Genealogy

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Me too, big into genealogy. At the moment, I seem to have mined out the sources of information I was using - censuses, historical newspapers online, grave sites, etc. Recently Ancestry.com added some wills and probate files, which was good but they only had a minority of my ancestors. I find every 2 to 5 years, a whole new vein of data is available. I do have a membership at Ancestry (US only, World is too expensive) and figure it's worth it to me, if nothing else because I use them as cloud storage for my photos and scanned documents. It's my only real hobby expenditure and I don't mind paying it.

You can look up their World collections at the historical library for free, and if you find any records (like a census) you can save that image and add it to your own collection later. The Mormons also have a free site where you can get many US census records and can have an online tree if you like.

I started doing my genealogy work before computers were big, Internet and so on. You had to go to a national archives site if you wanted to do any census work. Very laborious. I much prefer searching from home in my armchair!

One of the political threads has morphed into a genealogy thread, so I thought I'd bump this one up.

Genealogy is a very aspie-friendly subject -- if you haven't explored it, give it a try! You may be descended from actual Chreokee princesses (unlike Elizabeth Warren), or English Puritans (like Barack Obama), or Hebridean crofters (like Donald Trump). More records are now available online than ever before, and DNA testing is becoming cheaper every year. (Testing for lizard ancestry is still comparatively expensive, however.)

My dad got into our geneology back in the Seventies. Ended up publishing a little book about our ancestors back to the American Revolution.

Nice to see a thread that I started being resurrected. My own genealogical studies expanded beyond my wildest expectations. I have enough information to fill several books and am concerned I might never finish the job because of the competing requirements of general living and other interests that I have become equally passionate about.

At the library, one of the areas I do shelving and shelf reading in is the genealogy section. I am very interested in that sort of thing. Right now, one of my interests is researching the meanings of people's names.

As for me, I am full German on my mother's side and third generation American of Italian descent on my father's.

Just ordered an upgrade to my genealogy DNA test. Still trying to find my home planet. The last time they told me I wasn't in their species database.

There's an Ancestry DNA test ad on the TV that drives me up the wall. There is a silly woman saying the mix of genetics her test gave her and she reckons she's 51% Scandinavian, 7% Greek and Italian, 21% British and 21% Jewish. How on earth can a religious belief have specific genetic markers especially one as globally disseminated as Judaism?

I am not into genealogy but one of my many interest is 19th century U.S. photography. And I use many of the same tools as genealogist in my research. In a way I have become somewhat of an expert researcher for genealogist. I can look at old photographs and analyze it and determine the approximate age when it was taken (if it falls between 1840 and 1900)

I had a huge interest in genealogy when I was in middle school. I can trace my maternal line back to the 1600s, but could only trace my paternal line back a few generations. I have a distant cousin who is absolutely obsessed with it (may be on the spectrum), and most of what I know about my maternal line comes from him.

I did puzzles as a child and outgrew 5,000 piece puzzles upside down, inside out. Sooooo, when I discovered genealogy... the infinite-piece puzzle... What you said. So, since I have young children, I cut myself off from genealogy. Otherwise they would know their ggggggggggggggrandparents, but not their mother. I tell myself... later... in ten years, I'll get back to it. (In the meantime, I take 3-4 hours every once in a while.) And then I'll have to have a HUGE alarm clock to ensure I get to bed - or that I eat or see anyone outside the room. I look forward to it...

Enjoy!!

Geneaology is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you'r gonna get.