t have a clue as far as where most of mine came from. What it told me is my ancestors were native Americans from central and northern Mexico, Spanish, Greeks/Middle East (and a weird one from eastern Europe) then a bunch of random low percentage numbers from North Africa and such. Like I said…no idea what that means in realistic terms or how accurate these things are…a lot of the above was a surprise, though some of it wasn’t.

My mother’s side of the family we have a family tree going back to the mid 1400’s in Holland - based on that probably the same area carving clogs and smoking tulips or something.

Dad’s side: we know they come from Scotland from the Inverness area along the shores of Loch Ness. I like to think they spent their time getting pissed and inventing monster stories.

1300s? Recognitor of the Grand Assize. Lands around Pembury, a bit less than a third up the Hastings Road between the coast and London.

Isn’t everyone with English ancestry related to William the Conqueror?

My maternal ancestry: German-Swiss peasants.
My paternal ancestry: Russian and Eastern European Jewish peasants

That’s all anyone knows.

Yes, see my post above.

We have documentation on my mother’s family going back to Shakespearean times, so I would surmise that circa 1300, they would have still been in the same area, still being farming landowners.

My father’s family were very low level rural peasants from the country around the Black Forest, which probably would have made them serfs in the 1300s.

I have a papers documenting a direct ancestor arriving in Salem, MA in 1633. He was a soldier. Possibly from a long line of soldiers? Who knows? That’s as far back as I have information. Or maybe they were farmers. My last name (same as the ancestor’s) means “from the fields” in old English. Great Yarmouth (where he emigrated from) is a coastal town, so maybe those who weren’t sodiers or farmers were fisherman? I wish I knew.

My grandparents were Irish immigrants. If I must hazard a guess… in 1300, my ancestors were probably just ordinary Irish farmers raising oats (potatoes hadn’t been introduced yet) and cows.

I have an Irish great-great-grandfather. Other than that, everyone else, as far as I know, was Jewish. Some of them were in E. Europe, and ended up in the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia just before they came to the US, so I’m assuming they were in Austro-Hungary, but they could have been in Russia, and somehow gotten to Slovakia after a pogrom. Anyway, Ashkenazic.

Another part of the family came from England, and was here in colonial America. They were probably Sephardic, so they probably somehow survived the Spanish Inquisition. I don’t know what part of England they came from.

Then another part came from England as well, but they seem to have been Ashkenazic Jews who probably originally went to London from Russia or Poland, and were there long enough to save money to come to the US, and raise a generation who spoke the king’s English, because a few of them moved to Connecticut and started quietly going to the Episcopal Church.

Anyway, nearly all of my family would have been Jews knocking about Europe in the 1300s, trying to stay alive, and avoid blood libels, etc.

Best guess, hiding from the Mongol Invasion of Europe.

Farming semi-arable soil on the northern part of my country’s main island, breathing nice clean air, gradually being converted from animism to Islam, maybe shifting from farming to forestry and mining to better deal with Chinese pirates and traders who keep paying you a visit, laughing at any stranger who comes along.

Getting murdered by Robert the Bruce and his men - Well, some of them, anyway - Including the Red Comyn (John III Comyn, Lord of Badenoch). There there was an odd bit of fighting, banditry and revenge, flight to Wales, more bad-assery, flight to Ireland, still more shenanigans, flight to Canada, migration to Pittsburgh area, additional shenanigans, and then migration to California, where misbhavior continued until my father’s time. :stuck_out_tongue:

The most recent common ancestor of all humans probably lived about 2,300 years ago.

At around 5,000 years ago, you reach a point of identical ancestry - where every human alive today had the exact same entire set of ancestors. In other words, everyone alive at that time was either an ancestor of every modern human, or their lineage died out completely.

Rohde et al Nature 431, 562-566 (30 September 2004)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7008/abs/nature02842.html