anyone else do Ancestry.com stuff?

Just wondering.. Found out my Great Grandfather came from Glasgow, and the before that Glasgow.

Neat!
I find all of this so cool.

One of my family members did my Dad's whole side of the family and we go a long way back in the USA - Before revolution times, apparently!

I need to tie in another cousin who's done my Mom's side, but I haven't seen it.  My Grandfather was born in West Lothian and I have family members in Scotland, so that much I know, but don't know much before that.  Know a wee bit about my Grandmother's side, but not much either. 

Wow, phatbeetle! That is impressive!

I'm always in awe that people can actually create a family tree.

My parents are both deceased and I know so little about their parents. I remember my grandparents somewhat but they were all deceased by the time I was seven. My sister paid for some genealogy help from ancestry.com and came up with nothing that we hadn't already provided them. We only know our grandparent's names and their suggested birth dates and birth places but that's it for them.

To be fair, our father was born at home in Mexico in 1936 but no one was really sure what day or even if the year is correct. It was all based on the recollection of my father's older sister and she was six when he was born and even that is a guess. There are no official documents to support his birth date or year. It was sort of just verbal so for all we know, our Dad may have been born somewhere else on a different date. If this was him in 1936, it must have been even harder to find any documents for my grandparents. I do know that my paternal grandfather was born in 1889 because my oldest aunt remembers that he told her.

What kills me is that my father once told me that he had an older brother. I had NO IDEA of this man's existence and I was 34. My Dad said that he was from his father's first wife (there was no official ceremony, as was the custom in the day) and that he met him for the first time when he was around 10 and his brother was around 25 with a son. My Dad's response to my surprise: "Well, if I'm nearly 70, then my brother is pretty dead now." Oh man, the brotherly love.

I'm sort of wondering how in the world my father managed to emigrate to the US with very little in the way of "official" documents. I guess that in 1960, things were very different.

My long lost sister found me after doing DNA! She is 2 years older than me. I also found out that my parents got married in Vegas when I was 26. That is my favorite.
- I had 2 relatives fight in Gettysburg. One on the North, and one on the South
- My aunt Rosa (Grandfather's sister) was murdered by her husband in California in the 30's. It made national news. Her husband killed her with an Axe and got the death penalty.
-Great Grandad on my dad's moms side, was kicked out of his Italian Village because he could do magic tricks.
and the best one....

My relatives owned a horse brush company that is still in existence today in Castle Donnington. Where my visa packet left the UK from.

Yep, I do genealogy as a hobby, and been at it since the mid 1970s. It's a lot easier now, with so many records online, and all the DNA stuff. But it's also a lot easier to get led down a wrong path, too!

lorenausuk, I'll see your Dad's one brother, and raise ya! I knew my dad had a sister and a brother. It wasn't until I was almost 30 that I found out he was one of 10 kids! And that my grandmother (on the other side) was one of 12! I only knew about one sister of hers, and a brother, as well!

I've just recently had a DNA match pop up here in Scotland, but haven't pursued that yet. Probably a Donegal ancestor who came over to work in the factories. Happened all the time, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and then afterwards.

I'm sort of wondering how in the world my father managed to emigrate to the US with very little in the way of "official" documents. I guess that in 1960, things were very different.

In the sixties and before you could work for cash. When I lived in an oilfield town we had a lot of workers coming in from all over the place, as that kind of work paid well and asked no questions. There were other day-laborer and contract-type jobs as well, where a foreman was given cash by an employer and he would pay it out to the workers at the end of the week. (Saturday nights cash was flying in the bars, I gotta say!)  Plus, agricultural workers and domestic staff did not pay into SS, so there was no tracking.

And back before all the interconnected computers, if you wanted to disappear and become someone else, you got yourself a birth certificate for either a baby or a young child that had died, and went out of state and got a driver's license and based on that. And, I am told, you became that person. You'd file taxes, etc., and pretty much there'd never be a question as there wasn't a central database of people who had died. Back in the day you didn't get a social security number as a child, only when you wanted to work. So if you were in your 20s and hadn't had a card before, it wasn't impossible to get one if you said something like you'd been working on the family farm for years or were a domestic (not tracked by SS) and wanted a better job now.

In the sixties and before you could work for cash. When I lived in an oilfield town we had a lot of workers coming in from all over the place, as that kind of work paid well and asked no questions. There were other day-laborer and contract-type jobs as well, where a foreman was given cash by an employer and he would pay it out to the workers at the end of the week. (Saturday nights cash was flying in the bars, I gotta say!)

And back before all the interconnected computers, if you wanted to disappear and become someone else, you got yourself a birth certificate for either a baby or a young child that had died, and went out of state and got a driver's license and based on that. And, I am told, you became that person. You'd file taxes, etc., and pretty much there'd never be a question as there wasn't a central database of people who had died. Back in the day you didn't get a social security number as a child, only when you wanted to work. So if you were in your 20s and hadn't had a card before, it wasn't impossible to get one if you said something like you'd been working on the family farm for years or were a domestic (not tracked by SS) and wanted a better job now.

I am HUGE into genealogy. I've traced my dad's side back like a thousand years on some lines. Oh and I discovered I am a mayflower! And a cousin to the Bush's and Robert E Lee... A fifth cousin on my mom's side got in touch and we went to Ireland to see the family farm! We were a bit of a mystery to them as we were the branch that went to America and disappeared - and I was then able to trace a few probably cousins on the same line in America.

Oh and I have a great great uncle who was a president! And can trace back to both Scottish and English royalty and all sorts of gentry.

I've even started tracing my husband's side and found out more about his father's side than anyone thought possible! My husband's grandfather was a bit of a mystery and a cad... but I've traced one part of his family back 500 years and we went to visit the village in North Yorkshire (we live in Yorkshire anyway).

I'm sort of obsessed. It's been a fantastic hobby during my period of unemployment!

I am HUGE into genealogy. I've traced my dad's side back like a thousand years on some lines. Oh and I discovered I am a mayflower! And a cousin to the Bush's and Robert E Lee... A fifth cousin on my mom's side got in touch and we went to Ireland to see the family farm! We were a bit of a mystery to them as we were the branch that went to America and disappeared - and I was then able to trace a few probably cousins on the same line in America.

Oh and I have a great great uncle who was a president! And can trace back to both Scottish and English royalty and all sorts of gentry.

I've even started tracing my husband's side and found out more about his father's side than anyone thought possible! My husband's grandfather was a bit of a mystery and a cad... but I've traced one part of his family back 500 years and we went to visit the village in North Yorkshire (we live in Yorkshire anyway).

I'm sort of obsessed. It's been a fantastic hobby during my period of unemployment!

That's so cool!!!

That's so cool!!!

Oh and I worked at a school named after my 28x great grandmother, which was a right hoot!

But wait - do you know how many 28x great grandmothers each of us have??? 2 million.... so it is a pretty meaningless connection once you get back more than a couple hundred years...

It is, really. 

Technically, I'm related to "W" (Bush) through his mother. And Eleanor Roosevelt. And some literary giant whose poems we had to memorize in high school who I can't remember....But that's me and like half of New England - when you have populations where each generation has 12 surviving kids, that means there's a lot of "related to"s.

Something I run into quite often, especially on sites like Ancestry, is people believing that because those little "tip" leaves pop up and a name, age, and place is the same as the person you're researching, that you've found an ancestor. I ran into one person who was convinced "our" family line went back to Charlemagne because they found people who had similar names at various times going back - no actual hard proof.*

It's particularly bad when researching Irish ancestors, since families re-used the same half-dozen names to an amazing degree.  I've got one instance where, within a couple of miles of the same place in Tipperary, there are six people with the same name in the same time frame, all in the extended family. And yeap, they are all relatives, but not necessarily my direct ascending relatives. Keeping them straight in the tree is tough. Especially since most of the reliable Irish records burned in 1922.

*Not saying it's absolutely impossible for it to be true, but I tend to think that once you go back past the 1700s in Europe, unless you were dealing with nobility (whose lineages were recorded), you're starting to get into the realm of guessing.

Physicskate and Nan D.- sounds like we might be cousins!  I have three Mayflower ancestors and am also related to the Bushes and the Roosevelts (Teddy's vacation home is in the town my ancestors founded on Long Island).

Love, love, love genealogy!  I have been hard at work on both my tree and the husband's tree.  Having free access to Ancestry is deadly at the library when it's slow.  Found out a couple months ago that my marriage to my husband is NOT the first one between our families.  One of my ancestors and his son married a set of sisters who are children are one of his ancestors in Birmingham.

My current claim-to-fame is that Hamilton is basically the story of my family.  Aaron Burr is my double second cousin, my Kipp ancestor was living at Kipp's Bay in New York when the British invaded during the Revolution, and I am related to Levi Weeks of the first murder trial in the USA.

Found out a couple months ago that my marriage to my husband is NOT the first one between our families.  One of my ancestors and his son married a set of sisters who are children are one of his ancestors in Birmingham.

That's CRAZY!!!  What a buzz finding that out must have been!

Physicskate and Nan D.- sounds like we might be cousins!  I have three Mayflower ancestors and am also related to the Bushes and the Roosevelts (Teddy's vacation home is in the town my ancestors founded on Long Island).

Oh I bet we are really distant cousins then! Grace Bush is my 8x great grandmother.
Samuel Fuller is my Mayflower.

Nan - you're right abut Irish genealogy being a huge headache... Can't get past those who came to America (except this cousin near Dublin...). My maiden name is from a family that I surmise moved through Northern Ireland... and it's a super common name, which makes it damn near impossible... but luckily it's mostly English, so do-able.

And some literary giant whose poems we had to memorize in high school who I can't remember....

My little horse must think it queer,
To stop without a farmhouse near.
Between the woods and frozen lake, 
The darkest evening of the year.   

Frost?

My little horse must think it queer,
To stop without a farmhouse near.
Between the woods and frozen lake, 
The darkest evening of the year.   

Frost?

Oooh, Stopping by woods on a snowy evening...


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