Genealogy

[Koach]

Anyone else have an interest in genealogy? I've been doing mine since March of 2005. My grandmother's first cousin who's a semi-retired nun did a lot of the research herself, and she sent the charts to see if my mother could help out. My mother wasn't interested, but I took the job and found a hobby I really loved.

[roger]

Yes Koach.

I started to delve into the family history about eighteen months back .. a year or so after my dad died. My sister had started doing it, but was too busy doing other things to really spend much time on it. Back then I only knew the name of one of my great grandparents.

Without going into too much detail we had a few really big mysteries in the family, the biggest of which was what had happened to my father's Dad.

A decade or so back such investigations would have meant spending hours investigating old records in Libraries and churches, and looking around graveyards.

Now, a lot of the information is available on-line and I've been able to piece together our family tree and have made contact with a number of long lost distant [[ and in a couple of instances not very distant ) relatives. The family tree has expanded from about 40 close relatives almost 700,

Its turned into quite an obsession and nowadays I find myself poring through old census records, and info from electoral rolls, telephone books etc. And I've now got copies of birth marriage and death certificates of people I never knew existed a few months back. The only difficulty is knowing when to stop!!

Roger

[MadLad]

yep! it's a fun hobby.I've also found a few distant cousins online. Got my dads side of the family back to the 1500's!

[tamla617]

roger
700?thats amazing![[stop now before the christmas card list gets out of hand) i havent bothered 'cos i just know i'd never stop looking,searching etc.but thats the only reason,i would love to do it.

[roger]

Actually Tamla617 .. 700 isn't that many .. I've seen trees on the various websites I visit that have 10000 or more .. I know as I'm on a couple of them!!

Its amazing how it all grows exponentially ..

If I take my parents and siblings there are 5 ..
And if I add spouses and children of my generation that is another 8 ..
If I take my parents' parents and siblings that adds another 8 ..
And if I add spouses, children and grandchildren of those that is another 15 ..
Making 36 or thereabouts.

And then we start reaching the era where large families were more common than today ..
So if I take my grandparent's parents and siblings that adds around another 30 ..
And the known spouses, children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren of these number in the hundreds ..

And if I take my great-grandparents and siblings ......

And so it goes on ..

Have managed to find a royal connection too .. one of my great grandfather's cousins on my father's side was a guest of Her Majesty Queen Victoria for a while .. He spent some time in Durham Prison!!

Roger

[tamla617]

.......lol!

[bradsupremes]

I absolutely love doing my genealogy! It certainly is a topic that has always fascinated me. I love the work that Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s has done with PBS on "African American Lives," "African American Lives 2," and "Faces of America." I hope he plans to do a second "Faces of America" in the near future. As for doing my own genealogy, I can trace my ancestry back many generations on both sides of my family tree. I was fortunate enough that I had a distant relatives who did a complete ancestry on my maternal grandfather's side that traces back to mid-1600s Germany. Recently I did some research and made some discoveries that traced that tree back several generations further into the late 1500s. Recently, the furthest back I could trace my father's side was to the late 1880s Italy, but I did some research and digging and traced the family back to the mid-1700s.

Back in April of last year, I was on facebook and search for people with my same surname. I knew where in Italy my family came from so that helped to narrow down the searches. I contacted several people and asked if they knew of any connection. Some replies came back with no clue of a connection. However, I did get one reply back stating that she knew there were relatives that did go to the United States. After I gave her more information, we discovered that we were third cousins. Our great-grandfathers were brothers. From there, I got in touch with many more cousins who I talk to frequently and hope to meet one day in the near future.

As for doing research, I don't always have the time and resources to do it as much as I would like. Money is always an issue too! Ancestry.com is a great site, but that site costs money and I don't always have the cash to do it. Familysearch.org is another great website and it's free! I found several generations on there!

[Koach]

I also love Family Search and Ancestry. Do you know about findagrave.com [[free site)? I'm a regular contributor and member of their forums, too.

[Motown_M_1056]

Despite Alex Hailey, it's something that's still difficult for some African- Americans due to non existent birth and death records and not being counted or not taking part in Census drives.
I have a cousin who traced our family back to slavery times on my mother's side and even back to a village in Africa. I don't know if she 's learned any more.
But my late father is difficult. He changed his first name not long after his birth in 1912 and he never talked much about his family--aside from his mother, and his two siblings who died quite young. Because he reinvented himself, tracing my roots through him is difficult.

[robb_k]

I'm very interested in that, and DNA analysis would help more than most records. I can trace my father's family back from my generation in The Netherlands, Belgium, Israel, Canada and USA to the previous two generations in The Netherlands and Belgium, to the previous 4-5 generations in Hungary. I can trace my mother's family back from this generation in Canada, USA, Israel, Australia and South Africa, to the previous two generations in Belgium, The Netherlands and Lithuania, to the previous 4-5 generations in Lithuania. The actual records don't go back further than the late 1700s, as The Germans destroyed almost all the records from Synagogues in Europe during WWII.

However, as most of my father's extended family [[including myself, my father, one of his three sisters, paternal grandfather, my brother and one of my two sisters) are redheads, and The Khazars [[West Siberian tribe who eventually settled in Hungary) were said to be a "redheaded" tribe, I suspect my father's family may have been descended [[at least in part) from the Jewish Khazars [[whose King adopted the Jewish religion in the 600s A.D., as did The Khazar's nobles and middle class). My mother's family like most Lithuanian Jews, probably descended from German Jews who were invited by the Polish and Lithuanian kings [[around 1000-1100 A.D. to bring trade to the new towns when their kingdoms were first urbanising). Many of those German Jews were descended from Judean traders or slaves who came to Germany's Rhine Valley with The Roman invaders.

[nosey]

I've been doing genealogy since the early 80s and my family [[Spencer) have an extensive history. I can trace my Caucasian side back to the Jamestown Colony [[Lane surname) in this country. I can trace my African side back to 1807 to [[Pris)Cilla an enslaved woman. Our Caucasian roots come from Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands and England. My cousins did a DNA on a direct female [[no relation to me) using the same company as Skip Gates and it yielded Guinea Bissau and several other countries that I can't remember at this moment. Since that knowledge didn't pertain to me, I didn't really process it.

In 2002, due to extensive research, I met on line and eventually face-to-face, the Caucasian descendants of my ancestor and although we were excited to find each other, over time the relationships have waned.

Also, this summer a cousin found out by accident that our cousin, Lt. Roy Spencer had been a Tuskegee Airman! He died in 2002 and we are now in the process of finding his children, if any. We have many, many documents, land titles, wills, death certificates, pictures, etc. The oldest picture I have was taken @ 1897 of our patriarch, Bradford Spencer.

[grapevine]

...I did a lot of my own family's history research back in the 80s when my children were born ...it became an obsession for a couple of years ...I enjoyed going to national and local archive public record offices ...churchyards ...researching BMDs ...wills ...censuses ...all long before the mighty internet made it easier ...I ammassed a good collection of certificates going back to 1837 ...the IGIs were a good source for dates and ancestors before then ...I found details back to at least the 1770s ...the wills were the most interesting documents as they also offered many more social details of my ancestors ...I hope to renew my researches when I retire c. 2022!!! Ex-librarian Mrs Grape ...now retired ...says that ancestry research is free at all UK public libraries ...though the current con-dem government seems to want to close them all!!!