Family history research surprises...

[wheresmymojo]

I'm researching the family history on both my side and DH's.

I've come across quite a few surprises/interesting things and wondered if anyone else had anything they've found in their family trees that took them by surprise?

The ones off the top of my head in my tree are:

• I have a 4th Great Uncle who was a civil war hero in the US (he even has a Wikipedia page); I had no idea we had any ties to the US at all

• DH's family can be traced back to the 1000's because one of them was mates with William the Conqueror

• DH's family is full of Barons, Sirs, Lords and Sherriffs of Nottingham. Some of them have marble tombs and oil paintings

• Mine were poor as fuck, many died in the Irish famine, some lived in Liverpool slums, some died in workhouses. The ones that had a 'good' life still worked down the pits and raised lots of children in just two or three rooms

• In one branch mine eventually trace back to Scottish crofters near Aberdeen (also poor) trying to make ends meet for 10 kids off 7 acres of land

• One very sad suicide with that I think now would've been PND

• Lots of deportations to Australia and time in prison for petty crimes like stealing a chicken (probably to eat) on my poor side

Anyone else?

PS I find the subreddit r/AncestryDNA useful too. There's a link there to a site that can give alternative relationships other than just 'cousins' (like Ancestry gives) if you type in the number of shared CMs with a DNA match.

I'm surprised at the emotional toll that researching your ancestors can have on you. How much you care about people that you didn't even know existed. I've lost an awful amount of sleep since I embarked on researching my family tree

Can't agree more. And guilt for never even asking about it when older family members could have filled in the gaps. Dm still has memories of many of the previous generation or two which I have been able to flesh out. Even 100 years ago seems a completely different world. Every so often I need to take stock before embarking on the next line of enquiry and collate the information before it gets completely out of control.

My parents are dead and I'm desperate to know more about their families, especially mums side as I didn't know any of them.
How do I find out about them, what did you all do? I had the free 24 HR ancestry access but didn't find out much and was very confused. I'm not very pc literate.
Any advice would be much appreciated.

I started with the National Archives which links to different censuses and registers. If you have any birth, marriage or death certificates that should give you names and addresses as a starting point then you can build on them. Newspaper archives has searches if you know what area they lived in. I've been amazed at how much I have found without registering so far.

Someone further up the thread mentioned the cost of using ancestry. Your local library will probably have free access to it, mine does. I do a lot of my research there and type it into my tree, which I have on ancestry and you don’t have to be a paid up member to have your tree there. The only slight downside to using the free version in the library is that you can’t attach records to your tree and you can’t contact members directly.

Every now and again you get free weekends where I then go in and attach documents to my tree. I’m always going to sign up and pay for the month so I can contact people but I never seem to have the time, if I’m paying I want to spend as much time as possible using the site to get my money’s worth to save documents etc.

I would love to do the DNA test but I’m a bit wary of a company having my DNA and what they could potentially do with it.

Thanks, I'll try the library. And the national archives, do I find that online? I'll dig out any certificates I can find, what ones would be useful?

I would love to do the DNA test but I’m a bit wary of a company having my DNA and what they could potentially do with it.

This is my concern too.

I would be wary of ‘uploading’ my DNA elsewhere & third party sites but would trust AncestryDNA as things stand at the moment.

I would opt to not have my DNA stores & press the delete button if I felt differently in the future.

I worry more about credit card fraud etc.

Re: person with a first cousin at Ancestry - if subscriptions lapse people don’t always receive messages. When did they log in last? Also, some messages go to bulk folder & you don’t always see them if you login on phone.

@thatwouldbeanecumenicalmatter The re-use of names was very common. It seems strange to us today, because names are so tied up with personal identity.

People used naming patterns and traditions, which I won't go into detail about here, but you could look it up.

I'm surprised at the emotional toll that researching your ancestors can have on you

Yes here too! I’m quite a mawkish individual anyway but some things really moved me. My dad’s direct paternal line goes back mostly to the British isles, they were among the first wave of settlers and the inbreeding was stomach churningly horrific up until the 19th century - Catholic so they kept especially apart. Handy for genetic genealogy though! But suddenly they stopped marrying one another and my whatever x g grandfather and his brothers almost all married Cherokee women. When I looked into it at a more sort of population type level it really broke my heart.

newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/the-power-of-cherokee-women-cguyNX91RE6asAyIQwYheg/

Obviously can’t know anything much about the individuals and their relationships but it left me feeling such sadness.

I often dream about my grandma and gt grandma (from that mixed line of European/Cherokee) who both shot themselves in the head, fatally, when they were in their early sixties.

This thread inspired me to spend some time updating my family tree on Ancestry earlier (to be fair, am stuck in bed as extra!broken, so...) & made discovery it seems one of my 3xgreat-uncles was charged with manslaughter! Better still, whoever entered things into the record summary got things wrong & he wasn’t acquitted - he was sentenced to a “Term Of Police Supervision” (doesn’t state how long for...)
Not enough information to be sure it was him, but dates & location make it likely. And he’s not one of the people on my tree with a super-common name. Unlike my maternal great-grandfather, for example - Daniel Buckley, anyone? I think about a quarter of the men in Ireland were called that. I’ve also a Sarah Fisher & a Sara Fisher in different parts of my tree: ensuring I don’t muddle them up when adding people is a bit stressful.

Speaking of muddles, it seems at least 2 people in Australia are convinced my great-aunt Peggy - who came back to the UK when she was about 4 & did most of her growing-up in Belfast - is/was some random Australian woman. As in, who lived her whole life there, rather than, as was the case, coming back to the UK, growing up in Belfast, moving over to London with 3 of her sisters as a young woman, very sadly being seriously disabled by a series of strokes when she was still fairly young, & dying - still in London - in 1992. Given the responses PPs have mentioned upthread, am not at all sure about contacting them to say that, well, they’ve got things muddled somewhere.

Whenever I've contacted people, I often find it's their husband's tree and they don't really know much. I keep getting suggestions for people who have my grandad in their tree because he's got a pretty common name.

I really wish I could find someone who was seriously looking at what might be my ggm/gggf. I've got a name discrepancy that I just can't work out.

I found that my grandfather's grandparents weren't married, which may explain why great grandfather was an only child.
Quite a few suicides "in a fit of temporary insanity", too much infant mortality, lives list on the Lusitania, and a long-standing link to Scottish roots.
I've recently been doing a bit of research and just found a whole bunch of new cousins.

^lives lost

hello all, well latest update. I have thousands of matches from first cousin to 8th cousins. I am still no nearer to finding the Irish link but when I look at the trees of my matches I have found quite a lot, but haven't found any links.
You need to remember that just because you have a DNA match with someone, they might not have their tree correctly researched. You need to check several others with the same ancestors if you can.
I'm finding lots of people in America, Canada, and of course the UK.

I agree it can be very emotional if you track a family for about a century. I was almost crying reading about a baby that rolled into the yog (fire) and burnt to death.

For me though, finally finding out my genes and ancestry has really changed my life.

Romany That’s so awful :(

When you say Irish link do you mean finding the people who were from there originally or people you’re connected to who are living there now? Just wondering because I check every day for any hint of a match from the British isles (especially Ireland and Scotland) but nothing so far.

Maybe it was too long ago for there to be any links now?

Ayahuasca

They were Romany but part of an organised tour, they went to Ireland and never came back.
So I have a DNA connection to some Irish Romany, quite unusual really.
Romany and Irish Travellers are completely different cultures.
Now I have the connection with these distant relatives and see their tree and they come down and I go up and so far the twain is yet to meet I have thousands of matches from all over the world and my DNA is a match of the original Romany to leave India over 1,500 years ago. I was absolutely amazed.
It's taken over my life, it's unbelievable.

It’s so fascinating and absorbing, I really relate to your enthusiasm! You’ll find them eventually- GEDmatch might be helpful, though I can’t quite figure out how best to use it yet.

I’m finding the ancestry thru lines thing extra helpful lately when I input putative maternal grandfathers and see how well the matches with shared ancestors measure up, centimorgan wise. Definitely narrowing it down but at the same time I accept I might never know for sure.

Putative? Do I mean possible or potential? 🧐

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I'm not sure which word you meant but I agree you might never know for sure. I've linked a ancestor with someone else which was fine, but then found out her tree was completely wrong as I had references from journals, books, and the exact registry documents.
However, sometimes the documents can be wrong, especially census, that could have been taken wrongly, wrong names recorded, and of course wrong name being given for some reason.
So it's difficult to be 100% sure and you need to see it on several trees, have documentation before being certain but not 100% sure.

The trees are so often unreliable but they’re always interesting!

The marriage certificate of my paternal grandparents has arrived. Both were 19 when they married in October 1917. There’s a couple of interesting things: The groom and both fathers were coal miners, which ties in with some vague memories of what my father said. But at the time of the marriage, the groom was in the army, and if I’ve managed to interpret the writing correctly, he was a private in the 6th T.R.B., which from a brief google seems to be a training battalion and implies that he joined some time that year. It needs more research, but I would have imagined that coal miners were excluded from military service, at least in the early part of the war, because coal supplies needed to be maintained.

Of the two spellings of the surname, the groom and his father are listed with the other spelling rather than the one that subsequently shows up for the children of the marriage. But that could be what the priest wrote down. The two witnesses are from the bride’s family but not her father – I thought it was traditional for the two fathers to be the witnesses.

There’s lots more to unpack just from this one certificate, especially looking at google maps to see where they lived. And they should show up in the 1911 census.