The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Community => Coffee Lounge => Topic started by: Fleecewife on February 28, 2020, 11:47:19 am
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Has anybody here researched their family tree? I put it off for years, but then I suddenly found myself having started it and being totally absorbed. Last night I found a direct line of ancestors going back to parents born in 1585 :o 8) That's 11 generations back from me, 13 from my grandchildren, with all spouses and many siblings named and with birth dates. They are just about all Fensmen, which explains why the males of my family are so distraught at having to pay taxes (Fensmen are notorious for refusing to pay up even back in the time of King Alfred and his burnt cakes) I now feel inspired to check on what was going on in the world when my xxxxxxxxxnth grandparents were born. Even with lines with a less unusual family name, I am already reaching back into the 1700s and I've only been doing it for a couple of days. Talk about addiction :roflanim: It was 4 o'clock before I fell into my bed this morning ::)
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Yes, my sister and I are doing ours, and my cousin on my mum's side is doing that side of the family, we're sharing information. It is totally addictive
If you come across any road blocks it's worth looking at Scotlands People (https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/search-our-records (https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/search-our-records)) for any relatives that were born, marrried, or died here. All in one place.
Also get a proper DNA test done - we gave my sister one for her 70th birthday and found a whole lot of relatives in other countries as a result. She was sent mail addresses - we didn't recognise a few of them, but one was the husband of our cousin's daughter in Canada (they use the same email address) and our cousin in Mexico. We had no idea Jim was over ther. Retired after selling the business he'd built up, and living the life of Riley in sunshine, tequila, and tacos :excited: :excited:
Brilliant fun, and so exciting when you see the occupations and can google place names to see where they lived.
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Thanks for the website Doganjo. Mr F had looked for some of his rellies on there, but they're ALL called George, and if they're not George then they're William. It brought tears to my eyes trying to sort through them all and get the right George married to the right person and with the right children. Add to that that family memories can often be way off and I definitely need a website to help me. Mr F went to Register House with his sister yonks ago, and copied out what they found by hand - deciphering that is hard enough!
It is good to be able to share some info with others. My brother is helping me a bit, and so is my SiL, with memories as well as facts.
Ha, Jim thought he'd escaped the family, and you've found him :roflanim:
I'm wary of the DNA test but once I've got a bit further maybe I will go ahead. I had a general one done a few years back, but the science has advanced a whole lot since then. Oh I'm sure my father really is my father as I see him every time I look in the mirror, but I believe something like 10% of fathers discover they are not once the DNA is checked - that would spoil Christmas :o Apparently in King Richard 3rds DNA history there was an unexpected dissonance.....
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Oh yes, DNA can be a bit daunting, but since my sister looks like my mum and I look like my Dad, and both of us look like our cousins on both sides we were pretty sure there were no skeletons. My cousin had one done a few years ago and it was just a waste of time, but Helen's one was extremely useful. It was the Ancestry one we used, but I think the My heritage one is good too
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My pa, sis and the Australian woman who turned out to be our 7th cousin did pa's family tree many decades ago, when it was all parish records and detective work. It took years and many, many visits to churches and records offices all over the country to get back to the late 17th century. The link between the line which emigrated (was deported ;p) to Oz and ours was found only through a letter in the back of the parish register - that sort of info must be lost forever now.
Have fun!
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Well done for getting that far back, as you will have found when you get beyond the statutory records (1840 if I remember) things are a bit hit and miss. All the parish death records for Nairn (where my people are from) are lost which created a real brick wall for me.
My most confusing discovery so far was my G. G. Grandfather (iirc) married Helen Ledingham, his father married Helen Ledingham and his father married Helen Ledingham! 3 generations in a row married
Girls with the same name (they were all related but it wasn't quite mother, daughter, granddaughter but not far off it)! It took me ages to get my head round who was who!
It is addictive and fascinating.
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I have someone who appeared to have married his own sister, but I think it was a cousin in fact - I hope so! Maybe two brothers gave their daughters the same name, born in same year. Even worse is when there are children from the same parents with the same name, sometimes the first one has died so they reuse the name, and then to add extra difficulty they were both known by nicknames anyway. There seem to be a lot of nicknames in my family :o
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... Although naming conventions can be helpful, in the past people were nearly always named after a relative (and in some areas it followed quite a strict formula hence the number of Donaldinas etc in the Western Isles - girls who were born when it was the turn of naming after the grandfather so just stick ina at the end to make it feminine!).
I guess the re-using of dead children's names is part if the traditional naming conventions - you wouldn't want a family name to die out (or a grandfather to feel disappointed his namesake had been lost.) It is surprisingly common.
If someone born in your family tree doesn't have a name that is familiar it's worth being suspicious and double checking it is the right person.
If it is the right person it can sometimes hint at an interesting story.
I have an ancestor who was a carpenter working in shipbuilding in Nairn, around 1800 he moved to Leith and 2 or 3 years later had a son Walter Goalen - those names sound totally foreign to the family and would never have been given without a really good reason. Turns out there was a shipyard in Leith at the time owned by Walter Goalen. I assume he must have worked at this shipyard and there must be a story behind it (sadly now lost to time) but hinted at by the strange name.
I think future genealogists will have a hard time due to the current trends of choosing random names that have no family or geographical (or even language) ties.
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My sister and I actually went in to Edinburgh to the Scotlands People office, to hear a lecture from one the the custodians, then we went on to the computers and whenever we got stuck there was always someone hovering nearby ready to help. We're going to go again soon. But this time we're going armed with queries and problems
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A cousin of my mum's has done the Dickson line - my mum's maiden name was Dickson; I started to do my maternal grandmother's 30 years ago butlife got in the way. At that time, you had to go to REgister House and use the microfiche and big books. YOu gave a wee man a note of what you wanted and he disappeared into the bowels of the building and brought you the microfiche on a wee tray.
I'd quite like to do Dan's. Someday when I've got time.
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It's so much easier in Scotland with all the records in the same place back a good distance, and links to further back than that.
But Dan's will be more difficult unless he has some Scottish lines behind him. A cold wet winter's night is good :innocent:
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A cold wet winter's night is good :innocent:
What is that? :o
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Researching ancestry in the UK is so much easier than in Poland.
You have all census information, birth and death records online and anyone can access them. In poland theres nothing like that. Theres lots of websites with people trying to make up there family trees, but councils and town halls only hold there records for 100 years - as far as I know - which is not much st all.
The most reliable source was church parish records - as long as you know which parish your family came from and they weren't destroyed in WW2 or even WW1 or even before ! Poland was not independent country for over a century - until 1918 it was divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria. All of which had there own records and probably destroyed anything before and when they left.
Nonetheless I know names and places of birth of my great grandparents! My dads grandad came from a relatively rich nobility in other end of the country (there still is a village with the same name and coat of arms as my great grandfathers). Because of coat of arms you can trace the family till at least 15th century or maybe more (with very few details in between).
Btw costs of arms in Poland were not like in the UK - only for head of the family - instead every family member (male that is) inherited the coat of arms with his surname. With time people with the same coat of arms became a bit like the clans of Scotland.
My great grandmothers grandfather was an artist living in Paris in 19th century. She came from a poor farming family - although still with coat of arms and nobility ancestry.
I really wish I can find out more about my mother side of the family - no idea really as her grandfather died during the war at the age of 23 - left a widow with two little kids. She later remarried and had another two kids - my grandmothers half sisters. I know a bishop of Lublin who died in concentration camp during the war and was made a catholic saint some years later - was actually her cousin somehow.
My mums dads family came from a beautiful medieval town but moved out from the after the war (again great great grandfather was shot by the nazis in the town square). Their surname suggest they might originally come from somewhere else (I have seen the same name used in Austria and Belgium) but no real clue where from.
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Carrying on from oor wullie, the current trend is to double-barrel-ise family names, either just for the children, or for the adults too, aquiring the double names on marriage, or on jumping the broomstick. All well and good, but what happens when the children marry? Do they then aquire a quadruple-barrel name? and then for their children? I think this fashion is doomed to be shortlived ::)
In my parents generation, it was the fashion for the first child to take the mother's family name as their second given name (so my Mum rejoiced in 'West' - very feminine!).
When I first came up to Scotland in 1969 as an undergrad nurse, I looked after a string of Douglasinas, Thomasinas, Williaminas, yes Donaldinas, Alexandrinas, mother in law was Georgina. If the trend had continued for me, I could have been Normanina, Frankina or even Vernonina or Reginaldina :roflanim:
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Oh goodness [member=156019]macgro7[/member] what an awful time your family and your whole country has had, and now for you to have to try and sift through what remains to find the facts must be near impossible.
My family male line comes from Hungary, and my brother's wife is from Czechia. Her first child's father is from Syria or that general area. I think I shall have to have a whole lot more free time to research that lot, as those countries may all have similar problems as Poland does. I think it's a good idea though to try to find out as much as possible and get it on record now, just in case it gets even more lost. Then it's down to where all these family trees are stored for future generations - some Cloud seems a bit ephemeral.
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Arabs often know their lineages for a good millennium ;)
The same clans are holding the same social positions for centuries in some places. Except for "Saudi arabia" where the Saud tribe were simply Bedouin nomads and highway robbers from a region so empty and desolate that the Ottomans didn't even bother considering going there (they ruled everything else around it though).
In Poland at least The most interesting are genealogies of minorities - lutherans mostly have German names and although there was a lot of protestants over there in 17th and 18th centuries, a lot of them migrated from Germany.
There is a muslim minority living in the eastern Poland (nowadays split between Poland, Lithuania and Belarus) since 15th century (or longer!) They were all given nobility titles and land from the king at that time and until now there are a couple of muslim villages - same village as any other in Poland but instead of catholic church it has a mosque.
There is a religious minority called "caraims" ( I think that's how you spell it) who come from Crimea and are essentially Jews with slightly different traditions and rituals - however they dont consider themselves Jewish and nazis didn't touch them! No idea how as a lot of muslims were killed as Jews!
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You still have the option of changing your name Fleecewife....... Keeping up the old traditions and all that....
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Speaking of changing names - my fathers father did that after his own brothers cheated him into giving up all the family farm into their name and being left with nothing at all in this world >:(