What is the history of your family Heriatge?

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Just because the online national archives only go back that far doesn't mean records don't go further back.

Here is an uncomprehensive list of publicly available records for the 12th century in England, are you saying these don't exist?

http://www.theoriginalrecord.com/databa ... decade/115

Or family records?
Parish records?
Tombstones?

or a gazillion other sources?

Until recently, my grandmother would travel back to Morocco every few years.

You'd have to try and do some genealogy to understand. Those aren't national registries. They're too spotty to be of any use at all. Here and there you've got a few records being maintained in a few areas for a bit of a timeframe, but that's basically useless. One single break, and you're lost, there's no way to trace. Even with national registries this happens quite often, for various reasons.

Last edited by edgewaters on 06 May 2012, 9:38 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I would love to vistit that country some day. Living in America their are not to many states that make you say wow that is cool. But in other countries their is nothing but cool stuff.

Would several years of driving round the country scrubbing lichen off tombstones in graveyards, knocking on the doors of stately homes, scouring tens of thousands records and having your DNA sequenced count as 'trying to do some genealogy'?

I'm just curious, why exactly do you think it is impossible for every human to trace their ancestry back a thousand years? Did you try for a bit and give up after a google search?

If you happen to have a name inherited from your father that traces back to any one of about 30,000 different aristocratic families, there is a very good chance that accurate and lengthy records will exist.

If your ancestors happen to have:

Appeared in the Domesday Book.
A town named after them.
One was the richest man in England.
The Mayor of London.
A major funder of the construction of Westminster Abbey.

Do you not think the task of tracing your ancestors might be somewhat easier than you are making out?

If you are descended from peasant scum of course, well it's not my fault they couldn't write their own name.




(My apologies to all for starting a class war.)

We've got about 2000 people in a database that's taken us nearly a decade to assemble. There is not a single thing in it that hasn't been verified - not one iota of speculation. Our standards are extremely high. Each individual in the database has a copy of whatever primary source material is involved - not transcriptions even (I am sure you are familiar with the problems there) but the original documents, bad handwriting and all. Images of the documents of course, not original copies.



None of that is any use at all if there's even so much as one gap. And there are generally, many gaps.

Yes, it's true if you belonged to an aristocratic family, then they may have kept records going back further - I did mention that, if you look at my first post in the thread. I gave 9th century as being about the limit of possibility in some cases. But most people who think they've got royalty or famous individuals, are just deluding themselves with romanticized nonsense and wishful family legends, and haven't really established it with any degree of certainty. They often think it's ok to bridge a gap or two with speculation - but as soon as you do that, the whole thing is contaminated.

I'm chavscum, multigenerational working class.

But historically, the rich had more babies than the poor did and over the course of many centuries of people with a 'noble name' inheriting nothing because the entire estate would pass to the oldest son those names filtered through all levels of society.

Lots and lots of people in Britain can trace their ancestry back into an aristocratic family.



Well I can report that everything I know about my family line is down to lots of research, (mostly my sister doing the work and me doing the scrubbing, rubbing and photos) no family legends past WWI and I've seen the names on the monuments in France, Belgium and Italy to give them a little credibility.

You do not have to 'belong to an aristocratic family' in order to be able to trace your ancestry back to one, you just need to trace your ancestry back to an aristocratic family, it does not make you a member of the aristocracy.

If the records show absolutely that king what's his name gifted lord inbred the first this exact parcel of land, no records then exist for lord inbred the second but then you have precise records for lord inbred the third owning the exact same land give or take a couple of boundary changes I think it is fairly safe to assume the two *just maybe* somehow related.

I notice that you have ontario as your location, how much time have you spent in Europe tracing your ancestry and how much time was spent in Canada on the internet?

The people resident in grand stately homes that haven't changed hands for a thousand years generally have nothing useful to do and absolutely love boring the crap out of everyone with tales of their historic lineage.

PS Did you really manage to get 2000 people with no posh lord types in it?

Oh originally it was chalk full of lords and celebrities. They all got eliminated, though.

There were a few mayors I guess. *shrugs*

some people know their family history really well. all i know about mine is that my paternal grandmothers family ages and ages ago had wealthy members in it and her last name means well fed in arabic so thats an indicator of their class i suppose. otherwise i know zero about the long dead. and you guys can all write essays on yours.

If the records on Ancestry are accurate, then my dad's side of the family has been in the United States since the 1600s. My ancestors on my dad's side of the family were some of the earliest settlers of Plymouth colony. I believe they had mostly arrived from England, as I think I have mostly English ancestry from my dad's side, as well as some Irish. Other than English and Irish, it's been alleged that I have Apache ancestry through my paternal grandmother, but that has yet to be confirmed. It's also been alleged that I'm related to Willie Nelson, but, again, non-confirmed.

My mom's side has been remarkably difficult to figure out, but it seems that I have Jewish and Irish ancestry on her side. Via Ancestry, I found out recently that my maternal great-grandfather was Jewish, and it could be that he was descended from a line of Jews from Germany.

So, yeah, I know that I'm definitely of English, Irish, and Jewish ancestry. Add a touch of Apache-Indian to that as well if the allegations are true.

A white guy whose greatest accomplishment was to say, "Paris vaut bien une messe," and an English politician whose most commendable feat was to make himself an intolerable nuisance to the monarchy. Besides that, some Scottish blue-bloods and others from various backgrounds.

I don't have many ancestors who stepped off the boat later than the Revolution. That is to say, if you have a problem with how I want the country to be run, YOU leave it. One of my ancestors was one of the Lords Proprietor. The way I see it, you are on my land. Haha!

The Mormons research the whole world's genealogy and keep the data on file in a big library (so they can baptize dead people).
So if any of y'all are tracing your family tree, the Mormons have a good resource.

True but my family has a resource as well a family book with a lot of facts about out familys history.

On one side my ancestors were Scottish mercenaries in the employ of Catherine the Great who settled in Lithuania and intermarried with the local Jewish population, on the other they were British entrepreneurs who came to this country in the late 1800s and set up shops in coal mining towns.

Some French by way of French Canadian.



Through another line have French Hugenaut ancestors - insurgent Protestants who were persecuted and murdered by the French Catholic establishment in the 1500's. So I have a race card too!

Some intriguing unconfirmed evidence of a pinch of Jewish ancestry as well.

Actually, like joker, and like most humans, I probably have ancestors who persecuted as well - we probably all have both victims and victimizers somewhere in our ancestry.

But the french portion is small, as is my English heritage.Am mostly German from several different lines.

One ancestor was a Hessian mercenary who was a prisoner of war of the American Revolutionaries. They didnt have pow camps- they had pows quartered as indentured servants to patrioit families. So he lived in the household of prominent Boston silversmith (considered better than Paul Revere). Fell in love with the silversmiths teenage daughter and took her back to Hesse Germany when the war was over. Their grandkids moved back to America two generations later in the 19th centurey.


My girl friend and I were playing on the computer, and I mentioned my one time aspie obsession with Zeppilins.

We got into researching our family names online.

We found out that my paternal grandmother's maiden name "Brandenstein"( which means 'rolling stone') is the name of aristocrats in Southern Germany and that they have married into the Zeppilin family- right after we had just been yaking about Zeppilins (not a frequent convesation topic).

The current patriarch of the house of Zeppilin is a very stern looking gentleman named Count Brandenstein Von Zeppilin.


So I might be related to the family who invented one of my onetime obsessions!

And the Rolling Stones are related by marriage to Led Zeppilin, and Im related to both bands!

My Dad's people had originated in Upper Saxony (Germany's eastern midlands) where the people were a blend of the Slavic natives with German colonists mostly from Frankish areas such as the Middle Rhineland and Flanders (today part of Belgium). Very possibly being among the first Protestants, my Dad had been told that we had had an ancestor who had corresponded with Martin Luther. In fact, Luther had had a life long friend named Weneslaus Link who had been a fellow Protestant theologian - though it's only guess work that he's the same person. Later, after the end of the Thirty Years War (mid-17th century), my family -with many others - had immigrated west to the Kraichgau region on the east bank of the Rhine (today, northwestern Baden-Wurttemberg), where a south Frankish dialect is spoken. There, they had mixed with a family apparently from the far northwest region of Frisia. By the early 18th century, during the Napoleonic era, many people of the Kraichgau, the neighboring Rhineland Palatinate, and the Weissenbourg region of Alsace - including my Dad's family - had immigrated to the Black Sea region of the Russian Empire in order to escape forcible enlistment into the French army, and the Anti-Protestant oppression by the French. We were supposed to have had an ancestor or two working as recruiters for the Czarist government (and had stolen plans for a weaving machine to sell in Russia - I guess not all my people were of good moral fiber!). While waiting over in Poland to migrate into Russia, the family had adopted Polish brother and sister whose parents had been robbed and murdered. When growing up, the Polish girl had married into my line. The Russians had promised the German immigrants that they would have political autonomy, would be free from military service, and free from taxation. In return, they'd colonize the newly acquired Black Sea region from Turkey and raise plenty of wheat for Russia. But by the 1860's, the Russians had become much less hospitable, and withdrew their promises. Fearing the real threat of the same kind of Progroms that Russian Jews faced, my people, along with many other Russian Germans immigrated to America. There, they helped settle the American West, in South Dakota, then later, Oregon then Washington. My paternal Grandmother's people were also Black Sea Germans whose experiences very much mirrored those of my Dad's people (except for apparently coming from the Franconian region of north Alsace), and so I won't torture anyone with getting into her family's separate history.

My Mom's family had hailed from Prussia and Bavaria. My maternal Grandmother's people had been from West Prussia, and were Lutherans as far back as anyone knew - despite the fact that they had the Jewish family name of Abamovske. Obviously, someone had converted somewhere along the line. They had immigrated to the United States in the 1890's in order to escape military service. Coming to Chicago, my Grandmother grew up, and met my Grandfather. His family had been Catholics from the south Bavarian/north Austrian border region. Otherwise, I know little about them, or their reason for coming to America.
Sorry for having diarrhea of the typing fingers - but history is my Aspie obsession.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer