Posted on 01/03/2015 7:29:13 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Not at all — the farther one goes back, the more connections one finds, particularly to the first New England families who managed to survive. If you’re part of a surname organization, or one exists (”Smith Family of America” for generic example), often they offer some kind of genetic testing deal. That’s interesting in its own right. Turns out that people who, on paper, are all of common descent turn out to be split into groups, those groups being related internally to each other, common ancestry, but not related to any of the other groups. :’) I’ve not had the money to burn on that yet, but I know that is the situation among members of one of my family lines who have had the testing.
One quibble — “direct descent” is redundant, there’s no such thing as indirect descent. :’) I used to work with someone who was *related* to Abraham Lincoln, but instead claimed him as an ancestor. He has no living descendants. :’( I also used to work with someone claiming to be descended from Aaron Burr (through supposed illegitimate offspring), someone claiming to be descended from the Dalton Gang (presumably not the entire gang, so it was probably more of a cousins relationship, not ancestral), and there are old stories among family members that we’re descended from this or that historical person, but there’s zero evidence for it.
Given how Mark Antony behaved, probably half of Europe has him for an ancestor. :’D
I have ancestors that came over on the Mayflower and the Anne. Not a large stretch to think a person from each ship met up in a very small colony. My genealogy is traced to both ships and beyond.
The PRB is a specific small group, the leader of which was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and he was evocative in his works, but probably the least talented in the technical sense. Lord Leighton (one of the artists of those two blam posted) wasn’t, I don’t thing Waterhouse (the other artist up there) was either. Alma-Tadema, who with Leighton had a similar talent for both stunningly realistic scenes and prolific output, is probably my favorite (he did a lot of scenes imagined from classical antiquity).
:’) Given the fact that we’ve only just managed to emerge from the peasantry, I’m pretty sure my ancestors were either in that boat, or managed to be on the dispossessed lines. :’) $600 is pretty cheap. So much is electronic and so much is available, multiple genealogies from zillions of sources can be used to generate searches for you and yours (typically starting with information from you, your known ancestors, and most people can come up with at least their great-grandparents), followed by outputs from each database which provides a hit, followed by attempts to import the outputs and merge them, then edit them down, and work on getting as much verifying documentation as they can. Gotta love our technological age!
Oh, hey, this is the link. I used to get a catalog from NEHGS, and that’s where I read (in the description of one of the titles they at least used to offer) that info about the Plantagenets.
http://www.americanancestors.org/index.aspx
You might want to check for a different spelling. Sometimes, some words are too hard to pronounce or spell (literacy was not widespread) and it could be The Austin you are looking for is some other similar name.
Stephen F Austin is a very famous person in Texas history. He led some of the first settlers from the US to Texas, that is how his name is spelled. I think the connection may have become just a family tall tail, after the grandfather was named Austin.
This is the second largest genealogy collection in the US ant it is online searchable. The largest is LDS in Salt Lake.
The LDS database has literally never given me anything beyond what I already knew, and of the stuff that was on there, much of it was dead wrong. It can be useful for those starting out with a tabula rasa, but only in that it can point them to what they need to research and perhaps where.
Thanks for that other one, I’m bookmarking it.
My paternal seventh great grandfather has apparently received Mormon baptism of the dead multiple times attributed to multiple locations after passing away in multiple centuries. I never saw an entry that got it right, out of at least ten. The reason for the interest would be that a branch of the family converted just prior to the Civil War and went west, ending up in Utah. Contact was maintained for at least a hundred years because a few from the Utah branch came to a family reunion in the sixties. All they needed to do was ask. It’s a little insulting to imply that his baptism in life was inadequate somehow, but he’s long gone and it’s of no effect upon him. Even if it was, they missed.
You go girl.
In a nutshell, the work is done by volunteers, it’s part of their religious duty, but it isn’t checked by anyone. It’s basically not valid either from that standpoint or as a database.
I meant farther back in Stephen F Austin’s history, there may be different spellings. We’re talking about a culture that seldom had formal education for the masses.
How many names do you think were re-spelled or re-given during the days of Ellis Island? Often, a name was spelled as it sounded, or if that was an impossible task, a person was renamed for the country or city they came from.
By oral family tradition, that's what happened in my family when my great great (great?) grandfather came over from Ireland. The family name then was one of the MacKenzie variations and, I guess, because of his accent, the reception clerk couldn't understand the name, but he did understand "Costley" ... actually, the name of the town that he was from "Castleigh".
Anyway, now we're Costleys instead of MacKenzies.
The lds library in Salt Lake is digitized and now internet searchable. You can access much reference material.
IIRC, Rosetti was renowned for paintings that depicted three female characters which all looked alike since they were based on the same model who had posed for each one.
Cheaper than hiring three models, I guess.
Some days, it goes like that. In researching my family, I found quite a few name anomalies from one generation to the next, when spelling or pronunciations changed with the fashions.
I find it interesting and really love to dig into other family histories.
He used a few favorites quite a bit, the one you may be thinking of is Jane Burden Morris. He also like to use Fanny Cornforth (who was a hooker), and his late wife, who was posthumous subject of his Beata Beatrix. In his personal life he seems to have been a train wreck.
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