Genealogy

[Avatar]

American Eric. Australian Eric. Baltic Eric. Iberian Eric. I'm having a tough time finding a downside to this.

That's because you're a fundamentally nice and decent person.

I'm pretty sure the people heaving a sigh of relief at there being only one of me are legion.

--A

[Skyweir]

Hahaha Thats exactly right Av .. Fisty is that

Hope he realises I was having a lend, teasing his sweet self

But not about him shouting .. Id never joke about that

So should that company clone his DNA .. and we get an Aussie Fisty .. Ill look forward to that

[Iolanthe]

Io, I think DNA is more appealing to Americans because we're not in as fortunate a position as you are -- we haven't lived in the same place for generation upon generation and our lineages are much more interbred.

I think it's fabulous, all the work you've done on your family tree.

All true.

I wouldn't even know where to start.

I didn't know where to start when I began! But I learned as I went along - sometimes the hard way. I spend several years drawing up a tree of one of my mother's ancestors - a Maria Lawrence, daughter of Randle Lawrence of Hertfordshire. Then a new contact discovered she'd been married a second time after 1837 when we were able to get a marriage certificate and her father was Joseph and she came from Berkshire!!! Talk about embarrassed

These days there is so much on-line I feel sorry for new beginners as they don't get the chance I had to absorb all the information slowly, even though I had to travel all over the country to see the records that I can now see in my study on my computer. That really was more fun, and much more rewarding.

Where you should always start of course is with yourself, then your immediate family. I was lucky that my parents were still alive when I started, and also some of my great grandfather's family from his second wife were still around so I learned a lot about the family from them.

[Skyweir]

[Fist and Faith]

My father took the DNA test at Ancestry. It's interesting how chunks of DNA pass down generation after generation, while others disappear abruptly. He and I share the same amount with some people. Otoh, he shares a pretty good amount with some people, but I barely match them at all.

If I haven't mentioned it, you can download the "raw data" of your test, and upload it to other sites. This gives you DNA matches from sites other than the one you tested on. Ancestry is used primarily by Americans. MyHeritage has a lot more people from elsewhere, and it tells you how many matches you have in each country. Dad has
3,797 USA
349 Great Britain
194 Ireland
191 Australia
156 Canada
65 New Zealand
45 Netherlands
21 Sweden
17 Germany
12 Norway
And several single digit countries.

There's one in Iceland. His name and the names of everyone on his tree are VERY Icelandic. Very small amount of shared DNA. Pretty much the lowest amount that can be considered non-coincidental. And it could be coincidental. But it could be dad's distant ancestors sibling went to Iceland. Anyway, I think it's pretty neat. Nice guy, too. We exchanged a couple of messages.

Lots of folks Down Under!

Iolanthe, I messaged you on fb. Lots of English DNA and matches. I'm sure we're related somewhere back there. Still not provable on my mother's side, but I've gotten back to William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders (and therefore Charlemagne) on dad's side. Of course, about a billion other people are descended from them, but now I can trace the line.

[Iolanthe]

Hi Fist. Back to Charlemagne eh? Should be able to get back to Clovis then.

I've only got back to 1604 and have run out of sources for the moment. No doubt something will turn up that will help. I still prefer doing it the old fashioned way

I wondered who it was that I had friended on FB but saw that you had other Watchies as friends. Now I know who you are!

[Fist and Faith]

I'm assuming paths back to these huge historical figures are fairly well proven. I mean, I'm not going to try proving that Matilda is descended from Charlemagne, or Henry II from Matilda. That kind of thing.

Never heard of Clovis. I just googled. Very interesting! He doesn't seem to be Charlemagne's ancestor, though.

[Skyweir]

You have ancestry down under Fist? Or some of your family immigrated here?

Or did they arrive in Aus on convict ships from the UK?

[Iolanthe]

I'm assuming paths back to these huge historical figures are fairly well proven. I mean, I'm not going to try proving that Matilda is descended from Charlemagne, or Henry II from Matilda. That kind of thing.

Never heard of Clovis. I just googled. Very interesting! He doesn't seem to be Charlemagne's ancestor, though.

Tell that to the Saxon kings, and even the medieval kings. They managed to trace their ancestry back to Brutus, who was supposed to have founded "Britain", and even Adam and Eve!!

I hope you are checking all the sources used by these printed trees etc. that you are using (if I could have found a tongue in cheek emoticon I would have used it here). Seriously though, don't believe everything you read. I've found several errors in printed volumes. We have more information available to us now than the historians writing in the 19th century, even the 20th century, or at least the sources they didn't use are easier to get at now.

I would recommend a website called British History Online. Some of the stuff there is free, but some you have to pay for. The annual subscription is small compared to Ancestry and Find My Past. Both the latter sites now have lots of parish register images from different English counties, although their indexing of those registers leaves a lot to be desired. You need to be very imaginative about how the surnames you are looking for could be spelled, or mistranscribed. Even better, if a family history society has done a transcription, particularly on Find My Past, use that instead of the site's index. Also be very careful when using Family Search. Lots of the info on there is patron submitted, and there are many guesses and assumptions amongst the stuff transcribed from original records.

[Iolanthe]

This is also a very useful website www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk/index.html

[Iolanthe]

You're right about Clovis. He was Merovingian, not Carolingian. Got confused as he is mentioned a lot in a book I have about Charlemagne and it's a long time since I read it.

[Fist and Faith]

You have ancestry down under Fist? Or some of your family immigrated here?

Or did they arrive in Aus on convict ships from the UK?

I have living DNA matches there. I don't know any of them, and I don't know how any of them got there.

[Fist and Faith]

Iolanthe, I believe some things are known, and do not been to be researched by every new person looking into their genealogy. It is fairly well established that Henry I was the son of William and Matilda. And Henry had a daughter named Adelaide, who went by Matilda, who married Geoffrey Plantagenet. They had a son, Henry II.

These are the kinds of things I do not feel the need to prove by finding original sources. Lines of royal descent have been scrutinized by many for a very long time, and I do not believe I will stumble across any original documents that dispute any of it.

[Iolanthe]

I was really thinking about the more recent research rather than the genealogy of kings and queens! By more recent I mean 15th to 20th centuries.

[Fist and Faith]

Yes, that stuff definitely gets scrutinized. I've found more wrong information on people's trees than I can list. Of course, it's undocumented. If they had documentation, they would know it's wrong.

[Avatar]

By more recent I mean 15th to 20th centuries.

Quite. Just the other day really...

(Brits. )

--A

[Skyweir]

quite

[Fist and Faith]

I'm reading a book about 1066 right now. Columbus didn't even sail here for another for hundred years, yet people in England were traveling on roads that the Romans built six hundred years earlier.

[Avatar]

Thing is, they couldn't build them themselves. After the Romans left, (by about 500AD), there was a bit of a decline because the locals didn't have the skills the Romans had imported. Buildings went from stone and brick and tile back to wood and thatch etc. They were living in the decaying ruin of a "greater" time.

Probably didn't start to reverse that until then (the Norman conquest) at the earliest.

--A

[Fist and Faith]

Yeah. But I'm just talking about the difference in what us Americans call old and what the English (and I guess most of the rest of the world) calls old. I'm very excited to have traced some ancestral lines back to their arrival here in the 1600s. Nearly 400 years!

A pittance. My ancestors go back as far as everybody else's, but not in my country.