How far back can you trace your ancestry?

My father's mother also claimed that she could trace her ancestry back to the first gang of the Dutch who arrived at the Cape in 16-something, but considering those Afrikaans family trees are so inbred they look like a family stick, I'm not so proud of that.

can't paternal grandparents and their roots be traced back using public records? all births, marriages and deaths etc have to be recorded so even a name will let you find out parents' details. helps if you have a team of bbc researchers helping, of course (and a lot of the above celebrities stumbled upon genealogically obsessed relatives along the way, which was handy)

On the Italian side, 600 years ago my family were bridge-building minor aristocracy who travelled eastwards from Lombardy to Veneto over about a century and settled there. Which makes me originally Milanese :(

HARRY LASAGNE!

http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/scotgaz/images/P5282.JPG

"I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Arm no more"

What's to trace? Less of a gene pool than a puddle.

I appreciate the 'ooh, didn't know that' side of family history and all that, but I'm never that clear on what it actualyl means. You see people quite disappointed that like them, their ancestors got up, worked, died. If they do find a link to some high-born family, it's pretty pointless - the only people with high-born links that matter are the folks who don't need to dig out the family tree to discover who they're rleated to, as school history books helpfully have this info. I dunno; maybe being adopted emans I don't feel part of it? Maybe adoption means I think it's all abit meaningless really. A nice diversion for sure, but not really that relevant in any way (though discovering medical conditions and such like - Hapsburg lips ect - could be useful).

I suppose it was more a sense of vindication on my mum's side, that these stories she told and we'd dismissed as fanciful, well, some of them turned out to be true.

And it's Andrew Davidson who was the sculptor. He married my Auntie Maggie, so he's not technically related to me, but Auntie Maggie (actually my great aunt. Or great (x6) aunt.) posed for the statue. I'm still trying to find a decent picture of her bloody arm...

http://www.scotlandspast.org/images/JacobiteFloraInvernessHouse.jpg

1. Charlotte Corday
2. PAID PIRATES for the Royal Family some way a couple of centuries back.

I am unconvinced either of these are true but it would be pretty fucking cool...

Really. I'm a geneaology buff, my family has kept good records and didn't wander all that much. The cool part was when I discovered that not only are my parents distantly related, but that my husband Scott and I are distantly related.

Then let's never have a child together. :)

Le premier qui fut roi fut un soldat heureux ;
qui sert bien son pays n' a pas besoin d' aïeux. 'Mérope', Voltaire

Parce que vous êtes un grand seigneur, vous vous croyez un grand génie ! ... Noblesse, fortune, un rang, des places, tout cela rend si fier ! Qu'avez-vous fait pour tant de biens ? Vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître, et rien de plus. 'Le Mariage de Figaro', Beaumarchais

At the same time my ancestors on my mum's side were exploiting the worker in a meat factory.

I'm not so sure about anything farther back than that, but I am probably descended from the Normans who came to Ireland in 12th century.

My dad's family, on the other hand: nothing at all.

Supposedly, a relative of my mother's who has since passed away was working on a family tree and he had gone as far back as the 1700s (Spain keeping much better records and all), but I don't know what that person found since I've never seen that family tree. All I know is the town my great-great-grandparents came from (Toledo -- er, I think).

(BTW, I had a paternal great-grandmother who was a full-blooded Apache, but from a tribe that resided in Mexico. That's how I know about my Native American roots.)

She also claimed that she didn't put "that much" rum in the fruitcake.

As a history teacher, this stuff interests me greatly.

Relatives. At least you get to choose your friends.

My mom claimed to Tom at Christmas dinner that she had traced our family ancestry back to Thor.

If you go to Mormon genealogy websites and track back the ancestry of basically anyone with European royal ancestors, it will say that the earliest known ancestor is a Norse god, usually Thor or Odin. Because that's who pre-Christian European kings always claimed to be descended from, and the Mormons have apparently taken the claim at face-value.

(possibly they go for Snorri Sturluson's theory that the Aesir had originated as legends about real-world leaders (from Asia Minor, in Snorri's original theory) who, as the legends were retold, became deified.)

Technically, I think anyone who can link their family back in to O'Neill in Ireland itself can claim kinship to Thor.

Frances explained this to me last night, but I wasn't really listening.

kinda interesting npr article on genetic testing

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/01/22/578293890/my-grandmother-was-italian-why-arent-my-genes-italian

"When we talk about the 50 percent that gets inherited from Mom, there's a chance that you have a recombination that just gave you more of the northwest European part than the Italian part of your Mom's ancestry DNA," she says. That's also why siblings can have different ancestry results.

...

As the companies collect more and more samples, their understanding of markers of people of a particular heritage should become more precise. But for now, the smaller the percentage of a population within a continent that's in the database, the less certain they are. Levin says Helix chooses to not report some of those smaller percentages.

The 23andMe reports results with a 50 percent confidence interval—they're 50 percent sure their geographic placement is correct. Move the setting up to 90 percent confidence, meaning your placement in a region is 90 percent certain, and that small 1.6 percent of my ancestry that's Italian disappears.

The ancestry tests also have to take into account the fact that humans have been migrating for millennia, mixing DNA along the way. To contend with that, the companies' analyses involve some "random chance" as Levin puts it. A computer has to make a decision.

And the ancestry companies have to make judgment calls. Robin Smith, a senior product manager with 23andMe, says their computers compare you to 31 groups. "Let's say a piece of your DNA looks most like British and Irish but it also looks a little bit like French-German," he says. "Based on some statistical measures, we'd decide whether to call that as British-Irish or French-German, or maybe we go up one level and call it northwestern European."

My forebears all emigrated to the USA as poor folk, which generally forecloses any research reaching back to their countries of origin. My mom traced my patronymic ancestors back as far as Co. Tyrone at the time of the Great Famine. Other claims about alternate branches of the family, which lead back many centuries and include the usual bumpf about Alfred the Great, are much too poorly documented to be provable.

So, most of my dad's family still lives in the UK or Ireland, but I found my fourth great-grandfather...was French! 1800 or so. My third great-grandmother was born in Paris.

However, this has resulted in rude acquaintances asking me to do their homework via Ancestry or even show them my family tree. This is why I'm fucking done with Facebook - post an interesting story and get people implying you're making shit up.

Not to mention, saying, "that's interesting could you look xyz up for me" is MAKE WORK and RUDE.

I pay 39.95 for this thing. It's for my own research.

I used to be disdainful of ancestry.com stuff but since almost all my UK Irish family have died off in the last 10 years I sort of miss talking to Irish relatives so sent my DNA to a lab in Texas. Maybe DNA is meaningless really, but I was happy to find out I was 85% Irish with a bit of Scandi and pinch of Eastern European. It was really important to me that I wasn't English, because I don't look English and in many ways I'm not really culturally English in subtle ways ppl brought up with English parents are. Maybe I'm a bit superficial and pathetic, but the DNA result cheered me up.

not long ago i went as far back as this guy. Edmund Sexton. my 10x grandfather in a direct line to where i live right now. basically, everyone in my family just went from england and ireland to massachusetts and connecticut and then stayed there forever. anyway, when you are reading about your 10-great grandfather and you are a heavy metal fan you gotta love when you see the words "Ritualistic mutilation". so cool!

http://www.sexton.ie/the-sextons-of-c15th-limerick-city/

"When Humphrey returned permanently to Ireland and to the service of Silken Thomas, Edmund decided to stay and soon became a favourite of no less a figure than King Henry VIII. For the next couple of years, Edmund became Henry’s emissary and was described by Henry as ‘ a trusty and wellbeloved servant’. Edmund was part of Thomas Cromwell’s network of Irish ‘diplomats’ and was rewarded by he and his brothers being given burgess status in Limerick. Edmund had, in effect, become the Crown’s man in Limerick and took part in military operations in Tipperary and Waterford. In 1535, Edmund was elected Mayor – probably at the behest of Thomas Cromwell. Clearly this ‘election’ wasn’t greeted with any great enthusiasm by the people of the city who saw him as an upstart native who was getting much too big for his boots. The fact that he was of ‘Irishe bloode’ did little to endear him to his fellow citizeens. His influence at Court did, however, result in the granting of a Charter for the City along with acquisition of a canon of some sort together with shot and powder. During his time in London, Edmund who was clearly a well educated man, wrote a book (which hasn’t survived) on the ‘reformacon’ in Ireland. He also wrote books on the geography and economy of Munster and discussed how the country might yield greater revenues for the king."

"It is unclear whether Edmund’s duplicitous nature or his religious beliefs were responsible for his unpopularity but sometime after his death, his body was removed from its tomb at St Mary’s Cathedral (allegedly by Alderman Christopher Creagh, Mr White, Edmund’s brother-in-law, and David White, the church organist) and hanged upside down in a concealed space between the roof and the rafters. The right hand was removed from the corpse and relaid in the tomb. Clearly, there was a ritualistic element to the manner of this mutilation and extraordinarily, the inverted corpse was not discovered until a number of years after Edmund’s burial when a thief was apprehended having sought refuge in the roof of the cathedral. Edmund’s grandson, himself an Edmund, suggested that his grandfather had been killed ‘for his religion’ but there is probably more to it than that as no other Protestants were mutilated in this way in the mid 16th century. Colm Lennon has suggested that many may have resented the way in which Edmund had enriched himself at the expense of the monasteries that had been dissolved and, perhaps more especially, at their expense. The Creaghs may also had opposed the Edmund’s burial in a part of the church that they felt was reserved for them."

cromwell made him mayor of limerick and the people there didn't like him because he was...irish? what a country!

i might have to go visit him in his mutilated tomb. my cousin lives in dublin now and i have a standing invitation to visit.

probably doesn't take long to drive from dublin to limerick. this might actually make me want to travel. that and i really like my cousin. and her kid. even if she does work for google...

I know I have one ancestor who emigrated to the United States in the mid-19th century. Other than that, my great-grandparents were all emigrants afaik, right around the beginning of the 20th century, from Scotland and Finland. I have no information on their roots in the old countries, other than knowing that my dad's mom's parents came from Turku.

My mother's mother died when my mother was an infant, and I know nothing about her or her family beyond her name. They may have deeper roots in this country, I have no idea.

Maybe more for the random wikipedia thread but I was surprised to find a Khan (Khaaaaaaan!) on the throne as recently as the 1920s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Mir_Muhammad_Alim_Khan

And this got me thinking, given how large a percentage of people supposedly carrying his genes, is that a specific thing DNA kits could offer, like a "Yup, you're a Khan" checkbox?

I have realised relying on family storied versions of the family tree get's you variable results. My mum told me my great granddad was dragooned into the British army and got badly injured at Gallipoli. Then later my uncle told me he tripped up and fell, then a cart drove over his leg before he'd even got to a battlefield. I'm sort of interested in my maternal granddad because I'm pretty much a double of him barring him looking a lot tougher than me and with more hair. But the big nose, the jaw, the eyebrows, the physiognomy - just identical. My mum said he was a genius who drank with a former taoiseach and also was an arsehole. My uncle said he was a hardcore alcoholic who was an electrician by trade, who because he could also fix transistor radios and do electrical bodgery, in rural Ireland this actually gave him genius status.

Yeah, a lot of self-taught geniuses a couple of generations ago. My dad's dad was a self-taught engineer who worked for General Motors. That wouldn't even be possible now.

As far as I know, we have only one war hero in the family. The engineer's brother served on a ship in the Pacific during WWII and managed to catch a piece of shrapnel in the ass.

#scott, the fellow mentioned in that story is a different Cromwell than the first one youd think of fyi, but i feel getting appointed to any role by the english crown put one in hottish water one way or the other, tho in that context perhaps the objection to his irish bloode suggests the powers that be in limerick didnt consider themselves irish, id need to remind myself tbh

dublin - limerick 2 hour drive and you literally pass my house. just sayin

as far as i know my aunt can trace us back 400 years without leaving the diocese id need to check if its further tbh

i've got my paternal line back to a guy who came over from england on this boat: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_and_John

my mom's side is a big mystery though,
she barely knew her grandparents and no one ever told her anything

my uncle told me he tripped up and fell, then a cart drove over his leg before he'd even got to a battlefield.

It's kind of crazy how many casualties happen to soldiers during wars that don't happen in battle. Go back more than a century and diseases used to carry off an astounding percentage of armies in the field.

nearly how my grandfather died in ww2! he was deployed as a scout to the philippines, contracted something, and was discharged.

In 1535, Edmund was elected Mayor – probably at the behest of Thomas Cromwell. Clearly this ‘election’ wasn’t greeted with any great enthusiasm by the people of the city who saw him as an upstart native who was getting much too big for his boots.

cromwell made him mayor of limerick and the people there didn't like him because he was...irish? what a country!

1533 in Great Yarmouth and that's where the written records stop. My 7x grandfather was an officer in the Continental Army - apparently this qualifies me to join some secret society in DC, but I have no idea if it'll get me a job or just a free dinner.

Our lineage is super well-recorded on my maternal grandmother's side going back centuries (the Websters, definitely including Daniel, less definitely including Noah). The other three lines I can maybe trace as far back as my great-great grandparents so I don't have any idea what comprises 3/4 of me.

Recently got to know a lot of previously unknowns about my mom’s family background: her dad’s family came from Ostergötland and Småland in Sweden, settling in Minnesota in the late 19th century. Her maternal grandparents came from Poland (a tiny village in Galicia between Krakow and Kyiv), and Montreal by way of Frankfurt. We think the great-grandfather from Montreal had a mother who was half First Nation but his name is ridiculously common so it would be hard to fact-check this family lore.

My dad’s family history includes well-to-do C17 Huguenot refugees and Revolutionary War heroes (spies!) on his mother’s side. His dad was the grandson of an Irish Methodist from Strabane who emigrated to Canada in the 1850s, after a stint in the British Army. He became a farmer in Ontario, had loads of kids, and a note in the Canadian census says ‘found 11 children going to school in one family - think it can’t be beat in the Dominion!’ About half of these kids became doctors and fanned out across Canada and bordering US states, to run country hospitals.

I’ve got most of my lines back 8-10 generations, and some a good deal more. I can trace a line on my father’s side on meandering pass through the English monarchy via John of Gaunt, back to William the Conqueror and Donnchad mac Crínáin. I’ve spent years on this stuff and I have solved a lot of old family mysteries. I learned I have Black ancestry which I was able to trace back to my 6x great grandfather. I also learned that one of my grandfather’s German sides was actually ethnically Wendish/Sorbian. Most recently I’ve been working on taking my Swedish ancestry back a few more generations.

Obviously I’m going to enjoy telling people I’m part Ostrogoth!

Most of my Swedish ancestors lived in Kalmar and Gotland, but there is one line I’ve traced back to Östergötland. My ancestor is Kapten Torbjörn
Svensson of Misterfall, who fell in battle in Denmark in 1659.

I was watching a bbc video earlier about how through DNA and linguistics they have worked out that Viking invaders to an eastern island of Scotland didn't just invade the place and either get bored after a few decades and fuck off back home or just die off over time or just slowly blend in. They likely wiped out the entire population of the island and stayed put and became culturally Celts over time. DNA test were showing most of the inhabitants were at least of 60%+ Norwegian/Scandi genetic heritage. This seems obvious really, but apparently they used to think Vikings got bored and fucked off back in their boats when archaeological evidence suggested a Celt cultural resurgence.

My mum's side of the family are mostly Liverpool Irish and so the trail just peters out when they came over in the late 1800s.

(xp) There aren't really any eastern islands in Scotland? The Vikings kind of ignored the east of Scotland and settled in the west. The explanation for this I heard was that they'd sail to the Faroe Islands and then go directly south.

Unless it was Orkney and Shetland, which is a different thing entirely.

yeah it was Islay which I'm referring to, which is of course a western island. My typing is thick as fuck sometimes(!)

lol, Vikings probably could have got to Canada quicker than the east of Scotland

in the sense that the west was poorly defended and easy pickings

Yes, lotta Picts in the East.

Plus the east of Britain was Danish territory, it was the Norwegians who headed for the west.

also the rugged east coast of Scotland makes it a logistical pain in the arse to invade with small narrow boats made out of wood, and them already being in the Hebrides and Orkneys ..etc

I had a little search when FindMyPast made some of its archives free, and the major thing of note I found were 1929 newspaper articles detailing how my grandad sued the Liverpool Corpy for falling in a hole at night near Clubmoor Rec...and lost. Nice try. I can't follow the lines back much further than that. What little I've found does seem to contradict the received oral history (supposedly g-g-parents moved from Cork to Belfast, g-g-f worked at Harland & Wolff, seriously injured, moved to a hospital in L'pool, died, g-g-m raised infant Cornelius on her own). But the records suggest my grandad was born in L'pool, and his mum at least is in local census earlier than that. So who knows.
Ireland certainly, but maybe a generation earlier than thought.

I did go through a couple of family trees at home at xmas. they were all from the same corner of the midlands and mostly just married each other but apparently that was ok in those days. one side was pretty well off so they had quite a few photos from 100+ years ago and it was weird how much you could see current generations in them.

both sides of my family seem to have separately engaged in coverups on a number of fronts wjth different agendas over the generations so it's hard to know anything. the most recent parallel cover ups were of some awful shit. on one side alcoholism, violence, abuse, probable CSA largely at the hands of one or more family patriarchs in england and maybe ireland, which along with rural poverty seems to have caused an exodus to london. on the other side of my family we have what seems to have started as a family dispute over fascism and socialism which was eventually settled fatally some time in the mid to late 1930s. getting any details is very difficult and it's been so cloaked in shame and innuendo (which probably brought my parents together, they know no more than me afaict) and I doubt I'll ever be able to establish much more about either situation. all of this seems is on top of previous generations' more normal coverups over only-shameful-to-awful-19th-century-rural-towns things like catholic and jewish relatives. I wish I knew more about the longer history of my ancestors good or bad but given this stuff it's not much of a surprise that I don't really know who I am or where I come from or how I should relate to my social and historical context

the earliest photo we have is of an old bearded gent who is so obviously one of us despite being a mystery even to my grandparents when they were alive

Like epistantophus I can (with a little bit of idle Ancestry dabbling) trace some insular European lineages back to John of Gaunt, and at least one continental lineage back as far as a 14th century count of Nassau, who was almost a Holy Roman Empire. That's probably true for most peope with European ancestry, though!

Pretty hard to avoid those people because they were among the most well-documented people in their time. No one bothered much with the genealogy of Hans the wheat farmer or Marie who had some kids. But Margaret Beaufort or an elector of Hanover (or whatever), you can ne sure that got written down, and those are the records that reach us.

I do not and cannot claim any reflected glory from my interesting relatives, but I do have some - Samuel F.B. Morse was a fifth great uncle, and Lizzie Borden (also a Morse) was kin to him.

It's mildly interesting that a seventh great-grandmother, Marie Rouensa, was the daughter of the Kaskaskian Chief Mamenthousa, who was at one time head of the Illini Confederation. This was probably 1680 or so? She married a French Canadian fur trader and converted. It's an interesting story but (again) I don't think it makes me more special than I otherwise would be. I just happen to know about it because it is well-documented.

For a long time I wondered why I have a Turkish surname even though my ancestry is Iraqi as far back as any of my relatives are aware.

I asked around and a great-uncle has compiled an insane family tree. It goes back to 1790 when the ur-ancestor was given the "title" of (our surname) by the governor of Baghdad. we don't know what he was called before that.

My grandmother's family has an Indian surname, but at this point i imagine there's a similar explanation.

Considering the progressive mathematics of genetic descent, the further back one traces one's ancestry the more likely it becomes that a particular line in the far past runs through some well-attested line of nobility out of of thousands of perfectly unknown and unremembered pairs of forgotten parents contributing to your ancestry. Even if the most favored line reflects only one out of 2048, 4096, or maybe 8192 possible lines of descent that's the one that gets identified and claimed.

I can’t go past the great-grandfathers of my family who were lynched

all four of them? that's awful!

I’m sorry, DJP. I always think about that when I am dinking around tracing my ancestry- that it’s a form of privilege to be able to do so, when for so many people (for a multitude of reasons) it’s an impossibility.

Fucking horrible is that, DJP.

I just started reading that Monk book, there are lots of background details about how dangerous life was for black people in early 20th c USA. Not just in the backwoods Jim Crow states, NYC was institutionally racist as well. One of the NYC public schools he went to, 60 odd % of the students were black and all the teachers were white and would frequently racially abuse the students. Kudos to Benny Carter who got expelled for decking a teacher who called him the n-word.

But the records suggest my grandad was born in L'pool, and his mum at least is in local census earlier than that. So who knows.
Ireland certainly, but maybe a generation earlier than thought.

With Brexit looming my sister went on a desperate hunt to find out if we could somehow find any recent Irish heritage we could exploit. In the case of my father's paternal line it turned they'd been in Scotland for years - in fact the 1840s, I wonder what was happening in Ireland in the 1840s to cause people to leave and come to Scotland? The men were all labourers, and all called either Thomas or Christopher. Boring! She didn't discover anything useful in his maternal line either, though she did discover a great uncle who played for Hibs and was picked for the Scottish League (back when the Scottish League and the English League picked their own international teams), and who even has his own wiki page. When she asked my mother about this, she replied, "Oh yeah, him, the footballer". Thanks for telling us, mum!

As for my mother's side of the family, they appear to have been all either farm workers or miners from Ayrshire. The family mystery of my mum's great Grandad remains though. He was a flamboyant character who liked to dress all in white, with a white panama hat, smoke a big cigar, and dabble in theatrical promotion. Famously he put on shows to raise money to build the Langside Synagogue, this and the fact he looked exactly like Lew Grade seems to have led to few family rumours on his ancestry.

my aunt has sent me on lineage back to robert the bruce, dyou mind

r u sure it wasn't Steve Bruce ?!

we havent that level of athletic ability in the family tbh

With Brexit looming my sister went on a desperate hunt to find out if we could somehow find any recent Irish heritage we could exploit.

has anyone's genealogy searching ended up in some kind of booby prize? like "your such and such twice removed left this book of racist jokes at our inn 100 years ago -- it's yours now"

hasnt stopped the majority if that type in going ahead with the passport application anyway afaict

I fear I'm of much the same peasant stock as Brendan O'Neill.

that fucking sucks DJP :(

Yeah NYC's public school teachers are still to this day much more white, percentage-wise, than its students. Shocking, i know.

To answer Aimless’s question, I only know the stories of two of my great-grandfathers, one on each side of my family. At least one was the child of slaves so I couldn’t trace much past his parents, whom I know little to nothing about other than that the had been enslaved. Both were lynched; one was a landowner who was murdered by a white sharecropper after telling the man to pay the rent owed for working my great-grandfather’s land. The sharecropper then took the land for himself. My other great-grandfather was arrested for not giving up his seat to white people on a bus and murdered by the police in his jail cell that evening. The city where this happened, Natches, MS, vacated his posthumous conviction and gave my family a formal apology in 2018.

Thank you for sharing that painful family history, DJP. That's harsh -- and a reminder that the US practice of destroying Black families is shameful, criminal, deeply ingrained, and still ongoing. Reparations can't come soon enough.