Anybody doing genealogy?

Well, it depends how much documentation there has been on the various branches of your family.

The reason the one branch of my family traces back so many centuries is it feeds directly into a couple of historically significant families which have probably been documented many decades ago.

Of my other 7 great-grandparents, I've had to dig up pretty much everything myself and as mentioned the trail goes cold back in Ireland around the year 1800.

But a lot of interesting stuff -- census forms, passenger lists from immigrant ships, military records -- does show up and fleshes out more detail.

 

You have to be patient and find out as much as you can about the relatives who originally came over. There's not going to be any magical green leafs popping up on those sections of your tree. I relied on looking through old obits and tracking down the death records.

With those I was able to pin-point general locations of where the family members came from in what were non-countries (Austro-Hungarian Empire baby!) at the time. There might be records in some church in some backwards ass village somewhere, but I have a feeling two world wars might have done a number on those institutions.

 

Google can be your friend too. Google your ancestor's name and some variant spellings -- you may hit on the magic combination nobody thought of before.

 

It's especially useful for outlining a family health history and some things to be watching out for.

 

That's exactly right.

I've had to dig up just about everything on my paternal grandfather's side, and have only gone back five generations to their emigration from Prussia/Poland in the 1870s.

But my paternal grandmother's side had a huge family history published in the 1880s documenting in great detail every direct line that came over from England since the Mayflower. So all I had to do was click on the green leaves to pull up all kinds of records, photos, etc., on that side.

All you need is a little bit of information (a name, a date), some luck, some deductive reasoning, and you can find quite a bit out through the power of the Internet ... and other amateur genealogists.

 

It's probably hard to say really. You could put your basic info (yourself, parents, grandparents) and it could sprout very quickly. Or you may have to use other sources too.

Ancestry does a 14-day free trial, where you can access everything on the site. Try it and see how far you can go.


Even if you don't subscribe after the trial, you can still access your tree and make adds to it from your other research. You just wouldn't be able to see the records on ancestry.

 

Yeah, thanks Hank, and everyone else who responded.

I'm going to sign up and see how it goes.

The other thing is that since someone else traced back one branch back to 1800 and that branch has hundreds of names on it, maybe someone else has done some of this work for me?

 

That's the ancestry jackpot.

I clicked onto trees a couple of distant cousins had already put together, and then typed in info from the hundreds of pages of paper documentation another great aunt had hunted down in the 1960s.

And then leaves started popping up on those people. Some of those GGGG-grandparents showed up on other family trees, so you click the links and keep going.

I wanted to see if I could track down the truth on the two Presidents I'm supposedly related to (that kind of gives it away) so I just decided I would click as far up the patrilineal line and see how far it would go, and it just kept going and going and going.

It went a couple thousand years, but I never could find for sure what the connection was with the presidents. If it exists at all, it's probably some sibling who was left off the charts.

 

After reading this thread I decided to go over to ancestry.com and do a trial. I haven't been there for several years so thought I'd see what's new.

Well, did a search and there are some family trees that really go sideways. All kinds of mistakes. Like Evel Knievel jumping the Snake River Canyon. Dates, names, when they came over, who they married, etc.

I have copies of ship manifests, naturalization and immigration papers, census reports and marriage/birth/confirmation/death records from the old country, etc. so I can cross-reference things so I know what I have is correct. Plus my mother was the family touchstone and I spoke with her about lots of this before she died, and that was a great help. And the LDS records were a big help with one side.

I don't have much contact with my relatives, and if I did a tree at ancestry.com some unknowns would show up that might be best left alone. Like somebody had a bunch of kids, yes, but with three different partners. Or this one was married before and had a kid. It goes on.

There are a couple of things that would really turn things upside down for people and I don't need to do that.

I figure leave it be.

 

I found an unusual marriage certificate (well, a detailed entry in a state's marriage index anyway) for a late relative on Ancestry once. That led to some fascinating insights about said relative's complicated discharge from the military. I had no idea, because my family doesn't like to discuss those things, but I'm glad I know now.

 

Funny you should mention Charlemagne. Da Woman has done a bit of work on her side of the family, and one of her not too distant ancestors was named Culpepper. Well, it turns out the Culpeppers have a very well documented history -- they even have their own website on the subject, http://gen.culpepper.com/default.asp -- and her relative is in that group (the name came up on the Culpepper site).

So apparently, my wife is related to Thomas Culpeper (the spelling has changed), who was accused of having an affair with Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII. Both were beheaded, and Catherine's final words were supposedly: "I die a Queen, but I would rather die the wife of Culpeper."

BTW, Catherine was also part of the family. She was Thomas' third cousin. Ann Boleyn was also a cousin of some sort.

As for the Charlemagne thing, the Culpepper site says this: "Our research suggests that most living Culpeppers descend from a 16th-century Englishman, William Culpeper of Hunton and Wigsell and his wife, Cicely Barrett. Through this couple, modern-day Culpeppers descend from the oldest known Culpepper, Sir Thomas Colepeper (born circa 1170), and from Charlemagne, the 9th century European Emperor."

 

Ah...weird family secrets!

I had a great aunt who died at the age of 4 in 1913. I've tried my hardest to find out what happened, but I'm fairly certain that secret is going to stay buried. My late grandfather claimed she choked on a penny. He was born after she died though, so I'm not sure I believe that (I can remember being told she died in fire once too). He remained strongly loyal in taking care of her grave until he died. I requested the death records of the girl from the state, but those came up empty.

Whatever happened to that child sent the parents into a tailspin. They did not make it out of the Great Depression alive.