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Your family tree.



pastafarian

Well-known member
Sep 4, 2011
11,902
Sussex
I love all this ancestry stuff,have only been able to go back to 1723 with confidence and multiple sources,anything further back for me i think needs professional scrutiny

found a great grandad who had 8 kids,the wife died,he remarried her much younger sister and had a further 9 kids......dirty stopout/good lad/ or something

on the crap side i am a member of ancestry.co.uk and a few weeks ago i received my first message from someone on the same family tree(mothers side) who wrote i always knew your mothers family were Fenian scum

not entirely sure how having one part of the extended family branching off to Ireland makes the family Fenian scum but no doubt the jock twit in question has his reasons,i wont be inviting him to any family reunion in the future.

generally i find the whole experience very interesting especially discovering where they used to live and their occupations.
 






Worried Man Blues

Well-known member
Feb 28, 2009
6,629
Swansea
Got back to 1700s Battle Fletching Nutley and Billingshurst, all Ag labs and farmers, spent weeks at Lewes Maltings in the 70s. Now you can find it out in seconds on the computer!
 


blue'n'white

Well-known member
Oct 5, 2005
3,082
2nd runway at Gatwick
I found some relatively (sorry no pun intended !) interesting stuff with parts of the family having emigrated from being oppressed Russian Mennonite Jews to being farmers in Canada and another part having been part of the first colonists in Jamestown Virginia
My ancestors seem, mostly, to have been farm labourers around Holmbury St Mary near Dorking
My wife is still doing ours but, as someone said above this stuff can take ages and be all consuming
 


Hugh'sDad

New member
Nov 29, 2011
577
'Ove
I truly believe the family tree thing is utter bollocks.
It is a selective wander down a genome, cherry-picking the bits you like. Go back 10 generations, and you have over 500 individuals who have contributed to your genetic make up.
Lets be honest, most people start to lose contact with their cousins in adulthood.....just one generation back.
 






Publius Ovidius

Well-known member
Jul 5, 2003
46,047
at home
Er... surely we all go back to the garden of Eden and Adam and Eve?

If the Bible is to be believed?

No we are all the product of the Big Bang at the start of everything. According to professor Brian Cox, as we are made up of matter, which was all created at the same time, then everyone single piece of life and material in the Cosmos has all come from one source.
 


BLOCK F

Well-known member
Feb 26, 2009
6,359
Got back to about 1750 on the Scottish side of the family.
Amongst the occupations were cooper, crofter, fisherman, domestic servant, general merchant and cowhand!
 




Publius Ovidius

Well-known member
Jul 5, 2003
46,047
at home
Whilst it is interesting, you only need to go back 8 or 9 generations before you don't share any genetic material with over half of your relatives. http://gcbias.org/2013/11/11/how-does-your-number-of-genetic-ancestors-grow-back-over-time/

One very interesting episode of QI asked the question how many people were related to Charlemaigne and by the laws of possibility nearly everyone alive today. The argument was that if you go back through history, there must be a convergence point where the majority of people are related to a set of people. Of course that will be affected by different races and how such things as slavery throughout the last 3000 years has forcibly moved huge swathes of indiginous population to other parts of the world. But it would take Deep Thought to map everyone's relationship to eachother in a comprehensible database.
 


Tricky Dicky

New member
Jul 27, 2004
13,558
Sunny Shoreham
Is anyone else interested in their 'tree' ? With the help of a researcher i have been just scratching the surface but 'my' tree goes back to around 1750 ,time consuming and you need a wall to pin it all up on ! However interesting reading and want to check-up on the criminal side,as go back one hundred years plus and you could be talking The Rope or Australia ?

My mums doing it at the mo, she has one line going back to 1650. Another line includes Martin Peters - but we knew that already. We're mostly all local, Portslade. My grandmother had 17 brothers and sisters so at that level it gets huge I imagine.
 


DavidRyder

Well-known member
Jul 23, 2013
2,888
My mum has spent most of her retirement doing ours. Lots of famous names keep cropping up, as I'm sure they do on everyones. Apparently I share great x8-ish grandparents with Wills and Harry - I'm assuming that puts me 16,000,000th in line for the throne?
 






StonehamPark

#Brighton-Nil
Oct 30, 2010
9,780
BC, Canada
How do you go further back than your great grand-parents?

I'd love to get into this but I've not got much family left and no idea how to trace names/records!
 


Dec 15, 2014
1,979
Here
It is well known that some of Hitler's descendants live in the suburban part of New Jersey and that some of their friends know who they are. One newspaper writer wrote about their feelings of being related to Hitler. The most revealing thing about the story is that this family were actually extraordinary people. They were extremely successful at their professions and well educated. Many descendants from imimgrants to America post WWII have fully assimilated into society.
 






Perfidious Albion

Well-known member
Oct 25, 2011
6,041
At the end of my tether
How do you go further back than your great grand-parents?

I'd love to get into this but I've not got much family left and no idea how to trace names/records!

There are lots of sites with help and explanations . One of the biggest & for free is familysearch.org by the LDS Mormon Church (but do not let that put you off

So far mine is back to the late 1700's..mainly agricultural labourers who died in the workhouse....
 




Cian

Well-known member
Jul 16, 2003
14,262
Dublin, Ireland
I'm the first cousin eight (I think) times removed of a former Bishop of Pittsburgh; and much closer to a member of the Saw Doctors.

There's a thankfully not yet proven exact link to Daniel O'Donnell and I'm refusing to look any further down the line of Boyles from Burtonport just in case.
 






glasfryn

cleaning up cat sick
Nov 29, 2005
20,261
somewhere in Eastbourne
How do you go further back than your great grand-parents?

I'd love to get into this but I've not got much family left and no idea how to trace names/records!

try ANCESTRY in costs but like you thought not much family left.
got really into it and now have 12265 people in my tree..............some very distant but nevertheless very interesting
 


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