Genealogy....
Have you ever done your family tree? please share if you have.
Are you interested in finding out your family history?
How far back can you go without having to look up records?
I would love to get mine done, I can go as far back as my great great great grandfather.
my grandmother traced our family back to the 1600s
she went to england to find church records and such
when she found out that one of our grand old progenitors was a pirate, she decided to quit looking and told everyone that the church had burned down
lol
I'd really like to know my family's history. It'd be very difficult though, at least on my father's side, to trace it - he's Russian Jewish, and I have a feeling the records were pretty well decimated during WWII.
My dad's cousin did a lot of the work on their side but I've never been able to see it. I need to remind my dad to ask her for a copy! She traced back to the Civil War and then kept going to the Revolutionary War. Pretty cool that, if I wanted to, I could join the Daughters of the Revolution.
I have a bit of info on my mom's side but my aunt has more... they came over in the late 1700's from Holland and settled in Illonois.
lol that's quite funny nomo, I would love it if I had a pirate in my family, how exciting.
Meagan that would make very interesting reading would you ever consider hiring a genealogist to see if they could trace right back?
We can trace my father's father's father, etc. back to 1629 when they came to Connecticut from England but there is no information about the family in England. I was told that the parish church where the records were stored had burned in the 1700s but maybe we were pirates, how exciting. Rrrrrrrrrr!
That would be awesome to have a pirate ancestor!
I'd never thought of hiring someone, Andie; what an interesting idea. I hadn't thought at all about my genealogy until last Friday night, in fact. N and I watched Defiance, which is about Russian Jews, and it made me think about my forebears in a new way.
My grandmother on my fathers side to a great job of maintianing our history. I can go back on my fathers parents back to the 1600s. We had a librarian in England, a Rum-runner" duirng the prohibition, and a few other unsavory characters. We stop on the french side, becasue apparently when you marry and Indian Maiden not approved of by the family, it is kind of hard to trace.
On my moms side, I can only go back about 5 generations. Her Irish roots are kind of lost as well as the Cherokee Indian side.
I use a free web service called my heritage. It has been a great help. I find it quite interesting to see the history, as well as the difference in the spelling of the last names.
I think my sister did a genealogy project in late elementary school and they discovered a ways back we are related to a King. Not sure what country he ruled though. It'd be neat to find out :]
I had to do mine in High School.
On my mom's side we traced it back like 14 Greats!! On my dad it was only about 9 Greats.
My father's family keeps extremely good records so we had a lot information for his side and didn't spend time researching, or we could have probably gone further.
My mom's family had a lot but we did research quite a bit, via online, census reports, and local city records. However, once we found one bit of information it lead us on to more and it became addicting!
I've got you all beat.
I am a direct descendant of John Alden of the Mayflower. His wife, Priscilla Mullins, had royal blood.
Through her line, and if you trust the royal records, we go back to at least Teged of Wales in the 5th Century A.D.
Booyah.
Also, through my father's line we can trace back to about the late 1600s on our main surname, and back even further on branches off of the surname (one of which is the Alden/Mullins line).
My mother's side is a different story since they burn courthouses down when they get bored in Appalachian Kentucky.
However, I have a great-great-uncle on my mother's side who shot a man over accusations of cheating over a poker game. He became a fugitive and holed himself up in a barn, which the authorities promptly burned down, Wilkes-Booth-Style.
I think these are great, it fascinates me the history of peoples families and you have some very interesting history going on here.
A later teacher of mine put it into perspective for me though when he a bit archly told me, "What matters is not who your ancestors are but what kind of ancestor you are going to be."
Someone on my mom's side traced back to Ireland and came to u.s. during the Potato famine and fought in the civil war. They had it put in book form and sent to hundreds of relatives.
Dad's side was had a book published they traced to the American Revolution. I'm a member of the Daughter of the American Revolution.
