How Far Back Can You Trace Your Lineage?

[sidcow]

On 14/04/2023 at 14:28, Risso said:

My great great grandfather was a padlock maker in Brum. He seemed to be up in court every other week for being pissed. Eventually, he fell into a canal (whilst pissed, obvs) and drowned.

Sounds like he should have been locked up. 

[sidcow]

On 14/04/2023 at 14:49, mjmooney said:

Thank **** for modern medicine. 

But.... But..... But..... Big Pharma is evil. 

[mjmooney]

1 hour ago, sidcow said:

But.... But..... But..... Big Pharma is evil. 

Well, it kind of is, in the way it operates. But its products (mostly) aren't. 

[mjmooney]

This picture, taken in Dublin in 1908, is only ONE generation back from me. The little boy second left was my Dad (then aged about five), with his brothers and my grandparents. 

[Rugeley Villa]

2 hours ago, mjmooney said:

This picture, taken in Dublin in 1908, is only ONE generation back from me. The little boy second left was my Dad (then aged about five), with his brothers and my grandparents. 

What class were they Mike? Your grandparents look like they did ok. No doubt a lot of slums in Dublin back then. 

[mjmooney]

3 hours ago, Rugeley Villa said:

What class were they Mike? Your grandparents look like they did ok. No doubt a lot of slums in Dublin back then. 

Well, bear in mind that in those days even working class folks would dress up for a formal photograph - hiring the clothes if necessary. 

But this lot were lower middle class - my grandfather was a silversmith, and also owned a newsagents shop (see below). My Mom's family in Brum were similar - her dad was manager of an electrical supplies company. Both families, however, hit hard times in the depression, making my parents downwardly mobile - with no more than a rudimentary education, my Dad worked in factories, and I grew up on a council estate. Family fortunes can fluctuate. 

EDIT: On the other hand, I had opportunities and advantages they never had - NHS care and grammar school/university education, for a start. 

Edited May 29, 2023 by mjmooney

[Chindie]

3 hours ago, mjmooney said:

Well, bear in mind that in those days even working class folks would dress up for a formal photograph - hiring the clothes if necessary.

 

I'm reminded of a Pratchett quote.

Quote

When you got right down to the bottom of the ladder, the rungs were very close together and, oh my, weren’t the women careful about them. In their own way, they were as haughty as any duchess. You might not have much, but you could have Standards. Clothes might be cheap and old, but at least they could be scrubbed. There might be nothing behind the front door worth stealing but at least the doorstep could be clean enough to eat your dinner off, if you could’ve afforded dinner. And no one ever bought their clothes from the pawn shop. You’d hit bottom when you did that. No, you bought them from Mr. Sun at the shonky shop, and you never asked where he got them from.

From Night Watch.

[Spoony]

I was hoping for fierce Vikings, wealthy ambassadors and pioneers from a bygone era

I got Romanis and some random Belgians. And I can’t be arsed to pioneer anything or invade anywhere on a ship. 

[mjmooney]

On 30/05/2023 at 14:30, Spoony said:

I was hoping for fierce Vikings 

I got 'em!

Edited July 14, 2023 by mjmooney

[gwi1890]

5 hours ago, mjmooney said:

I got 'em!

I’ve found my heritage to be inaccurate compared to Ancestry & Myliving dna. 

[mjmooney]

5 minutes ago, gwi1890 said:

I’ve found my heritage to be inaccurate compared to Ancestry & Myliving dna. 

How can you tell? 

[gwi1890]

47 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

How can you tell? 

Well my mother is Welsh and my father is Zimbabwean , my ancestry results were

48% welsh

2% Irish 

31% southern bantu

15% western bantu

2% eastern bantu

2% western Nigerian

so my admixture is quite diverse due to The Bantu migration and other things that happened in Africa…..

My livingdna breaks it down even more into tribes and specific countries but there are to many to list

My heritage has me as Nigerian- English and Scandinavian which doesn’t make any sense at all I’ve traced my mothers line back to the early 1500’s.

 

Your result are easy enough to upload onto other sites without having to take another test.

Edited July 14, 2023 by gwi1890

[mjmooney]

18 minutes ago, gwi1890 said:

Your result are easy enough to upload onto other sites without having to take another test.

How do you do that? The My Heritage labs have the actual samples, and have sent me their interpretation of them. Surely other sites would need access to those samples to do any further analysis? 

[El Zen]

I may look like Heinrich Himmler’s wet, Aryan dream, but my ancestry is fairly diverse. Can’t trace it too far back, but far enough to know that:

- My maternal grandfather was half Romani. His father was of full Romani heritage, although it’s unclear to me when my ancestors stopped living as travelers. 
- My maternal grandmother was 1/8 Romani on her mother’s side. 
- My paternal grandfather was of Kven (ethnically Finnish) ancestry. 
- My paternal grandmother can trace part of her ancestry back to a French (likely Huguenot) line, whose name she (out of sheer vanity) added late in life. 

The rest is run of the mill Scandinavian (lots of Swedish on my mother’s side, far back) as far as I know. 

As far as class goes, my mother’s side is entirely proletarian from Oslo’s east side. My dad’s side hails from Finnmark in the far north, where his mother’s side identified as petite bourgeois and his father’s side would have been poor farmers and fishermen, but my dad definitely grew up working class too and by now my entire family is decidedly middle class. 

[mjmooney]

@El Zen - seeing as I'm apparently one-third Scandinavian, we're probably related! 

(I suspect those pesky Vikings who landed in Dublin). 

[El Zen]

3 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

@El Zen - seeing as I'm apparently one-third Scandinavian, we're probably related! 

(I suspect those pesky Vikings who landed in Dublin). 

I’ll drink to that, older brother

[allani]

Researching a family tree can very quickly become addictive.  I've so far identified over 6,000 people on my paternal side (maternal side is a bit more difficult as she was adopted and never knew anything about her biological parents) with the earliest confident ancestor dating to 1643 (but I think I know who their grandfather was but am struggling to find reliable records to comprehensively prove it.  I've traced family members to 38 countries around the world - mainly people leaving in the 18th / 19th centuries for the new world.  It is fascinating and at times really disturbing:

I have found out that one whole branch of the family left Scotland after the infant death of their first child to join the Mormon Church in its very early stages.  Several family members became pretty close friends with Brigham Young (to the point that one of their sons lived with him for more than 2 years whilst at university).  I had no idea about anything to do with the Mormons apart from the usual stereotypes (which are mainly completely false).  Another family member was a quarryman in Scotland who left to work in the USA when the quarry in Scotland shut down leaving him pretty much penniless - his grandson went on to become a US Ambassador in Moscow during the 1980s and is widely regarded as being one of the key players in negotiating the end of the Cold War (there are photos of him in the Oval Office with George Bush and also of him and Gorbachev in Moscow).  Like most I've found plenty of stories about soldiers in WW1 and WWII - including an Australian relative who survived one of the first POW camps in the Far East, was one of the few people who then survived one of the most infamous Death Marches of the was from that camp to another and then died less than 10 days before the camp was liberated.  Another relative who was fighting in Africa when he was captured by the Germans, put on a transport boat to Italy that was then sunk by a British submarine, he survived and was rescued by another German boat and then taken to Turkey where he spent the rest of the war as a POW.  I've also found newspaper articles about a female relative who was at home cooking Sunday dinner when an unknown guy came through the back door with some flowers for her - which she refused - and he then attacked and killed her with an axe in front of 2 of her kids.  I also discovered another distant cousin in the USA who I found out had died on the same day as his two young sons - I assumed in a car crash or similar - only to then find newspaper articles that revealed that his wife had left him and taken his kids to live with her parents and he'd broken into the home, abducted one of his sons and then returned later that day, killing both his sons and then himself.

It can be a real emotional rollercoaster for sure.

[allani]

Just now, allani said:

Researching a family tree can very quickly become addictive.  I've so far identified over 6,000 people on my paternal side (maternal side is a bit more difficult as she was adopted and never knew anything about her biological parents) with the earliest confident ancestor dating to 1643 (but I think I know who their grandfather was but am struggling to find reliable records to comprehensively prove it.  I've traced family members to 38 countries around the world - mainly people leaving in the 18th / 19th centuries for the new world.  It is fascinating and at times really disturbing:

I have found out that one whole branch of the family left Scotland after the infant death of their first child to join the Mormon Church in its very early stages.  Several family members became pretty close friends with Brigham Young (to the point that one of their sons lived with him for more than 2 years whilst at university).  I had no idea about anything to do with the Mormons apart from the usual stereotypes (which are mainly completely false).  Another family member was a quarryman in Scotland who left to work in the USA when the quarry in Scotland shut down leaving him pretty much penniless - his grandson went on to become a US Ambassador in Moscow during the 1980s and is widely regarded as being one of the key players in negotiating the end of the Cold War (there are photos of him in the Oval Office with George Bush and also of him and Gorbachev in Moscow).  Like most I've found plenty of stories about soldiers in WW1 and WWII - including an Australian relative who survived one of the first POW camps in the Far East, was one of the few people who then survived one of the most infamous Death Marches of the was from that camp to another and then died less than 10 days before the camp was liberated.  Another relative who was fighting in Africa when he was captured by the Germans, put on a transport boat to Italy that was then sunk by a British submarine, he survived and was rescued by another German boat and then taken to Turkey where he spent the rest of the war as a POW.  I've also found newspaper articles about a female relative who was at home cooking Sunday dinner when an unknown guy came through the back door with some flowers for her - which she refused - and he then attacked and killed her with an axe in front of 2 of her kids.  I also discovered another distant cousin in the USA who I found out had died on the same day as his two young sons - I assumed in a car crash or similar - only to then find newspaper articles that revealed that his wife had left him and taken his kids to live with her parents and he'd broken into the home, abducted one of his sons and then returned later that day, killing both his sons and then himself.

It can be a real emotional rollercoaster for sure.

And it also feels quite weird when you find that two of your most common web-sites in your browser history (after VillaTalk!) are FindAGrave.com and BillionGraves.com!!!!

[gwi1890]

12 hours ago, mjmooney said:

How do you do that? The My Heritage labs have the actual samples, and have sent me their interpretation of them. Surely other sites would need access to those samples to do any further analysis? 

Via ancestry you download your results in settings and then upload to other sites. I can’t explain in depth what it looks like it’s like a code and measurements . By uploading it to another database i works through their database and matches with what they have. 

[Follyfoot]

My Das did a lot of work into this and we found out that we are direct descendants of SirThomas Guy (Guys Hospital) so that takes us back to the 1600’s really need to pick up is work at some point. 
 

A fun fact is that we are technically entitled free rent for life in a Arms house in Tamworth if we wanted to force the issue

Edited July 15, 2023 by Follyfoot