Ancestry - Family History

[bostaurus]

My very smart brother started researching our family tree years ago, before much was on the web, and then I picked it up from there. It is a lot of fun and very interesting.
We actually traced our family back to Adam! No kidding!
It is funny... Irish monks...way back in the day....decided that since the king was supposed to have been given their right of kingship from God then they needed to have an unbroken line from Adam. So they did their "research" and were able to come up with an unbroken line back to Adam.
So, if you can trace your family to the British or Irish royal family you can trace back to Adam. We have a couple of folks that came to Jamestown as poorer relations of upper crust families. If your family is from England you are probably in the lineage of the royal family whether you can show it or not. There have always been a lot of folks in the "peerage" and they have always been very profligate. There are probably more folks related to the Queen through the back door than those that were "to the Manor born".

 

[Baydog51]

Ron, I started on my research about 15 years ago. Traced my paternal line back to his ship arrival in Virginia in 1635. I also spent a lot of time on my maternal line and currently have about 2300 names in my data base. Ancestry.com has a lot of good info but it gets very expensive to use them the way they break it up in packages. I have found most of my info at the local library. If you live near a large size city, their libraries will have a substantial geneology dept with lots of info for free. Also the Mormon site familysearch.com will have much info for free to search. Also USGenweb will have a lot of info for free. Looking at the cemetary listings will give you many leads to family groups. Have fun.---Gary

 

[ktbi]

Thanks for the tips Gary...I planned to use ancestry.com on turbo-drive and then drop them. I will check those sites you mentioned. I found that Google Books has been a treasure trove too. Surprising what shows up there. I've been researching this for about two years, have over 1500 people documented, and feel like I'm just getting started. I'm trying to find stories, references, anything I can for each person. Yesterday, I found one widowed Great-Grandmother from around the 1600's listed in the Scotland Census. Her occupation was listed as 'pauper'. That struck me as sad for one, but a little strange to be listed like that.

Melinda, I totally believe what you are saying about we all go back to one source. I found one reference for my family that goes back to almost 1000BC! No documentation and this is the only source I can find - so I just dropped it. But the billions and billions of people we have now all came from that group of a few million back then. and the pool just gets smaller the further you go back.

Thanks for looking and good luck to everyone diving into this.

Post updates if/when you find them. It's interesting. I will do the same...
Ron

 

[RedGinger]

ORIGINAL: rockbot

My daughter has a copy of our family tree. My grandma and aunty's made a pretty good one years ago but it does't go back that far. No relatives left in Portugal
that we can contact.[]

Rocky, did you know Lobey was part Portuguese too? I know he was mostly Italian, but had some Portuguese ancestry, and probably some other ancestry too. I know a lot of the Portuguese in New England came from the Azores. What part of Portugal is your family from?

 

[RedGinger]

Hey Ron, here is a small section of a Wikipedia article in reference to the Southern accent:
"Southern dialects originated in large part from immigrants from the British Isles who moved to the South in the 17th and 18th centuries. Settlement also included large numbers of Protestants from Ulster, Ireland, and from Scotland."

 

[BillinMo]

I've often wondered if ancestry.com is worth it or not.

My aunt researched my dad's side of the family some years ago, and using some online resources managed to trace back to some of the original Dutch settlers in New York (before it became an English colony). I'm not sure how accurate it was, since a few birth/death dates don't seem to line up at all.

My mom's side emigrated more recently (Civil War and afterward -- all Irish) and I've been wanting to work on that. I'm old-fashioned enough that I like poking through old library records like the census schedules and city directories.

 

[carobran]

my grandfather told me that one of my ancestors was a knight in England

 

[SAbottles]

Ah yes; he may have been a knight once - but once a knight is enough !! []

 

[bostaurus]

ORIGINAL: RedGinger

Hey Ron, here is a small section of a Wikipedia article in reference to the Southern accent:
"Southern dialects originated in large part from immigrants from the British Isles who moved to the South in the 17th and 18th centuries. Settlement also included large numbers of Protestants from Ulster, Ireland, and from Scotland."

There are some really good books out about the Scots-Irish (those protestant Scots from Northern Ireland, Irish and Welsh(the authors term them "celtic" tribal people) that settled the south. Seems the English, Germans, etc. that settled on the Eastern coasts encouraged the immigration of these folk, who they considered rather barbaric, so they would settle in the wilder western regions. They let them handle the beasts and Indians. They tended to be wandering folk so they would settle in the wild areas for a few years and then move on farther west. The English, Germans, etc, that tended to move in, settle down , build homes, farms and towns, would then move into the areas they had "tamed". They greatly disliked these wild folk. They were useful for a purpose but they did not want to live near them. The tensions were very high between the "Celtic" peoples and the other settlers. They were said to be filthy, ill-mannered, promiscuous, and violent (just the reason they wanted them to settle the western part of the colonies). Many of these stereotypes continue to this day with the ramshackle homes, feuding, "Daisy Duke' clothes, etc.
The tensions were very high and during the Revolutionary War these tensions became excuses for both sides to commit horrible atrocities including the killing and torture of women and children.
It is said that some of the reasons that the South held out for as long as it did during the Civil War was due to the Scots-Irish, Irish and Welsh emphasis on fighting for a cause (and just plain fighting) and their ancient traditions of fierce loyalty to a clan, in this case a state. It did not matter what the fight was about...you fought with the clan.
As far as the language there are some really, really good books on it. Even within an area of the country as small as part of a county, language has been broken down to show the influence of the folks that settled there. My family has Scots_Irish, Irish, Welsh and English. In my late grandmother's speech you could hear accents on some words from East Anglia and that part of her family came over in the early 1600's! Did her family always pronounce those words that way or did she pick them up somewhere else? We will never know. Don's grandmother always used a certian word to call in her cows...we found out reading one of those books that it was an old Scottish word for 'cow'. She did not know that...her father probably never knew that...the family had been here for 250 years... Really cool stuff.

 

[Baydog51]

Let me throw out one more site for you http://www.genforum.genealogy.com/

You can go there and put your last name in the forum search and it will take you to tons of other folks already researching your family. Sometimes you get a lot of needed info that you haven't found yet.