There’s actually a religious reason for this. I’m not Mormon so I may be butchering this, but my understanding is that they believe relatives can be saved and let into heaven even after they’ve died. If a Mormon demonstrates via genealogy that an unsaved soul is related to him, he can take that name to his Temple and God will essentially send Mormon angles to go knock on the unsaved soul’s door and try to convert it so it can join the rest of its family in heaven.
So the more ancestors they can join together into giant family trees the more souls they can save.
Even non-Mormon genealogists such as myself greatly benefit from the work they do.
This is because of their practice of baptising the dead. Basically, they believe that a Mormon can undergo baptism on behalf of his or her deceased relatives who didn’t have the chance to do so themselves during their lives, and then the deceased relatives can be accepted into heaven. However, it’s only valid if you can identify specific deceased persons for whom you’re acting as a proxy; hence the need for accurate genealogies.
ETA: that’s what I get for opening this question in a background tab and then spending a half-hour looking at other threads.
I think it much more depends on who your ancestors were.
As I mentioned inthis thread I’m in UK and just from a very casual search from typing my name in Google took me to my entry on this site from which I was able to trace my ancestry back to pre-1066. Of course as was discussed in the thread, even documented ancestry is not reliable, but I was surprised to find that one of the claimed lines of descent on that site which I thought may be a bit fishy, I google further and found it was actually solidly documented in the National Archives from Henry II’s own records. In fact I can find multiple ancestors from 19th, 18th and 17th century quite easily, it is only when I start going back to the 16th century that they start becoming a bit thin on the ground. I must add this is all from a very casual search.
What I didn’t mention though on the thread is that on my Mother’s side of the family I can’t trace my family on that side beyond people I know, this simply because they were all solidly working class. I know that one great-great-great-grand parents was Indian (I know this simply because my great-grandfather’s mother was half-Indian and he himself was alive until just before my teens), but beyond a few hints of possibly Irish or Jewish ancestors and a solid family connection to Woolwich I know next-to-nothing about my ancestors on that side of the family.
Yeah, it’s really, really hard to do genealogical research (in English) if you’re Indian. I know more about my sister-in-law’s ancestors than I do my own, because her family has always lived in Oxford and mine is mostly from around Mumbai.
I think it’s more the working class element that makes it difficult. I can only really guess at who my Indian ancestor was - I think they were most likely a mid-19th century Indian sailor as there are docks in Woolwich and Indian sailors settling down in London and marrying local girls is known from this time.
I think another possible factor might be land ownership. Historically speaking, far more middle- and working-class American owned land than their British counterpart, due to America’s size and settlement history. Until recently, it was much more likely that an American would own the house he lived in or farm he worked than an Englishman would. And where you have property ownership, you have records - both official, and private, because people need to know who inherits what land.
One of the great oddities about England is that it had no system of land registration until the twentieth century. (Scotland, on the other hand, did have one.) But that isn’t quite as much of a problem as it may seem. Collusive actions in the Court of Common Pleas provided an unofficial substitute and the resulting records, the feet of fines, are a genealogical goldmine. (They are, it is true, difficult to use, but over the decades historians and genealogists have created lots of shortcuts precisely because they are so useful.) Moreover, families routinely kept title deeds because, in the absence of official registration, those provided the best evidence of ownership. Which is why they survive in mind-bogglingly large numbers in local archives. Although despite their vast numbers, they do tend to be easy to locate, especially since the advent of electronic catalogues.
Moreover, much the same applies to records not just of ownership but of tenancies. Landowning families also tended to keep records of the lands they were leasing. Those too tend to make up sizable proportions of their surviving archives. Just as importantly, the records of many manorial courts survive and those were primarily concerned with recording who was being granted which tenancies. Indeed, owners of English manorial records are now obligated to preserve them as the ownership of certain properties ultimately derive from manorial tenures.
Of course, a lot depends on the accidents of survival. But far more of this type of stuff survives in English archives than most novices assume. It’s also nowhere near as difficult to use them as they might think, not least because there are now any number of popular guides aimed at family historians explaining how they can be used.
It’s far easier to trace male ancestors than female (at least in the US). Quite often, female births weren’t even recorded, and the existence of a daughter is sometimes only found in a male parent’s will (I’ve never seen a will written by a woman from early times). As for kept records early on, most all them were in the form of church records and family bibles. Luckily for some, there were some persistent souls who compiled all those records into one volume, such as “The History of Ancient Wethersfield (CT)”. If you have an ancestor from one of those areas, the books can be a goldmine, although some of them only addressed the more prominent people in the community.
In the case of one of my family lines, a 19th century doctor took on the huge task of collecting family information in the late 1800s. This meant traveling all over the country (often on horseback) to track down relatives, interview them, and collate all the data into a book on the Colegrove family.
Apart from censuses, the Scottish system has always been separate and different from the ones in the rest of the UK. Formal recording of births, deaths and marriages began in 1855 and they’re available on this site: http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/
If your ancestors are Scottish you can often trace any given line back to the 1790s in about half an hour. If you have a marriage in around 1860, the register will give the names and maiden names of the parents of the bride and groom, and whether they were still alive or not. If a parent is still alive after 1855, you can then look for the record of that person’s death. The register of deaths will give the names and maiden name of that person’s parents, and the chances are those parents will have been born in the 18th century. Getting any more information about the oldest of these 3 generations is more chancy though.
Did you pick Henry VIII by accident? His legitimate line quickly went extinct – that’s why James VI of Scots rode his horse down to London and acquired his Second Number – and Henry’s only acknowledged bastard died as a teenager without issue.
This is not to say Henry VIII has no living descendants. Both of the children born to Mary Boleyn and given the surname of her husband William Carey are now generally agreed, I think, to be natural children of King Henry VIII. Other bastards are conjectured. Moreover …
[SPOILER]John Harington (1561-1612), inventor of the flush toilet, and possibly(*) ancestor to many Americans is now – Breaking News! – conjectured to be the love child of Elizabeth Regina the “Virgin”!
(* Early Harrington immigrants to Massachusetts are often shown as descended from the flush toilet inventor – I’ve no idea if this is backed by evidence.)
[/SPOILER]
But children were baptised typically within 3 months, 6 at the outside (except, see my comment about the whole family baptised one day). Infant death typically means up to age 5, and even up to age 10, not just newborns. Yet I see typically see families of only 2 to 4 children before 1800, whereas starting in the 1800s, 5 to 8 children seems to be typical.
(one of the difficulties I found is the older birth and marriage records seem more available and complete than death records in my UK searches.)
Selection bias. You’re not talking to most Americans, you’re talking to a specific subset of Americans who can do those kinds of traces. Certain groups (Mayflower descendants, etc.) have a very strong interest in identifying themselves, and so they have records and documentation. But I am not sure that’s true of most Americans - especially those who went west.
(I know that in all but one tiny branch, I can’t get past 1900 with any certainty. I can’t get past the civil war (1860s) at all.)
The title deed of my fathers house is a conversion from a hovel into a house in the mid 1600’s, so the ownership of the ‘property’ such as it was is only noted from that document although obviously they’d been living in the hovel for a while before the conversion.
And a whole load of records got destroyed in 1922, which doesn’t help.Look, Civil Wars are all very well, but destroying records is a bit inconvenient.
The farthest that I, an American, can trace back my ancestry is to the latter 1600’s, in one branch.
That we can do that is thanks to an ancestor who in the 1880’s wrote a book about the family, with an incredible amount of data. So I know that a multi-greats grandfather was court-martialed during the Revolutionary War, and that an extremely distant cousin was ambassador to Austria-Hungary, and so on.
If it hadn’t been for that guy who wrote the book then my great-great grandparents would have been as far back as I know.
While a lot of parish registers appear to have been transcribed and the contents in some form exist online, I don’t see the same about English courts or manorial records - presumably less important that birth, marriage, and death records?
Indeed. And it is true that many family historians run into difficulties when they try to move back beyond the nineteenth century. The handwriting, the language and an unfamiliarity with the type of records can all discourage them, even although these are often smaller hurdles than they assume. Moreover, this has in turn influenced the policies of the commercial genealogical websites because they calculate that their users are more comfortable using the later records. But then again similar biases also affect access to the American records.
There however one respect in which family historians researching earlier periods in America do have a big advantage over those in the UK - the population of the American colonies was just so much smaller. Even by the end of the seventeenth century their total population was still smaller than that of some English counties.
Did you pick Henry VIII by accident? His legitimate line quickly went extinct – that’s why James VI of Scots rode his horse down to London and acquired his Second Number – and Henry’s only acknowledged bastard died as a teenager without issue.