I have to tell somebody

[Prokupatuscrakedatus]

Nobody in my family is even remotely interested, but I have to tell somebody:

I just found the marriage of Peter Heckmann and Agnes ter Boven on 04.02.1680.
They are my 9th great grandparents.

Incredible! How do you even get started with this? It is wizardry to me!

Using other people's compiled family trees, particularly by Americans, is very hit and miss. Mostly miss. Many of them are quite literally barking up the wrong tree.

Should I have heard of Peter Heckmann and Agnes ter Boven? Are they famous historical figures?

OP, I know how you feel. I've been doing mine on and off for over 20 years. I have a couple of relatives who do take some interest but my biggest regret is not being able to tell my Mum (who died nearly 30 years ago) what I've discovered about her family.

I'm back to 1770s on her side, 1640s on my Dad's side. It's utterly addictive.

That’s so cool OP!

My mum did similar on my dads side (her side were too poor to go back much further than the late 1800’s although I think her sister / my aunt continues to rummage!). She traced my dads family back to the mid 1600’s! They were ‘wealthy’ enough to leave a will - silver spoons (with which all meals would have been eaten) were bequeathed. My mum traced them via these and other church records and then found their graves. We’ve been to visit and I loved it - a classic, old, village church like something out of The Crucible, complete with box pews and a Yew Tree.

The paper family tree is a thing to behold when it goes back to the 17th century!

wow, that is some tracing you have done, well done you!

Fantastic to see the line go back, and to imagine what each family lived through.

Genealogy is very addictive! However, tracing an accurate family tree can only be done if all female Ancestors were truthful with regards to the parentage of their Children.
The best way to know exactly where you came from is through a DNA test, as this would either corroborate everything you find when researching your family history, or will bring up some surprising results. My family and I recently took a test and found out my Dad has 7 half siblings (all long gone) that he never knew existed, and loads of other twists and turns, all through finding others we’re genetically matched to.

Awesome, well-done!!

I'm sorry to say this but just about everyone in Scotland is descended from Robert the Bruce.

If you have "just used Ancestry" then you need to be careful about what you find and use. I am a professional researcher and most people are unable to accurately trace their origins further back than the 1700s unless they were landed people. You need to go to original documents.

Have to agree - Americans love this stuff and have some of the most ludicrous trees you ever see. I have an American second cousin who claims we are related to Joseph of Arimathea. Hmmmmm.....

Oh, I was born on their 301st wedding anniversary 😁.

Most of us probably don't have fascinating ancestry however surely as you go back generation after generation, finding someone of significance in your family tree improves exponentially? First you're looking at more and more people across each generation and second the total population being smaller and smaller the further you go back, this reduces the pool and improves the probability of finding someone interesting?
Or have I got it all wrong?

Well done OP, for finding Peter Heckmann and Agnes ter Boven.
Peter and Agnes. I wonder what their life was like.

A great place to start searching your family ancestry is at a Chuch of Latter Day Saints research center. They have volunteers who will help you use their computers to search at no cost. You can sign up for their website at Familysearch.org and start searching away...I was able to trace my DHs family back to 900 AD! He is related to several Barons, Counts, and Lords so that may be why there are records going back so far. We are as poor as church mice ...unfortunately the family wealth was all spent before it got to us.

That's great. My DH and I are doing ours and I've got to early 1700s and coats of arms etc which is always interesting. I've also done the dna thing on ancestry and that's revealed more information. Like you my brothers aren't interested but at least my husband is.

Well done OP.

I've managed to also go back to 1640s following my dad's line, and I just want to know more! All that way back the family were either farm laborers or servants, (with the exception of a Beefeater!) but as I know where they lived I'd probably be able to find out their allegiance in the English revolution. It fascinates me that the farm laborer/servant consistency over almost 300 years only ended with my grandparents.

The most fascinating story I found was my grandmother's great grandmother was a witness in a witchcraft trial in Essex. The newspaper article on it was so interesting.

That's wonderful OP (now I want someone to post on here having discovered they are your fifth cousin - the power of Mumsnet )

Well done!

Make sure you screenshot the record.

But then you get into the whole philosophical debate about what is "family".

DNA is one approach and yes it is an absolutely valid approach. But on the other hand you have people whose paternal grandfather turns out biologically not to be who they thought it was - as far as THEY are concerned, the person who they always knew as their grandfather is their family, and the fact he wasn't biologically linked is neither here nor their.

There is no "right" or "wrong" in that aspect, if people want to research the family they grew up with that's fine.

I do always treat Ancestry trees with utmost suspicion though, there is so much rubbish put on there by people who have no clue what they are doing. Having a link to Robert the Bruce or William the Conqueror is lovely and romantic but you are unlikely to be able to prove that with a robust paper trail unless you are very very lucky - or spend weeks in the national archives trawling through medieval Latin court rolls.

Who are of Peter Heckmann and Agnes Boven?

I've traced my dad's family tree back to about 1650ish - distinctive local surname (hurray!) but with deeply unimaginative naming habits (so.... which John are you? Son, cousin, other cousin, father, aaarrrgghh). Nothing particularly exciting, but I love wandering in that infinite hall of mirrors that is WHY: was this shotgun marriage happy or sad? Why did you emigrate the same year your mother remarried? What was the reaction when you married your late wife's sister, etc etc etc.

They are the OP's 9 x great grandparents. They may not be notable or famous but the fact the OP has traced her line back to 1680 in present day Germany is an achievement to be celebrated.

Excellent, well done

I hear you @hostawater - the documents provide the facts but not the motivation. I am a big fan of local newspapers, you can often get some very interesting detail and "colour".

@missingingredient
They are people of no importance to anybody but me, but I have found them by searching pages and pages of church records.😀
And if the record keeper was local he wrote the local dialectal names (i. e. Agnes would have been Nees, Elisabeth would have been Elsken) if he wasn't local he'd more likely use his dialect. And when Napoleon was boss all records turned French and somebody born as Greetken would be married as Marguerite.

DD wants to take a test for fun. But with DNA testing there is this problem of people talking about German DNA, Italian DNA etc. as if artificially created political units had any relationship to genetics. The area my ancestors came from was Dutch, Spanish, French, Prussian over time.
One ancestor never left his tiny village but was born, married and died in three different political units.

Within all branches of my ancestors people stayed in the same village for hundreds of years for example: an empty village (plague) was resettled by 8 families and they stayed in that village from 1580 until industrialization, when they started to move out. So they married within the village and are all closely related. And all men were called Johannes.

if the record keeper was local he wrote the local dialectal names (i. e. Agnes would have been Nees, Elisabeth would have been Elsken) if he wasn't local he'd more likely use his dialect. And when Napoleon was boss all records turned French and somebody born as Greetken would be married as Marguerite.

Whoah...what? Please back up a moment. This is mindblowing. Would you mind expanding on this?