How far back before it doesn't matter?

[jooliee]

I come from a working class background with roots in the far West of Scotland but with a lot of North English ancestry too. Most of my family were miners or agricultural labourers.

I recently discovered that my 4 x great grandmother came from a very interesting/prominent family. She was born around 1780. Her father was a bankrupt and died young and my 4 x great grandmother married 'down' as she married an inn keeper (freeholder).

Realise that this is a long time ago, and we have 64 4 x great grandparents so only 1.5% of my known ancestry comes from any money/interest. Obviously you don't need money to be interesting but it just means there are a lot more records available so easier to follow.

How far back do you go before you think it's so far back that it doesn't really matter?

Define "matter" though...

My ancestry is very similar you yours, Scottish Borders, Northumberland, umpteen children in every generation, never moved out of a small geographical area, never had interesting jobs, all were ag labs or similar, married local people, had umpteen children, cycle continued.

It's only natural that when 90% of your tree is like that (boring) that you focus in on the 10% who were criminal, ended up in the Poorhouse, were involved in the local council, emigrated to Canada etc etc.

I found out that my DH's 13th great grandparents (and therefore the 14th GGs of my DC) were very historically 'interesting' (eg Hans Holbein painted them, a portrait is in the Met, prominent in history books etc). I think it's interesting! Meaningless to our lives now but interesting!

Mine goes back to 1608
My uncle had written down the spoken history of my fathers family line as far as ‘old ___, a shipwrecked sailor’

Years later I went onto Ancestry putting on his tree plus updates, and was able to then match the names to births, deaths, marriages obtaining timelines.
This also enabled me to find matches in other trees and push out my mothers family line. (In some cases hitting endless loops as some repeated Christian names would get mismatched a few generations turning into circles (eg your child is your grandparent) so I would have to break and correct the loops

But it still comes to a dead end at ‘old ’
(Sometimes I get an alert about a matching tree with an attachment and I get excited that his birth certificate has been tracked, but it turns out to be another transcript of my uncles original written version !)

I’ve had a few tries about finding overseas family trees, and I have managed to put a full name to ‘old ___’ but no joy in pushing back further

I might prefer to stick to my imaginary version that rather than being a simple shipwreck that he was really a runaway from his old life, and that connects a similarity to my original maternal grandfather … he was a sailor who abandoned my gran disappearing to London
The grandfather I knew was her second husband - but what i didn’t know until she died was that dear sweet granny & grandad had ‘lived in sin’ during the war for many years before divorcing and remarrying

How far you go is a matter of how far you want and can trace

How far back do you go before you think it's so far back that it doesn't really matter?

It always matters.

Decisions made by ancestors, or people around them, way back in the past still have an impact today. If your (general you) ancestor born in 1600 had married Kate rather than Joan the whole subsequent history of his family would have been different, and you would never have been born.

If someone's father hadn't died young, so he was sent off to live with his uncle - if someone hadn't decided to leave his village and go and work in town - if someone's first husband had lived and she hadn't married a second time and had more children, one of whom was your ancestor...

I'm going backwards with each name until I hit a brick wall. Some lines you can trace much further than others. You are more likely to get stuck if the family on that side has a very common name, less so if it is unusual or as in your case, can be linked to a wealthy family with already-documented lineage.

Have gone back to the 900s/1000s and were from ultra-nobility; owned most of Switzerland, royal adjacent something Saxe-Coburg etc.

Sadly that was the highlight, none of the wealth filtered. We're all bog standard now 🙄

I think it always matters.

If our direct bloodline ancestors anywhere at all in the timeline had made different decisions, met or not met different people, died for whatever reason before their children could have been conceived then we who are alive today would never have been born.

Family history is something I find fascinating and I have dabbled a little in my own in my very amateurish way. I can get back into around the late 1700s, though without a huge amount of detail. It becomes much more difficult to get anywhere after that and actually be sure that the entries I am making are correct.

We all have ancestors going back as far as humanity itself one way or another or we just wouldn't be here. We didn't come from nowhere.

"How far back do you go before you think it's so far back that it doesn't really matter?"

I think once you get past a certain stage when details become very sparse and all you have are names and dates then you really don't learn much about people other than their names.

But, if you get your DNA tested then it can be really interesting finding out how you are connected and, for me, I find this is often what drives me to go back further, to find out exactly how we are connected.

It's really interesting going back to our common ancestor and seeing how their side of the family has differed from that point on compared to my own ancestors.

What really started this off for me was when my mum got her DNA tested and she came across a whole load of very distant (5th to 8th cousins) DNA matches who had the same surname as her mother and they all lived in the USA.

How had that happened?

So that led to a lot of work and we eventually found that they were related as about 8th cousins. It turned out that back in the 1690s a couple of cousins in that family went over to America and became tobacco farmers. Our side of the family stayed home and worked as farm labourers.

So, the whole thing driving going further back was to find out how come we had so many distant relations in the USA.

We found something similar with my dad as well, although much later. In the 1860s a family member went off and joined the Mormons in Utah. We now have so many relations who live in Utah (and, I guess, are Mormons).

We also had many other relations who went off to Canada, Australia and New Zealand throughout the 1800s

"Obviously you don't need money to be interesting but it just means there are a lot more records available so easier to follow."

That was the case with the family that went over to America in the 1690s, they were part of a wealthy and very well documented family. My ancestors were the sort of seventh son of a seventh son so they never saw any of the money.

Well, I think it always matters. No matter how far back you go, your ancestors are inextricably linked to you because, if you took just one of them out, you wouldn't exist. It's a lot of fun. The furthest back I can find is an 8th g grandfather born 1565, called Henry, so he's my Henry the 8th. He only had 3 wives 😀 and I've no idea which was mother of my 7th g grandfather. As regards noble ancestors, most of us have some, but tracing the line isn't always easy. I tumbled upon a line of aristocrats, with further such lines branching off it. The only thing that makes it particularly interesting is that such people are recorded and so you can go further back. I like seeing old certificates, with ink blotches and old writing. Of course it all relies on fidelity. Only the mothers know their offspring's true paternity. So-called ancestors may not all be related to us. Before anyone asks if I'm aware this is an old thread, yes, I am.

I don’t like my living relatives, so I don’t care to know the dearly departed ones too!
In all seriousness though, Its interesting if there is somebody interesting I think. I would like to know if I was related to some historical figure (but none of the bad ones!) or someone who had an exceptionally interesting story. I think if it’s something that interests you then all of your ancestors are worth investigating. They’ve all made you who you are today and have all played a part in your genes.

If it matters to you, go as far back as you can.

@Idontpostmuch this is one of the few boards on MN where replying on old threads doesn't get you a telling off. 😂

Haha I love it