Posted on 05/14/2010 11:54:44 AM PDT by American Quilter
Now that so many ancestry records have been digitized, it's amazingly easy to start tracing your family tree. I'd never done it, but I watched this season's TV show, "Who Do You Think You Are?", and they kept referring to ancestry.com. So on a whim a few weeks ago I logged onto that site , and I've been amazed at what I've found. My mother's father's mother's family line goes back into the late 1400s in France, via many generations of French Canadians--who knew??? One of my dad's grandfathers came to the US to escape the Potato Famine in Ireland, and the other was apparently paid by his wealthy father-in-law to leave Ireland before the authorities arrested him for his anti-English revolutionary activities.
I've started wondering if I may be related to any of my fellow FReepers. Do any of you have any ancestor stories you'd be willing to share? My family has history in Quebec, St. Paul MN, Jasper County IN, Iroquois County IL, and the Seattle area (including the Olympic peninsula), but I'd love to hear from other FReepers regardless of whether we turn out to be related.
Old census records can be very entertaining. I was looking at some old records of my grandmother’s family in central PA and I noticed a couple of very strange occupations listed. I assume that what happened was that everyone in the area were subsistence farmers, but most also had a trade or some other job that they did, like being a blacksmith or a logger. Well, it seems that couple of them didn’t have anything else to report and when pressed by the census taker, one claimed to be a kite maker and another a card reader, or fortune teller.
I’ve probably got a horse thief from Kildare from the 19th century and a bit of Viking invader from a thousand or so years back. Mrs. JimRed is the great grandchild of survivors of the great famine in Ireland, and her cousin is related by marriage to a former governor of New Jersey.
Beyond the last couple of generations, I don’t think I want to know too much detail about about my roots.
Wow! That’s the farthest back I’ve heard of anyone going. And talk about a famous ancestor...
But some of the handwriting on the census' is beautiful. They learned to write back when school taught penmanship.
Another source is Rootsweb. They are linked with ancestry and they have trees. They are no longer posting trees but the left old ones up. They also have forums.
Cool! It’s amazing what DNA can do. I’m starting to hit roadblocks, too. I’ve learned that the British authorities in Ireland forbade the Catholic Church to keep records from approximately 1700 to around 1820, so it gets pretty difficult.
I think that’s very gracious of you!
I'm also a member of the DAR (Daughters of American Revolution), as one of my ancestors served in that war. (He was shot in the leg while delivering dispatches to General Washington.)
I’ve been very curious about Ancestry.com and thought I might join. My maternal history is traceable back to the late 17th century in England/America. However, my paternal history seems to start with my grandparents who just kind of showed up around 1900...
So we might be distantly related! My father’s family moved to Seattle (from St. Paul) in the 1920s, and then across the sound to Poulsbo on the Kitsap Peninsula in the late 30s. My aunt, his youngest sister, now lives in Kinsgston, WA. She married a man of Finnish descent whose family has lived on the OP since the late 1800s. The old family house still has no modern bathroom, but the sauna outside is well maintained and regularly used. My uncle told me once that his grandparents used to row across Puget Sound to Seattle once a month to buy the supplies they couldn’t grow or make for themselves.
There are Cotes in my wife’s line. We have some pictues of some. Lavoie (de la Voie and variants) and Prince, Oulette, Lessard, and a whole mess of hard to spell names. Most from the area on the south shore of the St. Laurence near Rimouski and on her mom’s line, Acadia near what is now Annapolis in Nova Scotia. Around Ste Anne de Beaupre NW of Quebec City as well.
What is cool is going there and finding these plaques with family names ALL OVER them:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyairriess/sets/72157606714822656/
ping
My Froggy ancestor was a Capt for the Union during the CW. I figure, like a lot of Europe, the good ones left and came here long ago. Which is why the less desirable, wimpy lot, is still over there.
Welcome to the US! And how cool to have a Revolutionary War-period ancestor. My family’s residence here dates back no farther than the late 1800s as far as I can tell.
LOL!
Isn’t that great! I just wish I could time-travel and meet some of my ancestors (in disguise, of course, so I wouldn’t get driven out of town as a loony).
Very cool—where is the Rift Valley?
It is quite amazing and fun to look up family history and find out just how far back one can go. I know that (unfortunately) my family was not from Minnesota. As near as I can see, they hit the harbor in NY and started west pretty quickly on the Lewis and Clark trail. Some settled in Kansas and some in Northern California. Later, some of the California branch headed north to Washington. My Grandmother was born near Longview in 1928, my Grandfather (mom’s parents) was born in Aberdeen around 1915. I need to flesh out the old family tree. I should talk to my mom more about this and my aunts and uncles (there are ten siblings) living to get as much as I can before they start dying off.
Also check out Footnote.com and, if you are Jewish, Jewishgen.org.
Footnote helped us solved my grandfather’s arrival confusion. We knew what ship he was on and about when, but the only Saftler on the manifest was a “Moses”, who nobody in the family knew about. When footnote.com went live, I did a check on “Joseph Saftler” (his real name), and found a link to all of his immigration and naturalization papers. One of the photo-copied docs had attached a landing card in the name of “Moses Saftler”. Hello, Grandpa!
Needless to say, they do get my subscription and have actually helped with a few other family conundrums.
“We, Maxwell’s, did not eat the livers of our cousins in Northern England. It is an outrage, we only stole all that whey owned, then again they gave us some pay back, James the First.”
Reivers, are ye?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Reivers
Quite a few people that settled in America go by the term “Scots-Irish,” but careful study shows many of them were originally from Northern Endland, not Scotland.
They had moved once to Ireland, and again to America and at first just went by “Irish.”
Later the term “Scots-Irish” came into use to differentiate them from the later potato famine Irish Catholics, who were seen as dirty, poor and often didn’t even much speak English.
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