Credentialism: KK has been doing genealogy for about 35 years. She helped two people, including her own brother, find long-lost siblings.
The Right Stuff
Three generations that culminated in the majesty that is KK
In order to do serious genealogy, you need to enjoy it. That is, you need to have an interest in history, mystery, research, and logic. I have spent literal hours at a time looking through page after page after page of census records, military records, probate records, church records, you name it. And I liked every minute of it. You also need to get used to disappointment. Most of your time will be spent chasing leads that go nowhere. It’s the absolute thrill of that one breakthrough that keeps the genealogist going. My last breakthrough was only a few months ago. The high from that will probably have to last me another few years, at least.
Starting Line
If you haven’t done genealogy on your family yet, the best place to start is interviews. Ask your living family everything they know about their parents, grandparents, etc. Names, dates, and places are important, even approximate information can be useful. Write it all down. Organize it. I believe Ancestry allows you to set up a family tree for free (however, you won’t have access to most of their records).
Fact or fiction?
Do not discount family lore. My Pa told a story about our ancestor that “saved the Duke of Wellington’s life” (fact check: partially true) and another tale about how his maternal grandfather “killed a man in a bar fight” (fact check: mostly false). The point is, both of these stories gave me somewhere to look, and the real stories eventually revealed themselves.
If you decide you want to get down & dirty, you’ll definitely want a paid Ancestry account. They offer different levels, which I found useful as my research expanded. Other good (paid) sites are Newspapers.com and Fold3 (military). Ancestry also offers memberships that bundle Newspapers.com and Fold3 into your Ancestry account.
Seek and Ye Shall Find
We all know that people’s vital information (names, dates, places) can be misspelled or otherwise accounted for incorrectly. This is why you’ll need some search chops in order to find what you’re looking for. These tips specifically apply to Ancestry, but are also fairly widely-used in other applications.
Soundex results for my last name. YIKES!
Soundex: this is a system that attempts to account for name misspellings. It includes the first letter of a name, followed by a 3-digit numerical code. The numbers are assigned to letter groups that sound the same when pronounced out loud. I occasionally use Soundex, but I’ve found that it’s both too limiting and too broad.
It is limiting because it assumes the first letter of the person’s name is correct. But if you read a lot of old-timey handwriting, you’ll notice that a lot of letters can be mis-transcribed. For example, a capital “S” and a capital “L” are often mistaken for each other in transcriptions.
Soundex can also be too broad, in that it will include names that are nowhere close to the name you’re searching for. I pretty much only use Soundex when I’m at the very beginning of my research on a particular family name.
Wildcards: these are symbols you include in your searches to account for unknown letters. A “?” in a search will replace a single letter, whereas a “*” will replace a string of letters (zero or more). I use these in almost all of my searches, depending on what I am hoping to find.
Search for “C?rn?g*y”
One of the names in my family tree is Carnagey. When I look at that name, I see the potential for mis-transcriptions on several of the letters (namely the vowels). So if I were looking for a Carnagey in my research, I may search for C?rn?g*y. Can you figure out why I would use ? for the “a” and a * for the “e”?
The “n” could also be a problem (often mistaken for “m” in transcriptions), but in order to avoid having too many search results, I would probably do a separate search (something like Car*g*y). You need to balance the use of wildcards with the anticipated search results. Too many wildcards can result in way too many, or way too few results.
Ancestry, I believe, requires searches to contain at least 3 letters if you’re using wildcards, so you won’t be able to search for something like S???h for “Smith”. An example from my tree is the name “Linz”. It’s a very short name with a multitude of possible misspellings. To research this name, I’ve searched “?inz” and “L?nz” and “L?n*z” and “Lin*z” and “Lin?” and probably several more. See if you can find my reasoning for each of those searches, and why I used the wildcards I did, and what kind of results I might get from them. You won’t be surprised to know this family line is a major brick wall for me.
Spacetime: dates and places can be used to narrow your results. These are especially useful when researching more common names. If you search for the name “John Smith” without including any other information, you can imagine how many results you’ll get. Better would be to include any additional information you have on the particular John Smith you’re looking for. You’ll get far fewer results by including information that he lived in Upper Buttcrack, ME circa 1850. You’ll still probably have quite a few results to wade through, but it will be narrowed considerably.
Keep in mind that many records do not include place and/or date information. A marriage record I found for one of my ancestors does not include any information on the ages of the husband or wife, so if I search for that person’s name and include a birth date in my search, that marriage record will not be shown in my results.
Know Your Records
A basic knowledge of what kinds of information you’ll find in different types of records is important.
Census: U.S. census records are a rich source of information, but that information varies depending on the census year. You’ll need to know that most of the 1890 U.S. census was lost in a boating accident fire. You’ll also need to know that before the 1850 census, only the Head of Household’s name was listed, and only a range for the household members’ ages was listed. Some U.S. censuses contain marriage, immigration, asset, and profession information. If you’re looking for detailed household information prior to 1850 in the U.S., a better bet are land and/or probate records.
1850 U.S. Census
1840 U.S. Census
Immigration: inbound immigration records for the U.S. usually contain names, ages, and origins of every passenger. These records are generally useful for research in the mid-19th century or later, as earlier immigration was more loosey-goosey. For example, my brother’s biological family seems to have lived fluidly between North Dakota & Canada for many years.
Vital: marriage records are an invaluable tool for finding maiden names, connecting family lines, and general place information (i.e. where the marriage took place). Birth records are probably the cream of the crop for information mining on a person. Unfortunately, prior to the late 19th or early 20th centuries, birth records are spotty, at best. Ma Kettle in Badger Ass Hollow, TN in 1875 was probably not going to report a birth to the “proper authorities”.
Military: you can imagine most records have great information on names, birth dates, next of kin, etc. Keep in mind that the early American military was far less organized, and your best bet to find out about a person’s military service will be through pension applications rather than something like muster rolls.
Trust, But Verify
During the course of your research, you’ll probably find that other people have also done trees on one or more branches of your family line. These can be a great time-saver if they include information for earlier generations than you have on your tree. However, before incorporating anyone else’s research into your own, make sure the information makes sense. Was John Smith really born a year before his own mother? Probably not. Researches on my paternal grandfather’s line often state we’re related to both the Harrison U.S. Presidents. Though our families lived around the same area at the same time, I have found no primary source material for this assertion, so I don’t include it in my research. On the other hand, it was also claimed that my paternal grandfather’s family was related to Dale Carnegie. This is 100% true and I can even tell you the name of our common ancestor (though I still don’t have a clue how to win friends & influence people).
Even in doing your own independent research, you need to keep your logic hat on. Does the information make sense in context? You found a military record for John Smith indicating he was in the 8th Illinois Cavalry in 1863, but your previous research showed him living, and owning a farm and some human beings, in southern Mississippi. Is it possible this could be the same person? Sure. Is it likely? No way – further research is required.
There you have the basics for getting started down the long, addictive path of genealogy. The TL; DR is: be flexible on spellings, know your search tools & records, and verify with primary sources. Think like a scientist: always try to find a reason why a person doesn’t fit into your family line before adding them to your tree.
One final note: I am willing to do family research for other people for free. I only require two things: a) a starting point (at least one name, approximate dates & places), and b) an interesting story (like the time a friend asked me to look for some great-grandfather of hers who supposedly died, but whom my friend and her mom suspected might have absconded and started a new life elsewhere). If you want some personalized assistance, feel free to contact me via the messaging system in the Forums.
My father has a very extensive record of my family tree, going back to the guy who got off the boat from ulster on one branch, and even further back to people in 1500s Devonshire on another.
So yeah, Southern English, Northern Irish.
In terms of thing my ancestors did, the most we’ve got is “had a mill get washed out by a river flood” and “fight in the civil war (some on each side)”. No famous people, no claims to glory.
We could have more data… if someone went to Ulster and checked the non-digitized records there (assuming they are still around).
I’ll just stick with “Seventh Generation American” for now. We’ve been here long enough, do I could as “Native”?
*count as
Ironically, I don’t think we have any indian blood in the family. I might be whiter than Elizabeth Warren… if you count Irish as white instead of transparent.
I might be whiter than Elizabeth Warren – you should have let the joke to someone else.
I’m so white, I don’t even have any southern or eastern European DNA in my blood.
RACIST
Ayup…I haz the White Privileges.
I only have DNA info from my father’s side (he got tested, I don’t like the terms of use, so I have not)
It appears to boil down to “Celtic (Ireland), Celtic (‘Great Britain’), Celtic (‘Western Europe’), Viking, a Finn, and some random Ashkenazi centuries ago”
My whiteness yet remains undefeated!
the fact that you don’t really drink is a waste of that ancestry. What would your celtic and fin ancestors think?
“random Ashkenazi”
Nazi confirmed!
Not last Friday night on the zoom, you didn’t.
No famous people. You’re a descendant of Charlemagne.
Line through my father also goes all the way back to 1500’s Devon… cousin? First came to America in the mid-1600’s. Tracked to an originating village listed in the Domesday Book, which listed half of the households as slaves.
Mom’s maiden name goes back to late 1600’s, with the first being a man who immigrated to America from England, and is lost from there. Several in the early direct line are important historical figures in Wikipedia.
I don’t have the records, or even the surname that branch was under (part of my dad’s maternal line if I recall.) So I’m not sure where in the shire they were.
Funny, the way you describe yourself, you don’t sound as if you’re descended from hobbits.
Inject some viking blood and you get someone average sized.
I am to my shame the descendant of kulaks and wreckers not good honest oppressed worker roots.
But I do go back to a long line of Romanians though a goddamn Bulgarian sneaked in at some point.
Genealogy is not a thing in Romania.
JOHN SMITH OF UPPER BUTTCRACK, ME?!
HIM NOT RELATIVE! STEVE SMITH KNOW ALL SMITH FAMILY HISTORY.
STEVE SMITH VERY FAMILIAR WITH UPPER BUTTCRACK
SP wants me to change our last name to the original of my mother’s family (which translates to “bass fiddle”).
One major mystery is what my father’s family’s original name was- what we use now is what the Ukranian/Russian locals called them when they arrived in the mid-19th century (which translates to “those guys”). SP, a genealogy wiz, has been unable to locate that as well. The village and any records or inhabitants with memories were fully destroyed by the Russians and Germans during the 20th century. So I can go back to my great grandfather, but no further.
That’s still pretty good. Not many people can trace their lineage all the way back to Methuselah.
Awwww sheeeeeit
This from the guy who fucked up the WAWR editing and tried blaming SugarFree.
IT WAS SUGARFREE!!!!!
You should be ashamed. Not just for the fuckup, but for the serial lying about it and getting that poor guy in trouble.
That poor guy, as you call him, has been giving away state secrets by eavesdropping on Oval Office conversations for years. The feds are about to bust his door down and haul him off for the bamboo shoot treatment. Deleting his stuff (had I done so, which I deny) would be doing him a favor.
“Had I done so.” It’s a confession, straight up.
SugarFree is all that’s fine and upstanding in this world. You only eat cigarettes and Mountain Dew.
Sugarfree is fine. But I will not have his name sullied with the adjective “upstanding!” And it has not escaped my notice that your ad hominem attack on my dietary needs are yet another deflection from the original topic, which was your extremely advanced age.
“If I Did It…”
by Mad Scientist
There’s no “if,” Your Honor.
Show your proof, old man!
My neighbor asked me to do some genealogy for her, and beside the fact that her mom was adopted, I told her I wouldn’t be able to go past 1870 without some kind of documentary miracle.
The girlfriend is very interested in genealogy, but has run into dead ends through the fact that both of her parents were adopted. She doesn’t understand why I’m not that interested in my mutt heritage.
Unless she has access to adoption records, her best bet is to do the Ancestry DNA test (23 & Me is a much smaller sample and is geared to medical info). After the DNA, she would need to learn about genetic genealogy. It requires the type of logical reasoning you would find in, say, high school geometry (lots of if/then type of stuff). If she gets any close matches in her results (first cousin would be the closest she could get), then things would be much easier. I calculated my brother’s ancestors from 2nd cousin matches. Even adding one generation – from 1st to 2nd cousin – makes things exponentially more complicated.
I can help her if she ever does the DNA test.
She’s done the DNA test, I’m not sure which one she went with. I believe she’s found at least some leads on the adoption records; however, she ran into some issues with the state (New York) privacy laws in trying to follow that back further.
As to the math, I will remain silent to avoid incriminating myself.
NY is EXTREMELY difficult for adoption records. They are very strictly guarded.
our last name – wait she took your last name? how regressive
She didn’t, but she said that if I changed mine, she’d do it too.
We’re both currently near the end of the alphabet, but I’m further than she is, so she kept hers. The proposed new name starts with “B.”
She didn’t – how sjw of her
She’s famous for that. I get hectored daily about my lack of wokeness.
Nope. But if he changed it to the ancestral name, I would.
Wife found out that i have people in revolutionary war, and the mayflower.
Extremist DNA
Also 1% Nigerian. Need to take advantage of that.
that is barely one drop
So?
One thing that has not turned up in my family tree is anything south of the Mediterranian, or east of the Urals.
Clint Black is 1% Sub-Saharan, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. welcomed him into the “tribe” (it’s a joke, calm down).
So, yeah…use it! If HLG says it’s OK, then you’re good to go!
I was 1% sub-saharan until the most recent update, Now I am not.
Well, sheeeit
They must have got that one drop the last time you gave blood.
Speaking of one drop, I think some of my people are Melungeons: “[…] populations thought to be of mixed European, African and Native American ancestry.”
Reparations FTW!
I am not paying either you or Robodruid one cent.
Thanks for the article, KK. I’m not interested, but my husband is, so I’ll pass along this article to him. My mother forces herself to like it because she feels it is her duty to do it. She likes the finds, but she’s not by any stretch driven by it. My aunt is really the family genealogist. She has a degree in library science and, like you, loves every second of chasing all this stuff down.
Thx KK. Interesting read.
I’ve ended up the famliy historian. Several ancesters put a lot of effort into their trees so I can go back quite aways in some cases – 1400’s for the Swedes. Best thing is I ended up with all the old family photos.
I know the least about the family name. Only back to the boats they came over on in the 1880’s. Guess the Irish didn’t keep records.
I use My Heritage – a lot like Ancestry. Allows you to crowd source your geneology, but yes, you do have to be careful of errors. Like anything (except truth it seems) errors propigate easily on the Innertubze and after a bit “everybody says so so it must be true”. I thought I found a link to a Capt in the Revolutionary Army. Turns out his wife had the same name as a Great^n grandmother and people glommed onto that. Trouble is there’s a couple generations missing beween Gramma and the revolution lady. The error is now so pervasive I can’t get past it in the research.
Fun stuff.
This is what happened with that Harrison connection in my family. It’s a huge family with lots of researchers, and a handful of us have tried to quash it unless & until there’s concrete evidence, but yet, it persists. Like HRC.
All 4 of my grandparents came from Slovakia around the 1920’s. A cousin on my mom’s side tracked down the immigration records and even a photo of the ship that my grandmother came in. I’m not sure if she got too far prior to that. On my dad’s side, we have a unique last name. There are probably 20 of us with that last name in the US, but if you look up the phone book in a certain village in Slovakia, there are tons of them.
I can trace some lineage back to Slovakia as well, near Kosice.
goddamn slavs go back to slavia or something
https://feefhs.org/index.php/resource/slovakia
Wow, that’s awesome. Thanks!
I have a one Grand parent from that neck of the woods. I also have some Moldovan relative, but who knows what beet farm great grandma came from.
My mom has been doing genealogy since well before the internet. We sometimes took multi day car trips to visit old graveyards and county historical societies. She focused on my dad’s family because she couldn’t get info from behind the iron curtain. She even gave talks at the X family Association conferences. So, another potential resource is a family genealogical association.
These days my mom is working on tracking her family history.
Great article KK. Thanks for this.
Sorry, OT, KK, but… everyone keeps mentioning the “forums.” How would an interested Glib find such a thing?
Also, on topic: I had the paid ancestry account for a while and I enjoyed it until I kinda got bored with the whole thing. Early on, however, it definitely fascinated me. I learned enough to learn I wasn’t as interested in my early ancestors as I originally thought I was.
Top of the page. Right under the little Glibertarian logo dude.
Well, before Ramses 1, the records get kinda sparse on the ground.
https://www.glibertarians.us/community
You have to log in separately to the forum, and if you’re never done that before, you’ll have to go to just https://glibertarians.us (no /community) and click Log In
(Same credentials as the main site, despite the separate log in)
There was some glitch a while back that you had to use the link I gave and then NOT put the slash at the end of it. I guess that got ironed out.
Ah, okay. Maybe I was going to the link with the trailing slash, then.
Forum credentials are the same as here, unless you’ve recently changed your password here. Let me know if you need any assistance.
1/4 of my grandparents don’t have a clue past the mountain men that came down out of the rockies in the late 1800’s. 1/4 owned a very large plantation in Jamaica. The other 1/2 were midwest dairy farmers.
The dairy farmers were msotly german and english. The Jamaicans were mostly german, west african. From what we can tell the Mountain men were a mix but the name is scottish.
The funny thing is, my uncle, on the english/german dairy farmer side had the blood test done and it came back with a bunch of portugese. So… someone was having fun on the side.
When I did the DNA test and connected it to my Ancestry account, I struggle to find any connections on my Pa’s side prior to my grandfather’s generation. Then I stumbled upon someone researching a name that went all the way back to the immigrant generation (1820’s) of my Pa’s family. So, it appears there was no hanky-panky going back at least that far. How boooooring.
In fact, my DNA results closely align with the family tree that I had built over many years prior to taking the test. I may do an article about genetic genealogy as soon as I can figure out how to explain the math & logic of it in a clear way.
Great article. It’s always fun to dive into the past. For all of the bitching we do today about our current events, these people saw some shit and still managed to pass on their genes. Kudos to everyone one of them.
*struggled
One of the really cool things that came from the Mountain man side were 2 old Winchesters with the LL serial numbers for legendary lawman. They were given to Legendary Lawmen from Winchester as gifts. No one has a clue how they got into the family. 1 got pawned. The other got blued and is sitting in a safe somewhere.
Another family lore story was my Pa’s grandfather was working on the railroad out in Oklahoma (all of my Pa’s paternal ancestors worked on the RR after coming to the U.S. until my grandfather, who escaped the Ozarks & moved to Queens), and an Indian came riding by, hell bent for leather, and tossed a rifle under my great-grandfather’s rig (some kind of crane). My great grandfather kept the rifle, supposedly, though I have no idea what happened to it. I should ask my cousin that still lives in the Ozarks if she knows about it.
owned a very large plantation in Jamaica
So they knew Kamala’s ancestors.
This is a great introduction to the joy of genealogy! Thanks, Kristen!
(I scheduled this post specifically for today since it’s the first day of an online genealogy conference – RootsTechConnect.)
Neat!!!!
Someone on here mentioned familysearch.org which I have used and found out quite a bit. I skimmed it, but will come back and read it again this afternoon. Thanks KK!
Familysearch.org is a first step. Once you find the resource you’re looking for, you’ll need to go down to your local Mormons and order the microfiche from SLC. However, they have EVERYTHING. Every. Thing. I’m actually quite intimidated by the scope of their library. It’s a lot of info to wade through.
My uncle Norman was big into genealogy. A branch of my Mom’s family (Norman was Mom’s brother), the Peytons, had a volume of books documenting their history dating back to about the Revolution, The Peytons of Virginia. Norman built on that and traced the Peytons back to a branch of minor nobility in Normandy in the 10th century, the DeVilliers.
On Dad’s side I have two ancestors that signed the Declaration of Independence; Thomas McKean and Abraham Clark.
It’s interesting stuff.
I find it suspect that Norman proved himself to be a Norman.
I find it very prescient on the part of my grandparents that they anticipated him doing so, and named him Norman in advance.
So you are saying you come from a long line of traitors.
The glob searching is powerful, but do they give an option to do full-on regular expressions? Probably not, but it would clear up a lot of the shortcomings you mention.
Only one famous person I am directly descended from: Charles Carroll
That is on my mother’s side. It is no reflection on me, I am still my own man. What I do counts, not what someone else did.
Fluke on my father’s side. My great, great, great grand uncle owned a fair amount of land. He got sued so he signed all of the land over to his sister (my great great great grandmother). One day he and the man that had sued him and was his main rival in the moonshine business met on the road. They decided to settle things then and there. As my ggg uncle was dismounting his horse his boot caught in the stirrup and he fell flat on his face. The barrel of his shotgun jammed in the mud, thus the other man nailed him. His sister kept the land because there was no one to sign it back over to. That changed my family’s history.
My grandfather inherited that land and added to it substantially as did my father and myself. That is how we got into the timber business – one guy’s boot got caught in a stirrup.
I hope you aint got no french in your blood
No frogs that I am aware of. All English, Irish, German and one Cherokee.
The Cherokee: https://postimg.cc/Xrd8m0fz
The “bar fight” story I mentioned is actually an excellent 2A example in its true telling (which I found in Newspapers.com). Though at the time (late 1910’s) the 2A wasn’t under attack like it is now. But anyway, I like that my family benefitted directly from the Bill of Rights.
Of Carrollton?
That’s the one. A signer of the declaration of independence. My mother is a Carroll, direct descendant. somehow we escaped inheriting the family wealth. I think it had something to do with alcohol down the line a bit. William? Absalom? I don’t remember which one. Something about 2 quarts of brandy every day.
Who knows? Stories like that get mixed up and evolve with every generation.
KK – The 32-20 my ggg grandfather was carrying the day he was shot is in my gun safe as we speak. A shame he couldn’t have grabbed it in time.
You and Mrs. Animal are likely 3rd or 4th cousins, then. Her mother’s maiden name was Carroll, and she is also descended from Charles Carroll.
4th cousins are genetically strangers. (no more similar than any two random people)
Accurate, but not my point.
So you are saying 4th cousins are fair game.
I know my 4th cousins once removed, simply because we share a very unusual last name (found them in the early days of the interwebz). I don’t know any other cousins that distant.
I don’t have any first cousins. The closest I have are two sisters, who are my dad’s first cousins via my dad’s maternal grandparents.
My mother only had two siblings. My father had six.
I have cousins from every one of those aunts/uncles. I’ve also met some of the 2nd cousins of which they are many. To say I have scores of cousins would not be hyperbole. And I didn’t even get to third cousins for it.
A small world, isn’t it?
It is indeed.
Fluke on my father’s side.
So that’s two famous names… ?
I’m roughly half German, half British Isles on both sides of my family, but I’ve never dug any deeper than that. My dad did a fair amount of genealogy, especially for his mother’s side of the family, which was the Yankee branch of a prominent British tea family. I don’t think they can claim Captain Picard’s favorite tea as solely their own, but they have a strong association with it.
I think my oldest sister inherited Dad’s genealogy records, but since none of the three of us had any kids, I don’t know if it would be of interest to anyone else. Any suggestions (if my sister even still has the stuff?)
Maybe try to find out if you have any relatives that are into genealogy that could take it and use it? When my great aunt died (maternal grandfather’s sister), she had done about 70 years’ worth of work on her family. She had gotten records directly from Germany. Her son (my first cousin once removed, whom I never met), tossed it all when she died.
Depending on what info you have, you could also bequeath it to a local history organization.
Thanks! I’ll have to ask my sisters if either of them is in touch with any of our cousins on our dad’s side. None of them lived anywhere close by, so we were never close to any of them. The oldest one was only a few years younger than my mom, and they were close friends by correspondence for many years, but she’s probably long gone.
Cool article. My maternal grandmother did a pretty comprehensive genealogy of her side of the family many years ago. On my Dad’s side the information is much sparser–most of the people I knew from that side are deceased now.
I had a girlfriend in high school and the early college days whose dad was strongly interested in genealogy. His favorite to talk about was a great-great grandfather whose daughter married a no-account abuser, whose head mysteriously exploded all over the front porch when he stepped out for air one morning.
One of my favorite old family photos.
the text is from the inscripton on the back.
Unfortunately, I have no idea who these people are. My folks found a box of old pictures when cleaning out my grandparents’ place and it was too late to ask about them. Cool pic though.
Anybody here with ancestors from Lancaster County, NE able to help?
https://photos.app.goo.gl/CzDhdigw2aQMFxop7
How far back have you been able to get in your research?
I’m sure I’m built for doing this kind of research, but I’m not yet convinced this particular rabbit hole is one I want to go down. I spent so much time digging through Anglo Saxon historical records in grad school that I may well suffer flashbacks.
Depends on the branch. Generally, mid-1700’s on the furthest ones. But like I wrote, I only add someone to my tree if I have primary source material. That obviously gets way more difficult the further back you go. I have very few individual names on my tree compared to others who have been doing genealogy as long as I have.
I recently got my 23andMe and need a ruling from OMWC: what exactly does 4.5% Ashkenazim get me these days? (And yes, through my mom, who has something up near 30%, IIRC).
Besides unearned guilt, I mean.
I recently got my 23andMe – how unlibertarian of you
I have a mix of late 19 and early 20th century immigrants in my tree. I got as far as Great Grand parents and got no further.
I also made a family tree combined with family history and documented the major tragedies, traits, and drives of my family members. I did this before my grandmother had a stroke and my GF died, so I learned a lot of family secrets and history I never knew about. It was part of a touchy feely training I took over 10 years ago.
Had to stare at that for a while. Kept thinking it said your girlfriend died.
Fascinating. Especially how they have a program to help with things being mis-spelled.
In a cottage behind my old house i found a bunch of notebooks and pictures belonging to someone who played on the first baseball team ever to play.
He had a book of all his relatives and their genealogy going all the way back to the 1600’s. Sold it in an auction, i wish i would have made copies, i remember it being very detailed with lots of footnotes.
I did a fair bit of digging a few years back, but with 3/4 grandparents, I could only get back a few generations to the immigrant ancestor, which was fairly recent in those lines – 1913, 1911, 1888, 1874, and so on. None of them were here earlier than the Civil War.
My maternal grandmother, on the other hand, had family roots that went almost back to the founding of Jamestown. Found a lot of online records for several branches of her family, and some of it was pretty interesting. Bunch of Civil War vets (all Confederates, them being in Georgia and all), one War of 1812 vet, a some Revolutionary War. On the other hand, a few of the ones from the Revolution were in a Loyalist militia in South Carolina, talk about a disappointment. Another one deserted at Valley Forge, but had the good sense to turn himself in after hostilities had ended but before the treaty was signed. By doing so, he salvaged his pension, which was given as a land grant in Georgia, which is how that family went from NC to GA.
No one rich or famous, but a few other interesting ones – one had been branded with an H on his hand as a horse thief, one was a notorious wild carouser who was in trouble with the law several times for drunken brawling, one Indian ancestor (which Grandma had said was always family lore but had no idea if it were true), one of the lower-ranking leaders of Bacon’s Rebellion, and one who was on the Sea Venture when it shipwrecked on Bermuda in 1609 as part of the second wave of settlers to Jamestown, an event which is alleged to have inspired Shakespeare to write The Tempest.
I did a little research for my wife as well, and hers was much like mine. Mostly not much available, but deep roots for one family which lead to the Salem witch trials. Her great-great-howevermanygreat-aunt was Sarah Wildes, who was among the first group hanged as witches.
Then your ancestors knew mine. The family patriarch wrote, signed, and circulated a petition in support of John Proctor.
all Confederates, them being in Georgia and all
They got theirselves in a heap of trouble.
Supposedly I am Ukrainian. Don’t tell the Poles.
Great article! Some good advice I can use. I received all the info from my great aunt after she passed a few years ago. Some interesting stuff but no really crazy stories.
One of my ancestors co-founded Lyme, CT.
My ggg grandpa on my moms side fathered my gg grandma at age 79 with his second wife 50+ years his junior!
Now that’s how you shitlord.
Something didn’t feel right after I posted. I misremembered. Here’s the dude. He was my gg grandpa.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/95205720/august-goldenstedt
Nobody clicked through to notice my gg grandpa was born in 1799?
That’s pretty cool.
My wife tells me that she can’t find out anything on her dad’s side further back than her grandfather, who lived in Koenigsburg, where her dad was born. Grandpa was killed during WWII when her dad was just 18 or so. Her dad knows that his father was adopted, but has no idea what name he was born under. Any records in Koenigsburg are long gone since they were either lost during the war, or soon after when then Russians took over and expelled all the Germans.
But I know where she came from. Heaven. That’s where all the angels come from.
You must have forgotten a birthday
KK even though you don’t read fiction, you might like Steve Robinson’s Jefferson Range series. It’s about a genealogist who solves crimes
Jefferson Tayte
Interesting – I’ll check it out
My grandfather did a pretty exhaustive, and at least nominally authoritative, genealogy of the family in America. He hired a British researcher to provide an overview of the family in Great Britain. Nominally, we arrived with William the Conquerer, etc. I’m interested in learning more about the family roots in Great Britain, but the surname amounts to “villager of …” which makes most of the stuff I’m interested in suspect at best. I do have the coat of arms and we should be good back to its granting (circa Richard III).
Any advice? Or best just to appreciate what I’ve already got?
What years are you thinking of as far as GB? Like, pre-1600s? The English kept excellent records, but the vast majority are not indexed. Indexing is how you avoid spending ours on fruitless searches. You could try the UK National Archives as a starting point. They are eons better than the US Archives as an online source. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
Ancestry has lots of UK/GB records, but not sure how far back they go. They’re across all types – military, vital, etc.
Other than that, you’re stuck with sifting through actual church records.
Yeah, I’m mostly interested in the pre-1600s stuff. Based on a few rumors, comments, and a bit of research by a great-aunt, the family hit its glory days between 1050 and 1750, with the highlights of the British family from the conquest to the emigration here fairly well known.
I may just leave well enough alone, I’m too old, and way too lazy, to start the kind of research project the English roots would be. I keep hoping one of the branches that stayed in Great Britain might pick up the task 🙂
I uphold the grant of your family coat of arms, Esquire Knott.
Just for fun, the ggg uncle that stupidly got himself killed in a gunfight is bottom left
https://postimg.cc/F1s39SPS
My family tree from my father’s side (Welsh, and most likely Black Celt) is pretty well understood back into the 1700s, but my mother’s family tree is, uh, more convoluted.
Her father’s “family” name is actually an invented French surname, because he was an orphan in the late 1880s in France. At that time, orphans from all over France were trans-shipped to Paris to be housed in state orphanages, where their place of birth was recorded as “Paris, France,” and they were all given invented surnames. Based on DNA and certain physical cues, we believe him to have originated somewhere in the Pyrenees (French or Spanish side, no-one really knows), and the trail prior to that time goes spectacularly cold.
Now, my maternal grandmother has a well-known regional French name from Normandy, and goes back to the 1500s or thereabouts (although there was some muttering decades ago that she had a genealogical search done which claimed that her family was a direct descendant line from William the Conqueror; we have never found the supposed research, and I no longer credit this info with being anywhere near true). In Normandy and Brittany in particular, going back before the mid-1570s or so is rife with problems (moreso with Brittany), because the church was the keeper of most birth, marriage and death notices, and if your priest was illiterate or nearly so, or worse, spoke some bastardized version of the local patois mixed with late-medieval French, it’s unlikely you’re going to find much that’s useful. And both of these places were mostly rural and remote once you got away from the coast, so Upper Rubber Boot it was.
It would be interesting to be able to go back further in France, but the real mystery is my maternal grandfather.
We have a Norwegian heritage and a Swedish heritage yet do not follow the conventional -dotter and -son naming conventions. One is a town in Norway which was cool to find and see where we began to use it, the other we believe a province or area in Sweden. For the Swedish side, best we can come up with was while emigrating to the United States, they thought they were asking where are you from, not what is your name.
My grgrandfather was from Brittany. My crazy mother tracked down her distant relations there and has kept in touch after visiting a while back.
There were a lot of minor lords, counts, etc. in Brittany in the 1500s/1600s; last time we went to Brittany (four years ago), we did some research into family origins for some neighbours of ours in the Lower Rainland™. Managed to wend our way back into the early 1580s (and, sure enough, there was a minor Seigniorage involved), prior to which the records just . . . evaporate. Unless you were one of the “big guys,” the late 1500s seems to be the final destination for a lot of these searches through French genealogy. I’m assuming it has something to do with a lack of literacy amongst available clergy of the day, or just a lack of clergy, period.
Speaking of neighbors, last time we went to Vancouver, we stayed at a Holiday Inn in Cloverdale. Turns out my grgrandfather’s farm was about 2 miles(*) down the same road.
*his survey deed or whatever it’s called in Hatland was in Imperial units so using the appropriate measure
The wife and I watched the Netflix movie “We Care A Lot” about a firm who uses the law to steal and liquidate old people’s assets by claiming they are incompetent, getting them put into a home, and then becoming their guardians. I have never wanted a Old Boy revenge type of rampage to happen in a movie before.
That movie had me routing for Tyrion the mobster.
Until the ending, anyway.
also, rooting*. ///whatisproofreading?
I’ve read a little about this, I think the judges were also in on it.
Awesome information KK. I think I have noted, I am a son of the Mayflower and we have connections to John Adams and his family line. If I didn’t know my family line back to the Mayflower, I would have never known a friend of mine, that we met about 8 or so years ago are actually cousins, distant, but cousins (we share the same Mayflower ancestor).
I have to do a lot of trusting and a whole lot of verification on who we married into in the 1700s. If that line is correct from what I have found and what others have input, we come from a long line of kings of old in England and Norway.
Again KK, great stuff.
Great article KK. Couple of added thoughts? ideas?
Names: in addition to what you mention, names often evolve in spelling over time. Some of this just seems to happen passively. But there is also a pretty long history in the US of non-English immigrant names being Anglicized (by the family themselves). So, for example, in some Dutch settlements in NJ & NY, Korttrecht eventually ends up as Courtwright and, later, Cartwright (party of six).
Passenger lists: absolutely correct about better lists post-1850. But there are isolated chunks of info earlier than that. In the 1630s, Charles I became alarmed at the number of people leaving England and ordered records kept which have made their way online. Here’s an example: https://firstsettlers.genealogyvillage.com/ships.html There’s also a bibliography: Lancour & Wolfe, “A Bibliography of Ship Passenger Lists, 1538-1825.” I couldn’t find it online but it seems to be in a ton of public libraries around the country. It’s old (1963) so there may be a more up to date bibliography.
Nice addendum, RN! Thanks!
Yeah, there are two different famous people with surnames a variation of the same name I’ve got (none of us spell it the same way). It’s a long enough and uncommon enough name that I’d guess we all have a common set of ancestors back in the old country.
Maternal grandfather’s side of the family goes back to New Netherlands. A generation ago somebody did a genealogy but definitely got stuff wrong as it didn’t correctly name all of Mom’s siblings or us children.
I’m lucky that I haven’t found any Anglicized names in my line. When my 4x great grandfather was in the King’s German Legion, the Brits consistently spelled his name correctly despite its length and having the “dt” ending (lots of people drop the “d” or “t”)
My maiden name was definitely Anglicized from the German (supposedly, my paternal grandfather’s folks were from the Schleswig-Holstein region in northern Germany.) It’s possible I’m not too distantly related to anyone who spells it the same way.
And speaking of passenger lists, there’s always the good ol’ Ellis Island database. When that first became available online some years back, I found my paternal grandfather listed, though he was not an immigrant – he’d been born in the US. Must’ve traveled back to the Vaterland for some reason.
Huh. Cool link.
Found my dad! He came over on the General St Heintzelman.
My mother has all the genealogy research.
I just keep track of where my name comes from.
Grandfather was in his middle forties when he took a much younger wife and started a family. Grandfather was born in 1889.
Grandfather’s father was also a late bloomer. He was in his forties when grandfather was born. So great-grandfather was born in a brick shanty of sorts in rural Iowa in the 1840s.
Great-grandfather’s father started the trend. He was also in his forties when great-grandfather was born. So great-great-grandfather was born in County Tyrone Ireland in the 1810s. Apparently, great-great-grandfather departed Ireland just before or just into the great famine.
I’m a quarter Veps. There are fewer than 10,000 of them around. Even my grandmother’s family didn’t consider themselves such. But some of their neighbors did and could even speak the language.
I love old family photos. I guess I came by it honest….circa 1940
https://postimg.cc/9DxsnZNB
Here’s my great grandfather working on his railroad crane, probably in OK
https://pasteboard.co/JQ1MOgl.jpg
Now that is cool as hell
Cool. I have a picture of an ancestor on my Dad’s side next to his steam shovel that he operated while digging the Panama Canal. He sent a number of postcards back home, written in a combination of Swedish and English.
One of them is of him and a group of friends who took a small hunting/camping trip into the jungle.
I have a theory that my 3x great grandfather worked on the Panama Railroad (precursor to the Canal). That whole side of the family worked on the railroad in Missouri & Oklahoma, and I found a passenger manifest from the 1850s of a ship arriving from Aspinwall, Panama into New Orleans with my 3x ggf listed. This would have been about 15 years after they came from Germany to the U.S. My 3x ggf would have been a man in his prime (early 30’s) with railroad experience. I haven’t been able to prove it yet, because I have no idea how to find records of men who worked on the Panama Railroad.
I don’t know how to find those records, but I wonder if any of the companies involved in construction might still have some historical records. The way those big engineering companies go, a big one like Bechtel might have swallowed up a few over the years.
Do you know where that picture was taken, or do you suspect it was from the Panama area?
Oh, I see “probably OK” now.
Yeah, probably in the plains. The guy in the crane pic was the grandson of the Panama guy.
A generation later…circa 1972?
I could strangle my mother for those pants and the haircut.
https://postimg.cc/5jbdj4vL
You didn’t have to tell us the decade, we could tell from the fashion.
You think that is bad? Get a load of this jacket
https://postimg.cc/cKRkN3Fj
What was she thinking?
I can tell you what she was thinking!
“Now, what can I do with that swatch of upholstery fabric that’s been laying around?”
^^ Yep
The old guy with the military medals in the post? Those medals are from the Napoleonic Wars
Which guy?
The small pic of the old guy with medals pinned to his chest
I am lost…can you link to it?
Up in the article above Suthen
Those are beautiful pistols.
Yes, they are. I have the Browning, I am not sure what the other one is but it is no longer in the family.
That would have been my first choice. I love the look of those older ones. Understand why they aren’t made today except in limited runs but I can still dream…
It is in .380. It was damaged by having shampoo spilled on it while it was in luggage back when no one batted an eye if you flew with a pistol on your person or in your luggage. The finish is damaged but it still shoots like the day it was bought.
Somehow circa 1940 doesn’t seem so old.
I made DVDs of all the family info I had and gave it to my kids/grandkids/nephews/nieces. To my knowledge there was very little interest in it. Fourscores are fairly new arrivals and any earlier info is not so readily available.
I’m an Ancestry guy but don’t seem to have much time to work on it, not with having to read what UCS had for breakfast or the best gin in a martini. Important stuff.
Someone will care at some point and they will be glad you documented all of that for him or her.
My dad’s mom was into genealogy and collected a lot of information, then one of my aunts picked up the torch and did some more research, which she sent out to most of the family a few years back. All my ancestors on that side were in North America by about 1820. Before they got here there’s information on maybe 1-2 generations in (Germany/Switzerland/Ireland/GB), but then it dies out. The exception to that is a guy who was the 4th son of some Welsh nobleman, who came to Virginia in the 1600s since he wasn’t inheriting anything. His line traces back to an English knight who helped the king conquer Wales in the 1200s and got himself a Castle and a Welsh girl out of the deal.
My mom’s done a bunch of research too, and supposedly traced back to European royalty (which all leads back to Charlemagne), but I haven’t seen or verified any of the info.
Re: Charlemagne. Me too! Long lost cousins!
Too many lines supposedly trace back to royalty for my sense of credulity.
I know they were not exactly chaste people, but I’d still expect more trees to ressemble mine – few if any names that people would recognize.
It’s a joke!!
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=everyone+is+a+descendant+of+charlemagne&ia=web
Nonsense, Mangy Charles had no children. Those attributed to him are all bastards.
My Dad’s side of the family is from Japan. One of his cousins over there claimed that our family was descended from Jews who immigrated from present-day Turkey over 2000 years ago… Then I learned that this cousin is kind of a nutcase who believes all kinds of crazy theories on the flimsiest of evidence.
My aunt did put together a family tree going back to the 1700s. Pretty cool. Apparently some nearby relative was one of Chuck Norris’s martial arts instructors.
Then on my Mom’s side (a mix of German, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and other deplorable wypipo) we’re distantly related to the baseball player Ty Cobb.
I’m always amazed/amused by how many families with Western European roots seem to have at least stories that they can trace themselves back to some more-or-less famous royal ancestor. It’s not that improbable: if you start from Charles the Great (Charlemagne) circa 800 A.D. and posit that each family had (say) two surviving offspring every generation (20 years), the number of people alive today who could theoretically trace their lineage back to some royalty somewhere must be immense. My calculator has me back-of-the-enveloping orders of magnitude more ancestors than there are people alive today, based on that assumption. Of course it’s absurdly naïve, but whatever . . .
If you can trace to a line of a king or important baron/lord…you most likely are going to be related to them all.
^This^
By 9th cousin your family includes most of the people in the west. By 40th cousin it includes most of the population of the earth.
And most of us are related to Genghis Khan.
I think my lineage is of Alexander the Great…which probably leads back to Khan at some point.
Mine is all peasants. Peasants now, peasants then. Peasants forever!
Revolting!
Come see the violence inherent in the system!
Peasants made the world turn. I count that as a win
*Waves pitchfork menancingly*
Peasant or a long line of royal bastards?
I don’t know what shithole country my family was kicked out of but rest assured it was because we were gypsies and horse thieves.
And tramps?
Charlemagne had 19 acknowledged children and who knows how many bastards. Mathematically, after 50 generations, every white person alive today has some Charlemagne dna floating around in him or herselves. So how come we glibs are generally not holy, or Roman, or ruling an empire (orphan megabusinesses don’t count)?
Option B: Have a brother who does genealogy. Bro Dean has done an excellent job of enacting my labor. He’s got pretty much everything since our ancestors got here, with the exception of a gap on the paternal side because a church burned down in NM.
I have Deans in my family tree. I have no idea when they came to ‘Merica, but they originated in the U.S. in Dorchester County, MD (Eastern Shore). I have them back to the mid-1700s in the Dorchester County area. That particular family is very well documented, with their own family association. I think James Dean was also related to them, but I haven’t really done much on that family.
After leaving MD, they wound up (as far as my branch of the family is concerned) in Indiana & Missouri.
I have Deans in my family tree.
I don’t. *whispers: R C Dean isn’t my real name*
Oddly, I was thinking about genealogy this morning (which I very rarely do) after seeing a bumper sticker (yes, one of many on a Subaru) that said “We Are All Immigrants”. I thought “Well, I’m not. I was born in the US, and so were my parents and their parents.” I couldn’t recall exactly how many generations back the ones were that off teh boat, but it was pre-Civil War for just about everyone. The lost records in NM would most likely have covered the line going back to my Indian ancestors.
Well, where have the SWAT teams been showing up then?
One branch of the tree is extremely proud of themselves, tracing things back almost a thousand years (a soldier in William’s army, back when they were doing that Bayeux tapestry stuff).
One branch DGAF and left whatever records they had back in Prussia.
One branch has been deliberately sketchy, though I can’t imagine any liabilities would apply to me.
One branch deliberately falsified records to eliminate unfashionable (((names))).
I’ve got my side of the family well-documented and tracing back to the UK, full of military, Texas Ranger, Freemasons, straight-laced.
Then there’s my husband’s family, with bootleggers, tavern keepers, sketchy relations with Italian mafia…
Both are interesting in their own ways. The research was great fun as it revealed most of the tall tales to be true!!
Gamestop up to $150.
Tesla is down to $700.
I have a “Z” in my surname and it has been changed to, “S”, and “C” in particular areas of the country. Of course, it does not resemble the name of the family that settled in Lancaster, PA in the 1730s from Saarland. I am not sure which German Kingdom that would have been at the time. My maternal side is a bit hazier, the family legend is that we are related to Robert Lewis Stevenson, but on both sides, it has been anabaptist farmers all the way down, save for my Catholic paternal Grandmother who was the first child of my great-grandparents born in the United States, her older siblings were born in the old country, Slovenia.
Yeah the changing of letters makes it difficult. We changed a lot of “sk” to “sh” to accommodate the language difference and dropped random “j”s that were in the name also.
I always imagine an 18th Century census take showing up at my ancestor’s house and hearing the name spoken in German, shrugging, and writing down whatever he thought he heard.
New idea for when census shows up in 10 years…I will just speak in gibbirish
Or maybe just Pig Latin.
“…I will just speak in gibbirish”
Authentic frontier gibberish?
yessir
That’s pretty much how it was done. If the family was illiterate, there was no way to correct the spelling. Hence, the need for Soundex & wildcards.
For sure, in my previous line of work, we had to account for the umpteen different ways names like Muhammed and Ahmed were Romanized when we were pulling reports and transcripts.
Man alive, I looked at a map of Germany at the time of their immigration, and holy cow, what a mess! What is now Saarland was part of at least a half-dozen duchies. They could have come from the Holy Roman Empire, part of the Hapsburg domain, or even the French Kingdom.
My family left Hannover exactly when Queen Victoria acceded to the throne. At that time, Hannover ceased to be part of the UK. My family patriarch had been in the Hannoverian Army. I think he was close to retirement age, and the funding from the UK to pay for the Army dried up. Might as well move to Missouri with the whole fam!
Doing a bit more digging I see that the French kept invading the area. One of those invasions was in 1734. I wonder if my protestant ancestors left because of the threat of Catholic persecution from the French.
I learned a little about that stuff watching Tom Bergeron’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are?…some of his ancestors were besieged & starved out in Catholic/Protestant conflicts in eastern France. Can’t remember which city it was. One of the ancestors managed to survive by converting to Catholicism & becoming a Fille du Roi in Canada. Fascinating story, would recommend.
That can’t be true, I thought he came fully formed out of the Acme Game Show/Family Comedian factory.
Right? He’s so vanilla, but I’ll be damned if his episode of that show wasn’t one of the most interesting in the series.
Sounds like it. I may have to check that out.
I’m sitting on a work “Town Hall” on COVID. I’m feeling hateful right now.
Let the hate flow through you.
Interesting article.
I muted it.
I was supposed to do a ‘listening session” with Secretary Buttigieg but I decided I needed a glass of Scotch to end my long day.
That’s the spirit!!
They changed the policy from not having to wear a mask at your desk to having to wear a mask at your desk. I’m never going back to that shitfucked hellhole!
I think we are supposed to…but most of the tracon DGAF and its worn only when in view. Otherwise, it ain’t happening.
My employer emailed us all that we WILL be tested for a Covid starting in March.
I am trying to figure out the logic. A test is just a snapshot in time. If a person tests negative he could catch it and have it the next day. If you test positive, I don’t think they know what that means regarding immunity to other strains, duration of immunity etc.
So wTF?
Hell no. We are waiting for it to drop that FedGov is mandated to get vaccines…not sure what Ill do if that does happen.
Antibody testing or active infection testing?
It didn’t say. That’s part of my frustration: what is it for? Why are we getting it?
Demand for tests must be down. Whycome you hate the test manufacturers?
I am having a blast looking at old family photos. I have not looked at them for a while.
Ox riding used to be a thing. One of my favorites, here is great grandmother hiking into a saddle.
https://postimg.cc/KKcNQjZB
I think that is late ’20’s, early ’30s?
Those are great. I’d post some of mine, but I think they are all attached with names. We have one where I family trekked from Nebraska to Idaho in the early 1900s
Gramma had to go to town for some fabric swatches & bootleg liquor!
Darn ox was too drunk to come back.
She didn’t have to go to town for the liquor, she just had to go to the barn.
She was the first person in Catahoula parish to have a freezer. She loved little kids so she mostly bootlegged ice cream. All of the kids for miles around would come to her house to eat ice cream. She was, by all accounts, the kindest person you could ever meet.
On the other hand when she got too old to handle her 12 gauge my seven year old father sold her his first gun…a Stevens 410 gauge for one dollar. A month later she heard some rummaging around in her barn one night and took that gun out on the front porch. A man was stealing tools from her barn. She peppered his ass real good. The next morning she went and told the sheriff what she had done. He told her to pour some coffee and sit tight then he went to the only doctor’s office they had. Sure enough there was old so and so laying on the table getting shot picked out of his ass. As the story was told to me the doc dry shaved him first.
I gave that Stevens to my brother a few months ago. When I got it the barrel was bent. I had a really good gun smith straighten it back and voila, it shoots as good as new.
I have a fair number of family heirlooms that are essentially worthless to everyone else but to me they might as well be made of gold.
I also recently gave my great grandfather’s anvil to my son.
I’m the first in my family to be really interested in firearms, so I didn’t have much to inherit. There are two exceptions: a Mossberg .22LR rifle (146 B-A, if I recall correctly) that was my Dad’s and a Winchester Model 94 in .32 Winchester Special that my grandfather accepted as partial payment for an auto repair job he did for a customer who couldn’t pay.
If you ever decide you want to sell that .32 let me know.
I have one. I collect ’94s. I have the dies, brass, loaded ammo, bullets, powder etc for it.
When I take a ’94 out I have to be careful about the ammo I grab. You can’t look at 32 Win Spl and 30-30 and tell them apart. You gotta read the print on the base. To make it worse I have a bunch of 303 Savage ammo around here.
Never. I have dies, etc. for it.
Funny story–as I said, my family was not a gun family. My grandpa took the rifle to the range and couldn’t hit crap with it, couldn’t figure it out until a friend pointed out he was shooting 30-30 out of it. He had probably just pointed at a 94 on the shelf when he bought the ammo and the hardware store guy asked him what he needed ammo for. I have two boxes of vintage 32 Win Spec. ammo–one missing 5 rounds. Story was that my grandfather sighted it in with 3 rounds and went hunting with a friend–it was his first time. He shot a deer with one round, wounding it, then dispatched it with another. Apparently he didn’t care much for killing, and so the rifle sat in a closet for 30 years until I came around and found it.
Keep these coming in. I love looking at old pictures.
I have hundreds of them. You will be all day looking at them.
I agree, they are fascinating. A world that no longer exists.
Here you go.
Grandma Merle, early 20th century Arkansas
https://postimg.cc/fSkdB3FT
Shit, I take that back.
That’s my mother circa 1943 or 1944
My maternal grandfather (AKA “Geep”) while he was serving in WWI. He’s the one on the far right without a tie. I think me may still have been stateside when this was taken before he shipped off to France.
Men should still wear gaiters.
Hell, men should still wear ties.
I’ve grown accustomed to exposing my hairless chest.
Accented with a tasteful medallion, no doubt.
We’ve got an old photo of a wedding on the NM side of the family; I don’t have a digital copy handy. The village square and people look like extras in a spaghetti western; its almost impossible to date. One of the interesting thing about it was that one corner got torn off, and was sewn back on. These were very poor people; they didn’t have any tape, and the photo was obviously a very valued possession.
Poor
My great grandpappy, about whom I have an article in the works (for way too long)
https://postimg.cc/hJS1VGSh
Dang. Couldn’t even afford mud to chink his cabin.
But they did have that one nice piece of furniture that they drug into the doorway for the photo.
On my Mom’s side they did a great job tracing our family back to the mid 1800’s which is a feat due to you know…slavery. I think it’s easier because my family has been in Grenada Mississippi and the surrounding area since slavery so it wasn’t exactly hard to keep track of everyone. On my Dad’s side, it’s a little more difficult because some of his relatives got the fuck out of Mississippi after the Civil War and did migrated to the North during the 20’s.
My wife on the other hand was much easier because her grandmother did all the heavy lifting. On her Dad’s side, his Mom’s side was a mix French-Norwegian and on his Dad’s side, they were full blooded Sicilians. My wife’s Mom side are a bunch of Scots Presbyterians from Pennsylvania.
French-Norwegian? Do you find yourself getting very snobby about your pickled fish?
My dad did a lot of work tracing down his side, and then lost it in a computer crash. After that, he was too disheartened to pick it up again. I do remember that he managed to untangle a knot by figuring out that one of the ancestors had a second wife with the same name as the first Like, thanks, ggdad or whatever, for finding the next nearest Bess and marrying her, just to screw with us two hundred years later.
My maternal grandfather’s family is pretty interesting since it’s pretty well documented back to Prussia by being a part of a group of wacko Baptists who got sold a bill of goods about how Ukraine was a land of tea and honey and religious freedom, and then left for America a generation later when they figured out it was a ploy. There are still Baptists in Ukraine because of my ancestors and their pals.
My maternal grandmother is a giant question mark because she lied about where she came from and her maiden name was generic, so there’s nothing to trace. There had to be some story there, but no one ever found out the truth, so who knows?
I’ve been to the mausoleum of my husband’s family in their village and there’s said to be 20 generations there. No idea if that’s true, but it’s certainly a really long time.
You just made me think of something. DNA results could easily be skewed by cousins marrying, or spouses marrying the siblings of their deceased husbands/wives, etc. Like, if you had 1/2 siblings from two sisters and the same father, they would share more DNA than normal 1/2 siblings. If you were doing genetic genealogy, that would complicate things.
I think that is why we cannot do my paternal grandmothers side. She was by all accounts a whore-baby as we have half-uncles coming out the woodwork that we never knew we had based on 23-and-me and stuff like that.
Interestingly my mom did 23andMe and at least so far, there are no new connections on her mom’s side. So that lady dropped in from outer space, apparently.
Prussian-Ukrainian Baptists… interesting. I would be interested to find out how they fared in the 20th Century.
They’re apparently still there, so the community survived the commies. But more than that, I don’t know.
Heh.
In one village in Normandy, approximately half of the people buried in the church graveyard are related to me, going way back; there was a spike of young-ish deaths post-WWII and into the early 1980s that puzzled me, so I asked my cousin about them. He just shrugged and said “car accidents.”
Collaborators getting their due by Resistance playing the long game?
Kinda doubt it, since my Normandy family was *in* the resistance (and my wife’s family [Friesland, Netherlands] were in the Dutch resistance). I could envision some very obscure collaborationists going on a revenge spree after WWII, though.
Hmmm. Think I just came up with a book idea.
One part of my family is Volga Germans who lived there for about a hundred years or so before Russia started taking away their privileges and left in late 19th century.
And my wife has an ancestor who married twice with the same name thing too. Confusing the first time it came up.
In that case, I think it was the ethnic community they were in with same names (at least after Ellis Island got done with them).
I think one of the interesting things you find when researching your family is longevity. My peeps live to be old. 80-100s old.
Yeah, my maternal great-grandfather died when he was 104; apparently, he fell off of a roof that he was re-shingling.
Maternal grandpapa died at 95.
Dad died at 87.
I’m sensing a trend. :-/
My revolutionary war major-drummer died at almost a 100. That is insane.
*looks at grandparents lives*
Yeah, I’m screwed.
You’re screwed? Great Granddad dead at 94, Granddad dead at 94, Dad 78 and going strong, I might have to deal with 40+ more years of this bullshit.
I think it was Ogden Nash who said, upon turning 90 years old, when asked what he thought of life “I am sick of my shit”
I am not sure it was him, but it was one of the famous poets who lived forever.
I want to live long enough to see the end of the universe where even atoms cease to have the energy to interact with each other. Dying when the universe still exists is like walking out in the middle of the world’s greatest movie.
That’s how I feel. There are so many things to learn and see and do.
But…but… life expectancy was like 36 until like 100 years ago!
Of course, none of those people bringing the life expectancy down so low managed to procreate, which skews the data a bit.
(And yes, I know you’re probably making a joke about people misunderstanding how life expectancy works, but if I can’t be a pedant here where can I be?)
Trump’s drug price guy just committed suicide Clinton-style (“multiple blunt force injuries”). If I was a drug expert trying off myself, I doubt I’d beat myself to death.
oops – 2018 – it popped up because Biden supposedly trying to do a similar study.
Yeah, but there are plenty of ways to give yourself blunt force injuries. Crash your car into an abutment, jump from a building, rig an anvil to fall on your head…
Or be a Trump supporter?
deceleration trauma
Good story with a very instructive moral: This fellow was my GGG Grandfather on my father’s mother side. He owned a plantation in Mississippi. When the emancipation proclamation was signed he told his slaves that he thought of them as family and they could stay if they wanted and he would pay them.
They all said they thought of him as family also and they would stay and help him work the place. In spite of what is said about those antebellum plantations and ‘rich’ owners they were always up to their eyeballs in debt. Those farms, like any farm, barely made money.
The next morning when he went out to get everyone for work he discovered that every single one of the former slaves had left in the night. That is what freedom means to people who know what it means to not have it. They would rather starve in a ditch than live in chains. If only people today understood that.
He put what he could in a wagon and he and his wife landed in Catahoula parish.
#1 portrait
#2 In the wagon Joseph, Cynthia and Grey Buck
https://postimg.cc/fVyCKg5V
https://postimg.cc/JGDt5NZ1
One other myth to debunk: Plantation owners did not sit around on porches sipping sassafras tea while everyone else busted their asses. They busted their asses right along side the slaves and hired labor. There was no sitting around sipping tea back then, not if you wanted to eat.
Just what a slaver would say. Great story above by the way.
^this. Pre-mechanization farming was back-breaking work. It still is to one degree or another, but nothing approaching the 19th century level of hard. There is a reason farm families were large, more hands, more work, and less money spent on hired hands. That and midwestern winters are boring as hell.
Speaking of plantations, there is a scene in 12 Years a Slave where the owner beats the hell out of who he described as his “best picker*”. I’m not saying it didn’t happen but I am saying that seems counter productive. I don’t get it but I am also not a slaver. The book that is based on was written by the main character. I’m interested in reading it.
*According to the film she was WAY more productive than anyone else and it wasn’t even close.
Some people are just psychopaths ?
True. Communism is a system of slavery and it attracts the worst kinds of people because it appeals to the worst parts of human nature. The old-timey slavery as it existed in the new world was a crude form of the same thing. It brought out the worst in people. It was, as socialism is today, an abomination.
I don’t think it is oversimplification to dichotomize. There is self ownership and slavery. There is only one alternative to owning yourself – someone else owns you.
Chuck McDowell can suck an egg.
You don’t want to get out of your timeshare?
I’ve been around this place too long. I first read that as Gynecology 101.
In a way…it still works
Thanks, KK! This is really interesting.
I have an unusual last name so it has been relatively easy to track down, at least in the macro, that part of my family origins. I’ve never done much searching, but I did find the Ellis Island records of my great-grandfathers from Scotland and Italy. My gg from Scotland actually arrived on the Lusitania, which is cool.
There aren’t enough hours in the day to pursue all the things I learn from You People. But I dig it!
Now I’m on my regular weekly team meeting and my libertarian rage is rising.
You could mute it and take a nap.
Still waiting to get called on, so no rest for the weary.
You don’t have a kitty filter?
HA! I didn’t bother turning on my video today. Fukkit.
This truly is the dumbest timeline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xy9T1Izh0w
Philippine naming has a built in genealogy aide. You are born with given name, mother’s family name, father’s family name. When women marry, they shift their last name to the middle and take their husband’s.
Russian’s have the patronymic instead of a middle name.
I’m sure there are others.
Similar in Central and South America
Tuco Benedicto Pacífico Juan María Ramírez.
I benefited from having a relative in the 19th Century document what they knew. I ended up with a box full of papers, photographs and all.
This was an interesting article, thanks for sharing. My mother did some genealogical investigations of our family a while back, but it was easier for her since her maiden name is both uncommon and unchanged from original spelling. The most interesting thing found was that we have an ancestor who was a Revolutionary War vet (although my mom already knew this as she knew a great-aunt had been in the DAR) and another ancestor of military age during the Revolutionary War who was born in Hesse, Germany, so while it is not confirmed I like to assume he was one of those mercenaries and therefor I have ancestors who fought on both sides.
My Great Aunt had our family genealogy done spent ten gs on it back in the day (she had a lot of money) turns out I am a descendant of the Crusader King of Jerusalem. And (although this revelation was years later after the report) if you believe the Da Vinci Code Jesus Christ himself.
Move aside Jews and Muslims I want my Kingdom back!!!
Been rewatching Veep its basically a documentary. Very few shows capture the true nature of politicians.
I also just finished the first Dune book. Very libertarian, the author actually wrote the book to warn people not to fall for charismatic politicians. Specifically Kennedy but in general as well. He used to work as a speech writer in Washington DC.
Its a bit outdated and definitely overrated but if you can read something like Game of Thrones without your brain breaking then I suggest Dune. DO NOT WATCH THE 1980 MOVIE IT IS THE WORST FILM I”VE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE.
Perhaps the new one will be good we will have to see.
Also, anyone getting tired of the anti covid vax conspiracy theories. Look if you doubt the vaccine you are not crazy and you should not be censored. I totally get your skepticism and you should not be forced to take it. But if the vaccine really started to kill people in mass quantities then the pitchforks would be out and the peasant violence that would be shed would make the French Revolution look like a walk in the park. Also, the people who would not have taken the vaccine are the conspiracy theorists and skeptics, and then the powers that be would be left with no or very few workers and shit ton of people that hate the establishment. The military and police are getting the vaccine so there would be no one to protect them. If anything THEY would want to kill the people who refuse to take the vaccine.
The military and police are getting the vaccine so there would be no one to protect them.
Well, they may be getting a shot, but who knows if its really the vaccine?
/tin foil OFF
C’mon man, Sting totally rocked that codpiece.
Been rewatching Veep its basically a documentary.
I always considered that the pitch for Veep must have been “what if Hillary Clinton, but charismatic and attractive?”
I mostly agree, I just don’t think she is charismatic. I think to the average joe and jane in the show she comes of the exact same way Clinton does. To the viewer perhaps she is charismatic but I don’t think that is the right term, maybe its more that we are sympathetic because we follow the story from her and her teams perspectives and she makes us laugh so we have some attachment.
“Yes, Minister” foretold the deep state decades ago.
I remember talking to you about skiing in Park City.
You didn’t, by chance, stop by the temple in Salt Lake, did you?