|
Post by spaceflower on Mar 27, 2015 20:23:00 GMT
I've started to but I'm a bit slow, still stuck in the 19th century. But they say that parish registers often go back to 17th century. Of course, if you're nobility, you can go even further back. But my forefathers were poor peasants and fisher men. And it seems that almost every man was called Johan (or Johannes), written as Joh. in the register. Their sons and daughters were called Johansson or Johansdotter. Is this Johan Johansson my forefather or another Johan Johansson? Is this Lisa the same as this Elisabet? The parish registers are also hard to read: digi.narc.fi/digi/view.ka?kuid=9059058There are family trees on the internet, lika Family Search and My Heritage, but I don't know how reliable the information there is.
|
|
|
Post by Kye on Mar 27, 2015 21:30:39 GMT
I don't even know my grandparents names on my father's side, so I guess you can say that, no, I'm not really interested in family history.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Mar 27, 2015 21:34:23 GMT
My great aunt used to tell me a lot about my great grandparents. But they had to leave now area that is Poland today when the second world war started, so I don't think there is a possibility of finding out about family history.
|
|
|
Post by spaceflower on Mar 27, 2015 23:43:25 GMT
I think it is fascinating to ponder that without my forefathers, I would never have existed. Also, you learn a lot about how things were earlier. I see that the Christening is done very soon after birth. But then the mother did not carry the child into the church, the godparents did. The mother stayed at home, she could not go to church before the churchning, 6 weeks after the birth.
The women bore many children then, and many children died very young. Though in the parish register, there is a "v" telling that the child had been vaccinated against smallpox. From 1816 it was compulsory to vaccinate children against smallpox. This was done by the vicar, the sexton or the midwife. Unless they were vaccinated, they were not allowed to go to school.
There was a relation who emigrated to USA, and I think that I found him on Ellis Island. Though what happened next I don't know. He could have changed his name to something more "Anglo-friendly".
|
|
|
Post by tangent on Mar 28, 2015 0:04:02 GMT
Our church office has phone calls occasionally from people trying to search their family trees. The records are not computerised, of course, and I sometimes doubt their reliability but I have no way of knowing.
|
|
|
Post by madmadeline on Mar 28, 2015 3:33:35 GMT
Once we hit 3 generations back, my family spans at least 8 countries. I have always been too daunted to try!
|
|
|
Post by jayme on Mar 28, 2015 14:57:56 GMT
My mom used to do genealogy, and she found some pretty cool historical things. One of my ancestors was the first to land on Plymouth Rock, and Longfellow wrote a poem about him, and his son was accused in the Salem witch trials. There is actually a tv show in which he is the lead character in a fictional version of the story.
But most people just disappear once you go back so far because there weren't very good records, or there are loads of people with the same name, or you don't know which country they came from.
|
|
|
Post by spaceflower on Apr 30, 2020 12:56:55 GMT
After the Swedish and Finnish famine of 1866–68, the emigration started off. The surviving did not want to relive a famine. So they emigrated to "America" (usually USA). In some families all of the children emigrated to USA. Though some came back. They went there to earn more money than they could at home. One relative, Emil, went to USA three times. First in 1909 when he was in his early twenties. He worked for three years in the mines of Butte, Montana. So did many of his relatives. This work was hard and dangerous, so many unskilled immigrants/guest workers worked there. After three years he had earned enough so he went home, put the money safely in the bank and married. After nine months they had a son but the bank went bankrupt and the hard earned money gone. So he went back to the mines in Butte and worked there during the 1st world war. Back home, he put the money in a bank and had a second son. But the inflation took most of his money. Back to USA in 1924. This time he worked as a construction worker in New York and Seattle. After three years he went home. This time he bought land. About the work in the mines: www.butteamerica.com/labor.htmSome emigrants returned with money. Some returned with broken health. Some were never heard of again. But I know I have many relatives in USA (and some in Canada).
|
|
|
Post by whollygoats on May 2, 2020 19:20:50 GMT
My ancestor carrying the family name arrived in North America in 1634 at Massachusetts Bay Colony. That was Roger and his wife Mary.
Since then, the family with the name has been moving west at a pace consistent with the growth of the European settlers' advance westwards. Westwards through Massachusetts brings you to upstate New York. Then to Ohio. That's where they were during the Civil War in the middle of the 19th century. By the end of that same century, they were in South Dakota, with one ancestor having been an active participant in the suppression of the Sioux. By the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, the loss of markets and droughts forced them off the farm and in to the penury of migrant farmhands, slowly drifting even further west. They were what I called 'northern Okies', crossing the northern plains in search of work. The renewal of the world war on the horizon created jobs in the shipyard of the coast, where they finally cashed in on the American dream and settled down.
So, I know only back to the point where Roger and his young wife migrated from Plymouth to Plymouth. I don't even know where Roger hailed from in Britain.
|
|
|
Post by ceptimus on May 3, 2020 0:38:40 GMT
You reminded me of the famous Will Rogers quote. "When the Oakies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states."
I've never been interested in finding out about my ancestors. I knew my grandparent's first names and grandmother's maiden names at one time, I think, but I've forgotten them.
With all the interest in genealogy, and the way many people enter the results of their research into computer databases, eventually all available records of births, deaths and marriages should be on-line, and anyone will be able to print out their family tree by just asking a website to do it for them. That will rob the hobby of much of of its appeal. Probably won't happen in our lifetimes though.
|
|
|
Post by whollygoats on May 3, 2020 1:41:00 GMT
I think that is what they are trying to do with the online geneological stuff. All in due time.
I never did any of the searching, I had a distant relative who did most of the research of which I am aware, followed by one of my aunts linking in to update our branch of the whole debacle. It was interesting reading everything collected. Most of it was very dry...Y'know, names, places, dates, and, if you were lucky, some idea of how they made their living. I was disappointed that there was no one of note, neither angelic, nor demonic. No desperadoes, no heroes. One curious aspect was that during the Civil War, there were six brothers, five of them joined the Ohio Union regiment and all five served in the regimental band. Number six, my direct ancestor, did not. Well, nobody seems to know what happened to him during the war years. He didn't serve, but we don't know if he took an extended vacation in Canada, or paid for a stand-in (which was a thing at the time). He moved west to the Dakota Territory, and his son served with Colonel Reno in the Lakota wars.
My father scoffed a lot about what his father had bought in to...that "rain follows the plow". It was basically railroad propaganda to get naive farmers to pull up stakes where they were being 'crowded' and move out to the more arid locales of the Great Plains. He then laughed about how it wasn't the lack of rain that ruined them, but the false promises of 'feeding the mouths of Europe' that disappeared once Europe figured out how to feed itself and the market for agricultural goods collapsed in the twenties. My grandfather didn't lose the farm, because he was a tenant farmer. He lost the tractor to work his rented land because he couldn't make the payments when crop prices plunged, so they pulled up stakes and moved to eastern Montana. My father escaped the farming life through the ministrations of the CCC, where he learned construction skills, for which he was grateful to his dying day.
I think all the stories of of huge interest. They give feel to who we are. The thing is, I have no one to pass this on to. It stops with me (well, with my niece). Meh.
|
|
|
Post by JoeP on May 3, 2020 11:11:32 GMT
With all the interest in genealogy, and the way many people enter the results of their research into computer databases, eventually all available records of births, deaths and marriages should be on-line, and anyone will be able to print out their family tree by just asking a website to do it for them. That will rob the hobby of much of of its appeal. Probably won't happen in our lifetimes though. Not just genealogy, but also DNA tests. Which people seem massively keen on and is also leading to lots of data - not as well covered by laws around public access. Eventually it will be searchable.
|
|
|
Post by juju on May 3, 2020 16:16:50 GMT
My sister did a DNA thingy through Ancestry. We (and I’m guessing we must be pretty similar) are 70-odd percent south east / eastern England, 16% Irish, and the rest is Northern Europe and Scandinavia.
So Anglo Saxon/Celtic/Viking then. Nothing unexpected I guess, although my dad was adopted and we don’t know who his father was - clearly nothing too exciting as far as Brits go.
|
|
|
Post by whollygoats on May 3, 2020 18:18:07 GMT
Yeah, I think that is the same outfit I used. The information I got back was perfunctory and no real surprise. It was all northwestern Europe. Celto-Saxon. They did split out 3% as having come from the Languedoc region. That was the outlier. I was surprised that Scandinavia was explicitly excluded.
Of course, ever since then, I get sporadic 'offers' to give me access to records, y'know, birth announcements, death certificates, public notices....each for a nominal fee. *rolls eyes*
|
|
|
Post by kingedmund on Aug 23, 2020 15:52:04 GMT
It’s only as accurate as the information you find. It takes years to research. I had a head start because of my great uncle. He traveled to most of the countries our family went to and uploaded info into databases that ancestors, family search and others have access to.
Everyone thinks they know where they come from but are typically shocked to find out what is actually in their tree. Like me I’m Cherokee Indian, British, Irish, German, Prussian, Russian, other dead countries, and Have African up the line. Most people are pretty much like that and even don’t know it. My uncle in my cousin because he shares a 10th great grandmother his line can from her daughter and mine from her son, which is funny how common that is.
The Mormons pretty much own all the databases of family research and 100 years ago they started this mission to amass the world geology records. I use familysearch.org these days since they are all connected. I am also part of the genealogical society here and am putting my other sides family history together. I pretty much pissed off two aunts on that side because they didn’t want anyone in the family to know that my Great Grandfather had remarried I linked the info in the databases and found the cousins that were shunned by my aunts. He died in the 80’s so why it still mattered. To bad.
|
|
|
Post by tangent on Aug 23, 2020 22:30:46 GMT
I can confidently say that my ancestors came out of Africa, possibly 50,000 years ago, and that along the way they had a fling with the Neanderthals. I pretty much pissed off two aunts on that side because they didn’t want anyone in the family to know that my Great Grandfather had remarried. I linked the info in the databases and found the cousins that were shunned by my aunts. Do the cousins know and have you met them?
|
|
|
Post by maurusian on Aug 28, 2020 12:40:49 GMT
As I once mentioned here, I did my DNA test a few years back to find out about my ancestry. Contrary to many of you here, this wasn't just motivated by curiosity to find out some cool things about my family a few generations back, but more of an attempt to answer the fundamental existential question "who am I?" Some general background: I come from Morocco, generally considered to be an "Arab country". It is a member of the Arab League, and Arabic is one of its official languages (the other official language being Berber, aka Amazigh). Most people then assume that all or most Moroccans are originally Arabs. Many Moroccans would want to believe that too. I certainly encounter this stereotype quite often, and there are many people who even think that we speak the same "Arabic" as Egyptians and Syrians, and expect us to have a fluent conversation in "our mother tongue". They usually look puzzled when we speak English instead. In any case, the official history of Morocco would have you believe that its foundation started in the 8th century with the arrival of an Arab named "Idris", who also happened to be a descendant of Muhammad through his daughter Fatima and her husband Ali (Muhammad's cousin). I always had some doubts regarding the official history of Morocco though, which also states that Amazigh people were a minority, and Arabs either came from Arabia in large numbers to populate North Africa in general, Morocco in particular, or they outnumbered the Amazigh by having more offspring. But even the official version of the story does not try to claim that there was a mass genocide as it happened with the American Indians for instance. As I later learned, most of the Amazigh, especially in the areas of modern-day Libya and Morocco, converted to Islam willingly, probably to spite the Byzantines with whom they were constantly at war, and thus spared themselves the fate of being killed or enslaved by the Arab invaders. They even cooperated and helped spread Islam further, whether through war or with missionaries (especially to Sub-Saharan Africa). Those who resisted were usually Christians in the areas of modern-day Tunisia and East Algeria, where the population was largely educated and urbanized (that's where Saint Augustine, Tertullian, and even 3 Popes, Victor I, Miltiades and Gelasius I, were from). However, during the formation of the modern states of North Africa, particularly after the decolonization, the original Amazigh identity was marginalized, and even banned in some aspects (education, administration, media, names of newborns, etc), in favor of the then popular Arab nationalism. This was facilitated by the fact that the political and intellectual elite was largely either Islamicized or Arabized or both. One major Moroccan intellectual from the 1960s even called for the "complete annihilation of all local languages in favor of Arabic". This is a very flagrant statement considering that, at that time, more than 60-70% of the country spoke Amazigh as a mother tongue (today the figure is more like 30% in Morocco, and 20% in Algeria). My motivation was to understand what happened in between, during the long centuries from the Islamic invasion to modern times. Did Arabs really overtake or outnumber the Amazigh? Was there a genocide that we hadn't heard of? How and why did the Arabization of Morocco take place? Was I descended from Arabs or from Berbers (Amazigh), or a mix of both or something else? Personal background: my family is 100% Moroccan to many generations in the past. There may be some distant offshoot(s) in neighboring countries (namely Algeria, though those areas were probably part of Morocco at the time), but I'm not aware of any worthy of mention. My family claims to belong to the Alawite clan, who are descended on the father line from this guy, who was a prince and ruler in the Kingdom of Sijilmassa (a very prosperous kingdom in the Middle Ages through the gold, spice and slave trade). Three of his sons were later able to expand the territory and conquer the whole country, and one of their descendants, Mohammed VI, is now ruling in Morocco (and no, we are apparently descended from one of the other sons, which is why I wasn't born in a castle). Most of my father's cousins and relatives still live in the area of Sijilmassa, and the DNA test seems to confirm that the claim, at least this part of it, is true (I was able to find other Alawite samples online which matched my Y-DNA haplogroup, called G2a-L91). The other part of the claim, that the father line continues to Ali cousin of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, and his daughter Fatima, is most likely untrue though. The reason for that is that G2a-L91 is quite rare in the Middle East, but relatively widespread in the West-Mediterranean, especially in Sardinia. Did the whole tribe of Muhammad somehow vacate the Middle East and settled primarily in Sardinia? Were they killed off in their home region? It seems quite far-fetched. Now I came up with several hypotheses for when my paternal ancestors set foot in North Africa: late Neolithic (Cardial), Antiquity (Roman occupation), and Middle Ages (expulsion of the so-called "Moriscos" from Iberia). The last one is probably the least likely for two reasons: 1/ it doesn't match up with the family history which supposedly goes back to the 11th century (beyond that is just legends of how one of our ancestors, named Hassan the Entrant, came from Arabia to Sijilmassa, which cannot be substantiated by any concrete proof), 2/ the other DNA test (autosomal) which gives those percentage thingies, shows 86% North African, 9% Southern Europe, 3% Subsaharan Africa and only 2% Middle East, on FTDNA, which is inconsistent with a relatively recent migration from Europe (I would probably have at least 20% Southern Europe like some Moroccans from the North in that case). So it's either the second or first one, though I'm leaning more towards the first hypothesis. The only way to prove it though is to do a Big-Y test, which analyzes more segments of the Y chromosome. I may turn out to be a descendant of Ötzi the Iceman, but he was probably just a distant cousin. Anyways, to gain more insight into my background and how things came to be the way they are in Morocco, I had to do a lot of readings about the history of Morocco, which was quite fun. I still have much to learn, but I can already see how the birth of the modern nation of Morocco was more like a botched up affair, engendering a chimera that does not know what it is and how it's supposed to walk or be, and how Algeria as a country should not have existed in the first place (without colonization, most of the territory would have been part of Morocco and Tunisia, and maybe a core of Kabiliya would be an independent entity, if things were left to evolve naturally). I will likely do the Big-Y test eventually, and also a deeper mitochondrial DNA test to learn about my direct maternal ancestry (I know that the haplogroup is T1a, which originally appeared in the Caucasus 40000 years ago, but that doesn't tell me much). Both are a bit expensive, especially the Big-Y, so I will take my time, while I learn more about the historical context.
|
|
|
Post by tangent on Aug 28, 2020 13:11:41 GMT
Very interesting, Greg. Sorry to lower the tone
|
|
|
Post by maurusian on Aug 28, 2020 13:23:41 GMT
|
|
|
Post by kingedmund on Sept 18, 2020 22:00:38 GMT
Oh that is funny. Oh yes. I’ve been contact with a lot of new distant family relations.
|
|