[Prince of Space]

I’ve been working on our family tree since the late 90’s, thanks to my husband’s aunt who did a lot of preliminary work on it prior to the internet. Hubby’s family goes back to the 1500s and has lots of semi-important ppl in it...revolutionary war heroes, plantation owners, famous Protestant preachers, etc.

Then there’s MY tree, which is full of poor Irish Catholic peasants who have scattered to the four corners of the world. Since they were pretty much illiterate, it’s been a real picnic trying to fill in my family’s history.

Ancestry is a good starting point but so many trees are full of errors — like a 2-year-old giving birth or a woman who is 55 is listed as the mother of so and so. Therefore, any info found needs to be double checked. I have about 225 close matches (1st through 4th cousins) but hubby has over 1000!

[mass55th]

Your family sounds like mine. My father was born in Holland in 1904, and his side of the family is full of farmers mostly. Their records are slim to none. My mother’s side goes back to the 1200-1300’s. She always said we had no relatives. My DNA shows 35% Germanic Empire, which is something she certainly never knew. And her side has all the famous people: Peter Minuet, Geoffrey Chaucer, Kings of England, Knights, and other aristocrats like the Grenville’s, de Spencers, and others, Barons of Germany/Prussia, etc. Sir Walter Raleigh is supposed to be a great-uncle of mine. I’m only doing the great-grandparents in each line, and I take it all with a grain of salt as none of it can be proven. About the only one I haven’t been connected to yet is Pocahontas...the real one.

[setter]

“Then there’s MY tree, which is full of poor Irish Catholic peasants who have scattered to the four corners of the world. Since they were pretty much illiterate”

Sounds like my family line bunch of poor, nobody peasants.

[mairdie]

My niece asked how I KNEW we were related to the tree I gave her, which started me off collecting source images. It's been fascinating. There's a couple of problems that result in errors that propagate. One is when they were using the old numbers for months and first month was March. If you don't know that, you call it Jan. Another problem comes up when the years were split and the computer systems give you x/x+1. If you don't know that comes from the date being x+1 and you put x into YOUR computer system, and the computer system now says the date is x-1/x and the mistakes are off and running.

If you've got MA ancestors, you're golden. Every library carries every town book with the records up to 1850. RI is a major pain. They gathered, published; gathered more, published again; REPEAT. Painful to work thru. But NY is horrific unless your ancestors were in the Dutch Reformed Church. For any Livingston descendants (Right Click "View Image" for full size):