Genealogy anyone?

[golfgal]

My cousin has been working on our family tree for about 10 years. He just sent me the like to the website where he has compiled all his information. Holy Moly! It is going to take 10 years just to read through everything. He has traced back to at least the 1100's, that is the earliest I have found so far. Some interesting relatives include Charlemagne, some Kings of England, Henry II, William the Conqueror and a few others. Laura Ingalls Wilder is on the list too. That is cool.

 

[Pop Daddy]

I think Im the first in are family tree to walk upright

 

[LuvN~Travel]

I think Im the first in are family tree to walk upright

I am SO GLAD I didn't have anything liquid in my mouth when I read that!
Kim

 

[alanapapa]

My cousin has been working on our family tree for about 10 years. He just sent me the like to the website where he has compiled all his information. Holy Moly! It is going to take 10 years just to read through everything. He has traced back to at least the 1100's, that is the earliest I have found so far. Some interesting relatives include Charlemagne, some Kings of England, Henry II, William the Conqueror and a few others. Laura Ingalls Wilder is on the list too. That is cool.

How sure is his documentation? I have my DM's DM back through 1508 in England and things get quite hard to verify. I have DW Caropooh's father's back to 1600 or so in Ireland/Scotland. Please PM me and send me a link. I love looking at some of these genealogy sites.

 

[golfgal]

How sure is his documentation? I have my DM's DM back through 1508 in England and things get quite hard to verify. I have DW Caropooh's father's back to 1600 or so in Ireland/Scotland. Please PM me and send me a link. I love looking at some of these genealogy sites.

I guess I don't know, I think it is fairly accurate. I know we have had a good family trail to follow just through information handed down through the generations that dates back to the early 1600's. I think a lot of the information has come from birth/death records in Ireland too. The site he has is a password protected family site. I don't have the ability to give anyone access unfortunately.

I know my grandpa on my Dad's side spent years trying to track down his family (this above cousin is on my mom's side) and was never able to track it past his dad. We are assuming there was a major name change either on his own part or that of the immigration officials. My grandpa had 3 sisters of marriageable age that were left behind when his dad came to the US that he could never find.

 

[emily1982]

I've tried to do ours but didn't get far back as i didn;t want to start paying for the information, but the census are useful to trace back a fair few generations. Most my moms family are local to the area, my dads are about an hour away and have been for generations.

 

[golfgal]

I've tried to do ours but didn't get far back as i didn;t want to start paying for the information, but the census are useful to trace back a fair few generations. Most my moms family are local to the area, my dads are about an hour away and have been for generations.

My MIL is working on my FIL's family now and she has gotten a lot of information from the census.

 

[OK!]

I've been on-again, off-again researching my family tree for about a year now, largely because of losing 10 (actually 11 now; we lost another one yesterday) family members since July 2005. Luckily, someone from the most traceable branch of the family had already done a TON of research and posted the info on ancestry.com, so I can go back as far as the early 1500s in Switzerland; that's the branch that Elizabeth Taylor is part of, so that was one of the ones I was most interested in anyway.

My dad's side can only be traced back to when they arrived in Delaware in the 1700s because those first arrivers decided, in their infinite wisdom , to change their surname into a really embarrassing one (unbeknownst to them, because they spoke German) to commemorate their crossing of the Atlantic Ocean and arrival in a new country. Sigh. Makes a good story, though.

 

[RoyalCanadian]

I would humbly suggest that any genealogy that suggests Charlemagne (who devised his own genealogy to prove his relation to Jesus Christ), Henry II and William the Conqueror as relatives has less than stellar documentation.

Many genealogies done in years past were embellished to increase the sense of importance for a person (i.e. Charlemagne was an important king, so one is therefore important if descended from Charlemagne) and while it can be downright difficult to prove the line of descent, it can be downright impossible to prove that the relation does not exist.

Now Laura Ingalls Wilder is a very interesting ancestor in her own right and that relation is easily documented.

Other posters are correct in suggesting that tracing relatives to the 16th, 17th or 18th centuries is difficult enough as records simply don't exist in the ways they do today. The earliest British census dates from 1841 -- there is a lot of time between that date and William the Conqueror's Domesday book to fill in the details.

 

[Mskanga]

I have worked on my husband's family tree and I have found out things that his own family did not even know.
I have so many links to follow and so many different countries now that it's not funny.

 

[momsgoofy]

I've been on-again, off-again researching my family tree for about a year now, largely because of losing 10 (actually 11 now; we lost another one yesterday) family members since July 2005. Luckily, someone from the most traceable branch of the family had already done a TON of research and posted the info on ancestry.com, so I can go back as far as the early 1500s in Switzerland; that's the branch that Elizabeth Taylor is part of, so that was one of the ones I was most interested in anyway.

My dad's side can only be traced back to when they arrived in Delaware in the 1700s because those first arrivers decided, in their infinite wisdom , to change their surname into a really embarrassing one (unbeknownst to them, because they spoke German) to commemorate their crossing of the Atlantic Ocean and arrival in a new country. Sigh. Makes a good story, though.

Tell me about those name changes. My maiden name was a weird one by most peoples opinions and I couldn't find anything on the family. Well, about 10 years ago we found out why. It seems my 6th great grandfather and his father, my 7th great grandfather, had a tiff and the 6th changed the spelling of the name. Once I found out the correct last name, I hit paydirt! There is a family association with tons of documentation about the family...we have a family crest and coat of arms, family hymn, scholarships for those who can prove their pedigree back to the original family member who came to America and a bunch of neat stuff. There is even a university in Pennsylvania that houses books about my family...not a couple, but an entire room and there is one in Switzerland with a couple rooms full. Every summer there is a huge reunion, which I kept wanting to attend, but it's not worked out yet.

 

[snowwite]

I started researching this after a lot of my older relatives were already gone and missed the opportunity to get a lot more detail. If you have elderly relatives let them talk to you about the generations before you. I did learn a lot from my great aunts but I wish I started sooner.
I also found some "interesting" stuff.
My family tree doesnt have as many branches as I thought. My great grandmothers were sisters so my grandparents were first cousins.
My great aunt died young unwed and with child.
My greatgrandfather died in the flu epidemic in1918. He was just 25 yrs old.
My great grandfather on the other side was a pedophile who molested his neice.His sister raised the child and his mother as siblings. My grandfather died not knowing his sister was his mother and his father was a monster.
My other greatgrandfather on that side was an indian scout who served in a cavalry unit. Per the copy of the discharge papers I looked at he led and fought battles against "hostiles" who were also indian. So he basically turned on his own people which doesnt seem to me something to be real proud about.
Twins are common. Especially identical twins.
Cancer and heart disease run rampant.
We are descendant of lots of fisherman and almost every generation has had someone in the military.
I also found out that the nationalities we thought we were are not correct.But I am still me and still an american mutt and I am ok with that.

 

[snowwite]

My cousin has been working on our family tree for about 10 years. He just sent me the like to the website where he has compiled all his information. Holy Moly! It is going to take 10 years just to read through everything. He has traced back to at least the 1100's, that is the earliest I have found so far. Some interesting relatives include Charlemagne, some Kings of England, Henry II, William the Conqueror and a few others. Laura Ingalls Wilder is on the list too. That is cool.

How did he get back to 1100's?
I began looking in 1988 and I cant get beyond the 1670's.
I dont want to rain on your parade but most people who claim to be descendant of someone famous dont have the correct information.
Of course you could just say we are all related because of Adam and Eve (if you belive in that)

 

[LiLIrishChick63]

i've always wanted to do a family tree and trace us back, but it's so hard. espically since none of my grandparents are alive and most of my aunts and uncles are either passed or have gone crazy, so it's hard to get the ball rolling.

 

[rie'smom]

When I was doing a family tree a few years ago,I "discovered" a great source for People with Scottish ancestry. For a fee-I think about 20-30 dollars.you can access the Scottish records -births,deaths and weddings. It was really helpful in helping to verify dates.
Oh and guess what-my first Melvin ancestor(Daniel,who was 13 at the time) was helped to escape his abusive step father by his mother. He left by ship from the Isle of Skye. On the way over,his boat was raided by Blackbeard. He was made a cabin boy for a couple of weeks until he and a couple of others threw wooden barrels overboard at night and floated onto the North Carolina shore. He lived in Bladen,NC. This was a piece of family lore but I was able to confirm dates with the help of the Scottish registry so it turns out that since the dates match that it might just be true!!

 

[snowwite]

i've always wanted to do a family tree and trace us back, but it's so hard. espically since none of my grandparents are alive and most of my aunts and uncles are either passed or have gone crazy, so it's hard to get the ball rolling.

I started w/the people left then went to local city halls and got birth,marriage,death certificates. Those list where they were born,occupation address and I was able to do more digging on line.For example we have a number of relatives I have never met living in Nova Scotia. When the family came from England the boat stopped there and some of them never left. I spoke with a cousin of my mom's who sent me pics of my great grandmother and her mother as girls as well as some of my mom from when she was a kid and went there. I got some software from geaneology forum and ancestry.com but none of the census had my family on them. I found more family on the census for Dakota territory.
I located my moms great uncle on a shipwreck memorial in Canada.
You would be surprised how much you can find. Be careful though. I have had a lot of ofers from less then reputable people who will "help" find information for a fee and most are crooks.

 

[magicmato]

I always laugh when people bring up Charlemagne. Here is an article from Ancestry.com

You Are Descended from Royalty
Every time I think about finding kings and queens in the family tree, I create a mental image of the would-be social climbers of years ago who researched family trees in hopes of proving themselves to be "better" than the average person. How little they knew. It seems that the "average person" also has royal ancestry. In fact, there is nothing more common than having a few bluebloods in the family tree.

Lisa Oberg and George Anderson both sent e-mails this week telling me about a fascinating article in the May 2002 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. That issue contains an article by Steve Olson, called "The Royal We: The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne."

In the article, Olsen describes his own search for his Irish ancestors. He goes on to detail what he learned from Mark Humphrys, a computer scientist at Dublin City University, as well as from some recent research done by Joseph Chang, a statistician at Yale University. In short, everyone of European descent has royal ancestry.

Chang’s mathematical model makes the case for the number of ancestors that each of us has: "The mathematics of our ancestry is exceedingly complex, because the number of our ancestors increases exponentially, not linearly. These numbers are manageable in the first few generations—two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents—but they quickly spiral out of control. Go back forty generations, or about a thousand years, and each of us theoretically has more than a trillion direct ancestors—a figure that far exceeds the total number of human beings who have ever lived."

The article goes on at some length to explain the realities of migration patterns and intermarriage within small communities. Olsen writes, "The number of ancestors common to all Europeans today increased, until, about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation prevailed: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or all their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living today."

Another preconceived idea that needs to be shattered is that royalty only married royalty, and therefore, commoners would not likely have royal blood in their veins. Humphrys says, "Here we have a sir, so this woman is the daughter of a knight. Maybe this woman will marry nobility, but there's a limited pool of nobility, so eventually someone here is going to marry someone who's just wealthy. Then one of their children could marry someone who doesn't have that much money. In ten generations you can easily get from princess to peasant."

Steve Olson’s article in The Atlantic is very interesting, and I would suggest that every genealogist read it in its entirety at: www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/05/olson.htm. Professor Joseph Chang's paper is a bit more difficult for non-mathematicians to read. It is available at: www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/pubs/Ancestors.pdf.

The best quote of all came from Mark Humphrys: "You can ask whether everyone in the Western world is descended from Charlemagne, and the answer is yes, we're all descended from Charlemagne. But can you prove it? That's the game of genealogy."