Interesting things you find in family history

[Crow Hunter]

This is interesting, and making me think maybe I should do some digging. My grandpa on my dads side had done some studying of our genealogy back in the 70s or early 80s, but i wonder if it would be more accurate now. Everything I heard about it was second or third hand anyway. It was primarily British and Scottish, but there was a claim that one of the earliest major politicians of New England may have been one of my ancestors. Mom's side is supposedly mostly German and maybe a little Native American.

What are you guys finding to be a good resource(s) for doing this stuff?

I have been using Familysearch.org. It is part of the LDS church and they don't really advertise it as such other than a LDS on the bottom. Their beliefs involve needing to know ancestry so they have one of if not the most extensive genealogical data set in the world.

They are accurate on what I have corroborating evidence on. There have been 3 different professionally researched investigations into various parts of my family history by 3 different people. All the data matched exactly and they had even more information that these professional researchers didn't have back in the 70's and 80's. It also matched my wife's families information that had been researched back in the 60's.

All of mine, at least back until the early 1600's is backed up by scanned in birth/marriage/census/wills/etc that have been transcribed by volunteers. So I trust them at least back until then.

Now there earlier stuff, I take with a grain of salt. Although it is nice to think that depending on the family member I am a descendant of Alfred the Great, Uhtred of Bebanburg, and Earl Ragnar Lodbrok. My wife thought that was great since she is a huge fan of both Last Kingdom (her favorite) and Vikings.

It is free. All you have to do is enter in your information as "payment" and start creating your family tree. I only had to link my parents to my grandparents and my tree was already completed WAY back on some of the families.

[Crow Hunter]

We traced our German heritage all the way back to a Catholic church in what is current day Switzerland. Most of my blood hails from current day areas of Baden-Wurttemburg and Saarland. The half from Baden-Wurttemburg came over in the 1880s, the ones from the Saar were part of the early groups of German settlers that came over in in 1735-1738, landing in Philadelphia and setting up shop in current day Berks County, PA.

My 7th great grandfather, Johann Wendel Seibert (named after the town he was born in, Sankt Wendel), came over with his brothers, sisters, and mom after the father of the bunch had passed away, and I'm assuming the family must've hit hard times (The Saar being a poor area, kept poor through constant war between France and the Holy Roman Empire). Johann was registered by the town as a blacksmith and bought 500+ acres which he rented out to others to farm. His brother, Johann Jacob, went south to what is current day Pendleton County, West Virginia and set up shop. He was commissioned as a Captain in the Virginia militia, reporting to George Washington during the French and Indian Wars. He, my 8th great grandmother, and the rest of the settlers were all slaughtered at the Fort Seibert Massacre following their surrender to Indians who had falsely promised them safe passage. Well, all except for one family member who was released to tell the British what had happened...

So back up in Pennsylvania, half the family were killed by Indians on the Pennsylvania frontier. Johann Wendel would enlist as a Sergeant in the Berks County Militia during the Revolution, a skirmishers/rifle company similar to what you see portrayed in The Patriot. Their qualification to join the unit was hitting a pumpkin at 250 yards. One of his sons, my 6th great grandfather, Henry Seibert then joined the German Battalion which was raised as a proverbial "fuck you" to the British who had hired German mercenaries to fight a largely German-immigrant populace. He fought at the battles of Philadelphia, Germantown, Trenton, Princeton, and Monmouth. On his way through Trenton and Princeton, he met a Dutch/British girl in Maidenshead, New Jersey (current day Lawrenceville). We tracked my 6th great grandmothers family to the 1600s, when one of her grandfathers was the Dutch captain who mapped the Delaware River up to Scudder's Falls (Trenton) and the British side of the family was disgraced nobles. She was from a rebellious family that signed a petition telling the King to pound sand, which is currently preserved at the Trenton Barracks war memorial.

So, after the war Johann Wendel moved down to Martinsburg, West Virginia to be with his remaining brothers/sisters and lived an abnormally long life for the era, finally passing in 1802 where his grave can still be found. Henry and his newfound love shacked up in Philadelphia after the war, and we've been in the Philadelphia/Trenton area ever since until my generation when we all moved away...my brother in Connecticut, my sister out down the shore. I call Virginia home but currently reside in The Grim, chasing some life adventures after Rudyard Kipling.



Ancestry.com.

If you find yourself related to a dude from Sizergh Castle up in Northern England by the Scottish border, who ended up founding three towns in New England after massacring their peaceful Indian denizens...well....."what up, cuz!". Welcome to the bloodline of war criminals.

Awesome!

[Darth_Uno]

Only 1/4 of my family was here before the Civil War. My paternal grandmother insisted we are direct descendants of Paul Revere, although I've never verified it and am pretty skeptical of that claim.

My maternal great-great-grandfather came here from Scotland and supposedly married a Cherokee. I've never looked too far into that either, but old census records list her as "non-white" (which they used to dump all Native Americans into). I'm not all hung up on "I'm part Cherokee" but she definitely looks like it in old pictures.

Maternal grandma's dad came here from Germany. Crazy thing is, I am a dead ringer for Great-grandpa Heinrich. You'd seriously think they were pictures of me. I own his trunk that he brought across the ocean with all his earthly possessions. It has an old roll of (very dry) tobacco in it, but I don't know if that's from the trip or he stashed it there later.

[Darth_Uno]

In comparison, my life has been pretty uneventful.

I'd like to think that was the plan when my ancestors came here. They were probably just gunning for three squares a day and nobody trying to kill you. Which, when you compare it to most of recorded history, isn't such a bad life.

[Stephanie B]

My father's family came from the same region on the Rumanian/Russian border, although my grandparents didn't know each other before they immigrated. Quite a large number of my grandmother's family, in particular, emigrated around the turn of the last century. Some didn't cotton to America and went home. A few of the more prosperous ones never left. All contact was lost with them around 1941.

My grandfather was a notorious horndog. It turns out that he had another family, even while he was married to my grandmother. He may have been bigamously married, as they have the same last name. Seems my father knew of this, but he never spoke of it. At least to me.

[CleverNickname]

I have been using Familysearch.org. It is part of the LDS church and they don't really advertise it as such other than a LDS on the bottom. Their beliefs involve needing to know ancestry so they have one of if not the most extensive genealogical data set in the world.

They are accurate on what I have corroborating evidence on. There have been 3 different professionally researched investigations into various parts of my family history by 3 different people. All the data matched exactly and they had even more information that these professional researchers didn't have back in the 70's and 80's. It also matched my wife's families information that had been researched back in the 60's.

Wow this is really neat. It's a lot easier than spending hours looking at microfiche when I did a genealogical search as a project in highschool. One set of my grandparents were already in Familysearch, and going by the username of some of the edits, it appears one of my second cousins has been particularly busy adding data.

Also, apparently Oliver Cromwell is my 13x great-grandpa.

[Hemiram]

Sadly, most of my family on the Irish side were abused housewives that either died early, or lived to extreme old age after burying their almost all of them alcoholic husbands. A couple of those women who lived close to 100 were not the abused, but were probably the abusers. One was my Grandmother, she only lived to 61, but she grew up the kid in a house that had unending yelling and fighting between her drunk most of the time dad, and her mother who just kind of "took it". My grandmother was on the road, by herself in 1922 at the ripe age of 18, selling corsets and similar items in the Nebraska, S Dakota, Iowa areas. Two guys tried to rape her (She looked like Sam Kinison in a dress, so I have no idea why), one lost his eye, the other one got stabbed multiple times with the little ice pick she carried until she died. Her 2 brothers were raging drunks, fighting about 2 times a week and she said she only had peace after she left. So she got married to my grandfather, who was an even worse drinker than her brothers, but he was a "Nice drunk". My mom was born a year after they got married and soon grandpa was gone back to Kentucky, where he remained almost forever. My mom was told he had died, which was a total lie, and she grew up thinking her father had passed away when she was too young to really remember him. My mom lived with her grandmother, drunk grandfather, and 2 drunk uncles after both had been divorced. Both her uncles would die very young, one of heart failure from drinking at 41, and the other in pretty spectacular fashion at 45, when the neck cancer he had ate into his carotid artery while reading the paper and arguing with my mother, who had just told him she was ashamed of being related to "Such a terrible person" after he stumbled, broke a lamp and the front window of the house, blood came spraying out of his neck like a geyser, and he died about the time the ambulance came. He was 45.

My grandmother married two more times after splitting with my grandfather, and they, of course, were drinkers, but only the first one was truly a drunk. He had slipped as a kid(drunk) and had his foot cut off by a streetcar. He was a mean drunk and his best friend would basically molest my mother when she was a pre-teen, until she told him she would chop his "thing" off if he touched her again. After she divorced that guy, she just had boyfriends, she always had them, despite her looks, or lack of them, and then she married her last husband, who drank, but not a lot, any drinking was too much for grandma. He was from Switzerland and was a chef. The main problems they had was his general fear of baths/showers, and his being a total tightwad, who lived on food he brought home from work, and would squawk when my grandmother bought almost anything at the store. He also hid food all over the house which got bad and smelled, so off he went after a couple of years. One day, in 1954, my mother had just gone to work for my dad and uncle and hadn't started dating my dad yet, and my grandmother calls her on the phone, "Hi honey, guess who's here?" Mom, "Who?", "It's your dad!" "Huh???". so at 29, my mom pretty much met her dad for the first time. As before, my grandmother and grandfather didn't get along well at all, due to he started coming home from "looking for a job" hammered. She (literally) tossed him out and not quite a year later, died of lung cancer at 57. In the pic taken when he was here, he looked 77, my grandmother was 52, and looked 72, and my mom, fortunately, looked about 25. Somehow, my mother came out very nice looking and aged much better than either of her parents. Over the years we found out more and more about her dad's side of the family. The men were pretty much all alcoholics, and the big "Scandal" of the family was when my great grandfather's first wife died, he married a Native American woman, "Anna the Squaw" in both bibles we have. The mystery is who was my grandfather's mother. He was listed in one bible as the son of "Anna", and the other one, the son of "Sara", who died just after she had him. "Anna" had 3 more kids, 2 survived to adulthood and a couple made it unto their 90's, as did 2 of the first bunch of kids. If you went by looks, "Anna" was my great grandmother, but her surviving kids and stepkids all insisted my grandfather was "Sara's kid". My mother looked like her dad a lot, and many Native Americans she met over the years said, "You look like my sister/mother/grandmother at various times over her life. All her aunts and uncles are gone now, and I'm temped to do one of those DNA teats to finally find out who my great grandmother really was. I think it's sad but funny that the "scandal" isn't all of the acoholism, it's that great grandpa married a "Squaw". Hillbilly scandals in Kentucky...

[MK11]

The disconnect between family lore and reality is fascinating. My wife’s family always claimed Cherokee descent and her grandfather certainly looked to be of Native American descent. However, DNA tests revealed they’re even more WASPY than I am.

The test did reveal they have a much higher than normal percentage of Neanderthal DNA, which I try to bring up with them as often as I can.

[Savage Hands]

Oh boy have I, but I’m keeping most of that information in the non-indexed area as I want to have some layer or Persec. I doubt anyone will pay for a membership to look me up haha. I went from not knowing my Grandfather was indigenous to now myself and my children being accepted to a tribe.
https://tinyurl.com/y24ussyb

[CleverNickname]

Going back through a bunch of random English/Scottish/Irish people that makes up the majority of my tree I came across a couple men with "Sir" as a title, and a few generations later I hit this guy, who's the first bonafide royalty I found in my tree. Since royalty generally have better records of their ancestors than everyone else, I kept following that to this princess who then led back through some Byzantine emperors, Armenian royalty, Roman consuls, some Greeks, some Jews, and hey well I guess we'll start using the Bible for genealogy...



Close the thread, I've won at familysearch.org.