Have you traced your genealogy? How far?

Did anyone watch Who Do You Think You Are? On Sunday? Courtney Cox was on this time. I really enjoyed seeing the castle. I thought she did a really good job handling the news about her relatives being royal.

The time Brooke Shields was on and they traced her back to royalty.... she acted really uppity after she found out. It was a turn-off for me.

Was watching it with DH and when one of the ancestral family names was revealed he said, I wonder if she's related to my coworker, that's his name and he says his family way back had a castle in England. He said something to his coworker who then watched online & yep, someone from her family tree is on his tree also.
 
That is super cool. We joke every time we watch that show that some of our long lost ancestors are going to pop up ( prob in a bad way) but so far, no one has.
 
Did anyone watch last Sunday? Julie Bowen was the actress they helped. Her two sides of the family were totally opposite! Who is next Sunday? I think it might be jennifer grey.
 
I've had to do this for an 8th grade assignment. I wound up not being able to do it because my family history can only trace as far back as my Great Grandparents on my Mom's side. (Of course, this was before the days where the internet was prevalent.)They wanted a larger tree. They honestly thought I was trying to be lazy and get out of the project. My Mom had to call the teacher and explain things to them. They had to give me a compromised B- on it.
 


My grandfather traced that side of the family back to the early 1400s (in England - which is where I was born). Earlier than that the records are pretty unavailable! He made a family tree for us and a book with some photos of tombstones, places our ancestors lived, etc. No famous or royal people in my background but it was still quite interesting. The family stayed for the most part in one rural part of Somerset, and I still have a number of relatives who live there. It's beautiful, so I understand why they saw no reason to leave!
 
We just had to do a family tree project for DD. We got to her 4x great grandparents. This is just from memory since two of her great great grandma's only died within the last 5 years. My grandmother still remembers her great grandparents and gave us all of that info. I would love to do some research but records weren't so great in Puerto Rico so I don't know how far I would get.
 
Did anyone watch last Sunday? Julie Bowen was the actress they helped. Her two sides of the family were totally opposite! Who is next Sunday? I think it might be jennifer grey.

Thought it was interesting they tracked both sides of her family and realized they researched to come up with some dramatic stories they could tell to fill the entire hour. I have heard they have celebrities who have been researched & never put on the program because they didn't come up with enough narrative for a show. Don't know how true that is, but it wouldn't surprise me. I bet a lot of people watch and think they can embark on research and uncover answers like the show does fairly quickly and easily, kind of the way home reno shows deceive some into tearing apart a bathroom and thinking they can reno it themselves in a weekend.
 


I've had to do this for an 8th grade assignment. I wound up not being able to do it because my family history can only trace as far back as my Great Grandparents on my Mom's side. (Of course, this was before the days where the internet was prevalent.)They wanted a larger tree. They honestly thought I was trying to be lazy and get out of the project. My Mom had to call the teacher and explain things to them. They had to give me a compromised B- on it.
I can sympathize! I can only go as far as my great grandfather on one side.and I've been searching for years! He ran away when he was 16 and started life in a new state.
 
I haven't really had to do much as my mom is the family historian. I found out that my family has been in the states longer than I thought on 3 of my 4 grandparents family.
My paternal grandmother was Polish and first generation. Her family had a store in Krakow but we haven't found out why they left Poland.

My maternal grandmother's history was really interesting. We always thought my great grandfather was 100% Irish, turned out his mother was German and disowned for marrying his father. There is a family legend that she was related to Lord North, the Prime Minister during the Revolutionary War but so far we have hit dead ends getting that far back.

My maternal grandfather was 100% German and from what my mom found out had lands confiscated by Hitler and we aren't from the area we thought we were.

My paternal grandfather was 100% Irish and his grandfather was in the precursor to the IRA. He even helped plan the Easter Rising in 1916 although he passed away before it took place. If you google my great-great grandfathers name the Easter Rising pops right up.

I tried to find out about my husband's family and all we know for sure is that his grandfather was in a mental hospital. It explains so much about his family.
 
I have been trying to locate my great- grandfather's father for years. We have a name from a baptism record of my great grandfather and that's it. After years of dead ends, we decided to hire a researcher from the county where we * thought* he might be from. I just heard today that even though she researched different documents than we had, she also could not find him. So of course, I'm sad. But I'm thrilled to have paid for three hours of her time as it was far cheaper than getting an airplane ticket to go look myself. QUESTION: have you hired a professional genealogy researcher to help you do research from states that are far away? Did you get positive results?
 
I have. When I hired professional genealogist or hired county genealogy society clubs in America to do look up work, the results typically were good. There were a couples times that further information could not be found. I remember in particular hoping to find long lost distant family from Jamestown, NY without success. I wondered if they had changed their name, died, or possibly returned to Europe.

The few times that results were poor happened when researching outside of the country. I tried searching in Ireland and Sweden in particular. Both times were disappointing. The few Irish search "results" found were almost humorous in a way as information "found" seemed to have come from my genealogy web sight, as far as I could tell.
 
I've traced both my paternal and maternal ancestors back to the 1400s. It really helps if you have ancestors who held prominant positions. There are a lot more records available for landowners and/or politically connected people.
 
It really helps if you have ancestors who held prominant positions. There are a lot more records available for landowners and/or politically connected people.
I know that's right! Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure i come from poor, who came from poor, who came from poorer still! I'm from the least politically connected family there is. Which is not usually a bad thing except when it comes to genealogy.

Did anyone see Smokey Robinson on who do you think you are? Quite interesting!
 
My dad, (maternal-by-marriage) aunt and (paternal) grandma have been very into genealogy. i think they've traced it pretty far back.

My dad's side we know a few things for sure:
1. We are English & Scottish, and at one point the Scottish folks moved to Ireland so we have family who were born in Ireland
2. We are Native American from the southeastern Canada/Maine area
3. We are French & French-Canadian

We descended from Stephen Hopkins, one of the Mayflower passengers. Fun fact: two of my friends - one a college friend and the other a college friend's fiance - are both descendants of the same Stephen Hopkins, making the three of us very distantly related cousins.

My mom's side is a bit more challenging to trace because we're Eastern European Jews and, y'know, not always easy to get records about Jewish folks from Poland or Russia or Germany. But I do know that most of the family came to the States early enough that we made out all right.
 
My mom's side is a bit more challenging to trace because we're Eastern European Jews and, y'know, not always easy to get records about Jewish folks from Poland or Russia or Germany. But I do know that most of the family came to the States early enough that we made out all right.

Both sides of my family can be traced back to Eastern European Jews so there is only so far back we can go. My father's side is the most challenging since the family name was changed when they emigrated to South Africa and no one is sure what the original last name was.
 
My dad, (maternal-by-marriage) aunt and (paternal) grandma have been very into genealogy. i think they've traced it pretty far back.

My dad's side we know a few things for sure:
1. We are English & Scottish, and at one point the Scottish folks moved to Ireland so we have family who were born in Ireland
2. We are Native American from the southeastern Canada/Maine area
3. We are French & French-Canadian

We descended from Stephen Hopkins, one of the Mayflower passengers. Fun fact: two of my friends - one a college friend and the other a college friend's fiance - are both descendants of the same Stephen Hopkins, making the three of us very distantly related cousins.

You can add more distant cousins to your list as Stephan Hopkins was also my relative that got my family to the states
 
Years ago I was told by a distant relative that our family has roots that go back to the Mayflower. I parked that supposed factoid away and about 30 years later came back to it. I then spent time on ancestry.com and determined I appeared to be a descendant of William Brewster, the spiritual head of the Pilgrim flock.

That led to me applying to join the Mayflower Society, which involved a somewhat arduous process of documenting the birth, marriage and death of every lineage descendant across fifteen generations. Whole process took about eight months between when I started and when I was formally accepted and certified as a Mayflower descendant.

After that, I continued to dig deeper via ancestry and was able to trace my lineage back to the year 1122. That was the year my 28th Great Grandmother Matilda De Mussard was born in Tideswell, Yourkshire England.

Lastly, I found through my Mayflower lineage that I have distant cousin lineage with a good number of famous people, including
  • General George Patton
  • Vincent Price
  • Bing Crosby
  • Katherine Hepburn
  • Lizzie Borden
  • Norman Rockwell
  • Tennessee Williams
  • Mamie Eisenhower
  • Julia Child
  • Pete Seeger
  • Henry Longfellow
 
My dad, (maternal-by-marriage) aunt and (paternal) grandma have been very into genealogy. i think they've traced it pretty far back.

My dad's side we know a few things for sure:
1. We are English & Scottish, and at one point the Scottish folks moved to Ireland so we have family who were born in Ireland
2. We are Native American from the southeastern Canada/Maine area
3. We are French & French-Canadian

We descended from Stephen Hopkins, one of the Mayflower passengers. Fun fact: two of my friends - one a college friend and the other a college friend's fiance - are both descendants of the same Stephen Hopkins, making the three of us very distantly related cousins.

My mom's side is a bit more challenging to trace because we're Eastern European Jews and, y'know, not always easy to get records about Jewish folks from Poland or Russia or Germany. But I do know that most of the family came to the States early enough that we made out all right.
 

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