Posted on 10/20/2022 9:01:59 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The earliest record we can find is just a few years after that in Alt Bork. Its surprising how many records remain from that time. No one has found any going further back yet. I dont know that they will. My sir names supposed meaning and this location has me suspecting that our branch may have changed/adopted a new one at that time.
There is a weird family story that has been passed along for a long time and no one knows where it started or how long its been passed along. We suspected it was from the mid 1700s but I have to wonder if its really possible that this story goes back further. It would fit what we know and match locations and records of relatives quite well in both mid 1500 and 1700s.
Oral traditions can last thousands of years, I wonder what my kids farming some distant planet will think.
I found an amazing analysis a genealogist had done of my Grandmother’s maiden surname. The surname goes back to the Norman invasion of England in 1066, but I was unable to find a direct connection between the numerous people in his work and my family. I’m sure it’s in there somewhere. I just tried to find his work again and learned this tidbit: The family name is thought to originate with the “Old Norman French ‘bottereau’, toad, thus ‘place infested with toads.’” I’ll never think of the name the same way again!
Fetterman’s house.😃😃
I’ve heard tell that, due to the longtime surname changing convention in Iceland, meticulous records have been kept for more than five centuries to limit consanguinity. But hardly anyone has Icelandic ancestry unless they live there. :^)
Or...one group would regularly steal the females of other groups and all of the related males within the group would impregnate her.
Wow-my maiden surname is an old Basque one-utilitarian and self explanatory-where they lived near/on-the cultivated field on a slope-we already knew they were farmers and sheepherders in the Spanish Pyrenees who left for the New World in the 16th century. Your toad one is way more interesting...
I wonder what the dowry/trade price was for a Neanderthal girl whose father had a lot of trade goods or other stuff/wealth? Mastodon tusks? Weapons and/or warriors?
About 500 years has been the wall for documents on my family as well-where they lived in the Spanish Pyrenees, when they took off for the New World, arriving in Mexico, and in a couple centuries what is now Texas and NM-but nothing about whether they were always in that part of Spain before 500 years-other than old stories-no documents...
I’m able to get back to the early 1500s on my Mom’s maternal side.
My dad’s family originated in western Germany in the Rhineland area. My great grandfather moved east to Danzig, Germany which is now in Poland and called Gdansk. Because of all the wars, fluid borders and destroyed records, it is MUCH harder to find much in Germany. There are lots of church records back to the 1700s that didn’t get destroyed, but far less than what I’ve found in England on my Mom’s side.
Are you of European descent? I believe that relatives of that 45,000 year old specimen went both east to Siberia and the New World, and west to Europe!
He lived there when he was shooting the original “The Hills Have Eyes”.
Primarily, yup. Part of this seemingly amazing result is, there were very small populations (as far as anyone knows) so, there’s a good chance there are either living descendants, or living people with ancestors in common with these old dudes and dudettes.
Biden....in the cave’s basement.
One impediment for my German/Swiss/etc ancestors is, I don’t speak anything but English, and I’m often not sure how well I speak that. :^) Thanks to much better genealogists in my family tree, I’ve got one branch of commoners in England back to the late 15th c. As with many people, I’ve encountered posh, pedigreed people, “gateway ancestors”, and those link descent from William the Bastard, Alfred the Great, Charlemagne, etc.
Two problems with that, for me: one, though historically accepted more or less, they seem to have been crawling all over each other like a box of drunk hamsters, so there’s no way to know if whatever posh documentation exists is actually recording authentic info; two, while kinda cool to some extent, it isn’t worth anything to me to be descended from long dead kings, queens, barons, and whatnot. :^) And not just because not all of them were particularly nice people. They don’t have to have been posh to have been a real a-hole.
The fact is, if it weren’t for my ancestors, no matter who they were, I’d never have been born, regardless of who they were, how long they lived, how they lived, how they passed, and what they did to others or had done to them. I just like finding out who they were.
In the US, records are usually pretty good, and many many genealogists are descended from the early families, and so the lines have been well-researched and cross-checked thousands of times. That gives most Americans about 400 years of pretty full lines of ancestry, and that’s long enough to find fun things like crossed branches, duplicate ancestors, double cousin lines, links to relatives one had learned about in school, etc.
In Britain, it seems like the trail drops dead before the parents of the immigrant generation, and sometimes the parents of the immigrant ancestors are obscure. In my family, I figure they were asked to leave, or had to flee by night and change their names. ;^)
Most of the old family stories about the ancestors in Spain joining the crowd getting on a ship and the hell out of Dodge in the 16th century involve being asked to leave-or else-and that seems to have been pretty common among Basques at that time. Apparently they were even more anti-government then than they are now-not fond of the Spanish crown, but they were good sailors so they chose signing onto a crew and leaving over “or else”-the story is likely true, especially for those who left Spain early...
Since most of us still live in S and W/W central Texas, and sometimes do business-construction materials, freight and livestock trucking/hauling-with people on the other side of the border-we still learn Spanish as a 2nd language in early childhood. But the Mexican/Norteno dialect spoken in N Mexico and the border of Texas and NM does not mean you can comprehend Spanish from Spain very well-one of my cousins who is a teacher pursued finding documentation of the family and their activities prior to about 1400-got document copies, etc-but she says the difference in dialects has been as much of a problem in translation as finding the stuff at all. Probably like a person from Louisiana who speaks Cajun French-or a Canadian who speaks Quebecois-going to someplace in rural France and trying to communicate...
:^)
I wish I had more free time to travel and explore my family ancestry. Things I know: My mother’s parents came from Germany around 1890. Her mother (Shirer’s “impoverished Prussian petty nobility”), her father marine engineer from Posen/Posnan, Poland. I have a German photocopy of a geneoology from the family going back to the 1700s. Wish I could get it translated.
My son #2 had a genetic test, either 23 And Me or Ancestry. The one that does NOT do Neandertaal. I have 2 lateral upper incisors with shoveling (a possible Neandertal trait). Son 1 had 6 wisdom teeth. Dentist asked if he had Esquimo ancestry. This brings us to his father’s ancestry which apparently included a Canadian Cree Indian brought to US by her trapper husband/mate. His mother told my husband she was 1/8th Cree. Son 2 said his geneology included possible ancestry for mom and dad. My ancestry included 6 to 9% very far east Eurasian. My husbands had 8% unidentified which could be Indian or Neandertal (not identified by this test (he also had Neandertal traits of mesomorph body, heavy bones, red hair and coloring, hairy body, light blue eyes, sunken chin).
On my father’s side his mother has been traced back to the Mayflower, John and Pricilla Alden. Collateral ancestors include Gen. Israel Richardson (Civil War) and poet William Cullen Bryant. His father was brought to US, age 12, from Wales (family apparently had Liverpool shipyard). Family name Williams could go back to 1066. Welsh fought English, were known as William’s (the Conquerer) men.
The genetic info obtained by son 2 pretty much coincided with known ancestral info. Mine with Germanic and Baltic percentages around 35 to 45%, and British Isles similar. My husband with mostly British Isles ancestry subdivided to mostly Scotch and English. He inherited 20 acres of land in southern Illinois. We traveled there to decide if we would keep or sell the land. Saw the small cemetary where his grandfather was buried with large obelisk style tombsone, and small marble obelisk tombstone from memebers of his Civil War troop he apparently had recruited. I spent several days in the county courthouse tracking purchase of that land. It was complex with 8 claimants. His grandfather died shortly after the case was settled at age 42 of typhoid. The stress?
So I could travel to Wales and Germany for more research on Mom’s line, or Detroit where my Father’s people had a farm and station on the Underground Railroad. After 10 years of marriage my husband found his family also had a station on the UR in southern Ill. History and geneology can be fun.
I have just finished reading 2 of the 6 volumes in Jane Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear saga. The first volume which has the heroine, a homeo-sapien, found after a major earthquake, rescued by a clan of Neandertals. The author did a lot of research and that volume was published in 1980. Her Neandertals were described as tending to send the females to live with the husband and his family. Men were described as especially important as hunters of big meat.
The author apparently based her Neandertal clan on research done at a cave on the southern side of the Crimean peninsula. I wonder if her descriptions of these people was based solely on skeletal and artifact remains, or if she also had access to some early DNA work? The heroine’s subsequent search for her own kind appearently occurred in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, before moving West. Since I an currently following Ukraine/Russia events, I found the authors descriptions of these areas at least 25,000 years ago quite interesting.
The books are fun if you like love stories and great detail, along with interesting suggestions as to how various more recent deelopments of civilization might have occurred.
It’s a work of fiction. Mary Stewart’s “Crystal Cave” started her Arthurian saga, it’s great fun, and she researched the old sources, but didn’t try to pass it off as history. Same goes for HBO’s “Rome” — fiction, with characters and action broadly based on ancient events, but not a documentary.
The exchange of daughters was a way for villages / clans to engage in mutually beneficial trade and build alliances. On the flip side, raids to steal women also went on. They led to a similar result. So too did groups of male invaders and conquerors taking over and building harems.
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