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Oh my god today I found 3 love letters from my great4-grandfather to my great4-grandmother! They were written in the early 1840s! But oh wow, the spelling & handwriting is amazingly bad. The first letter is only some 200 words in 30 lines & I'm on my 7th pass trying to make sense of it, each time teasing out slightly clearer reading. For instance these two lines:  As far as I can tell, what's written is this: "enPige som at jeg kændær somvel skaffe dig en kaandijon somamme". Which would be written something like this by an educated person: "En Pige som jeg kender vil skaffe dig Condition som Amme" (A girl I know will get you employment as a wetnurse). Oracle posted:Got Swedish ancestry? This weekend ArkivDigital is offering free access to their website! I read Swedish, but I'm not good at writing it. Also, seconding the quality of ArkivDigital's scans. Shame they're a paysite most of the year.
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Mar 16, 2017 17:41
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Nice find!
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Mar 29, 2017 06:07
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Does anybody know a good way to find family history for Russian/Eastern European Jews? I know that my Great-great grandparents were the generation that came to the states, but they never talked about their homeland, and as far as I know they were forced to move around because they were Jews. The only thing I have to go on, from the little bits my mom has found, is that they're from either Moldova or somewhere in Besarabia, but there might be some Siberian in there somehow as well.
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Mar 29, 2017 10:10
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Munchables posted:Does anybody know a good way to find family history for Russian/Eastern European Jews? I know that my Great-great grandparents were the generation that came to the states, but they never talked about their homeland, and as far as I know they were forced to move around because they were Jews. The only thing I have to go on, from the little bits my mom has found, is that they're from either Moldova or somewhere in Besarabia, but there might be some Siberian in there somehow as well. Try and find their immigration records first. If they came over after about the 1890s check ellisisland.com, if before check the Castle Garden website (you'll want to play with the spelling of first and last names, the search engine is not the greatest and the transcriptions are iffy). You can also check familysearch. All those are free sites. You can search Ancestry and if you find something promising post the link here and I'll check it out for you. You can also check findagrave.com to see if any of their other descendants has done any research on them or if their gravestone might have more info. This is also a free site. Knowing their birth dates if they have a common name like Schmidt or what have you will be essential as well to narrow down your results.
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Mar 29, 2017 16:17
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Bilirubin posted:Nice find! Btw, this was a totally lucky find. I had known for years when and where my great-3 grandma was born, and when and where her parents were married. Thing is there were 5 years between those two dates (and we had paternity laws since the late 1700s), so I went trawling in the county archives. Luckily that county kept pretty good conteporary name indexes, and there showed up a case in 1842 (child was born 1840, they married 1845). The love letters were included in the material because my g*ma handed them over to the officials so they could track down my g*pa. Her letters to him are probably lost because he kept them or threw them away or someone else threw them away any time in the almost 200 years after that. Hooray for bureaucracy I suppose  e: also his letters are very sincere and loving on the surface, but he's very much holding back because of the economy. Like "I am so glad to hear we have a daughter! I cannot come back home to marry you just now, i have no money! but maybe you can come up here and get a job as a wetnurse? i will always love you, your only true friend until death" literally his choice of words. anyway they lost contact, she had him tracked down, they married & lived happily ever after. just like the fairy tales Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Apr 1, 2017 |
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Apr 1, 2017 05:34
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Heading to Chicago at the end of the month, mom wants to visit my great great grandparent's grave with me. Think I will call the local monument makers to see if I might not be able to have a surprise waiting for her...
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Apr 12, 2017 05:40
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Nice! Man I wish we kept graves here, but then again, we'd be entirely covered in tombstones by now. I'm trying to write together the stuff about the 1840 birth-out-of-wedlock for my great uncle, but I keep finding out more stuff to put in. It seems her mother was never confirmed (lutheran), which was a requirement to get married and basically to become a legal adult. I've checked every parish in the county and there are multiple women of the same name that get confirmed, but they all have other parents. So I decided to track her backwards in the arrival/departure lists that each parish kept. Some priests were better at it than others, but I've ascertained these facts for sure:
All this makes me like 95% sure that my ancestor and the older woman at some point exchanged recommendation booklets, or my ancestor stole the other one & combined the pages somehow. * ) by law, all servants carried a small booklet wherein their employers wrote recommendations (or the opposite). The pages were numbered and drawn through with a string to prevent fraud. But if you had the same name, I suppose it would be possible to mix & match pages from two booklets if you could fake the string. Dunno if all that even makes sense, it's super hard to keep all these details in check. I think I might try a table of my ancestor, the other woman, and the travel records, and then compare facts?
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Apr 14, 2017 23:42
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Wow, that is fascinating. I did not know about the booklets. I know Sweden tracked every drat move people made in their parish records too, what is it with the Nordic countries and exhaustive bookkeeping. Is it possible whoever was writing in the books consulted the parish records and mistook one for the other, and that's why one of the women tried to change it, because they'd confused her with your ancestor and she was trying to set the record straight?
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Apr 15, 2017 04:17
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I don't think they had the booklets in Sweden, they had a much more effective system in Husforhörslängder that are effectively yearly censuses all through the 1800s. Also most of these booklets have been destroyed because who would save them? Also the law was in effect while our population grew from 1.2 to 2.5 million people over 60 years, something like that, so there has been a million of them probably. I do have a transcript of the 1830s traveler's booklet due to the fraud case, and it has the older woman's data: "Jane Doe, born ..., parents are ... and ..., baptized ..., confirmed ... , vaccined ... , etc". So the booklet was issued to the older woman, but also it had been edited (hence the fraud case). Btw: From ~1875 we had booklets for foreigners working in Denmark. Mostly Swedes, but lots of Poles and Germans working in southern Denmark. I think the cooler thing is that before 1875 there were pretty much no laws at all regarding immigration. As long as you weren't obviously not a lutheran (Jews were ok in Copenhagen, Huegenots in Fredericia, etc, but otherwise you had to be lutheran), you could pretty much just arrive with a piece of paper and go like "yeah, my lord in Germany or wherever, he said I could travel so that's what I'm doing. Can I hang out here?" Here's a Russian "passport" from the 1830s I think (not my family so I didn't make sure to take a good photo):  And a Danish "passport" from 1781:  PS: The Danish one makes sure to mention that he's traveling from a city that is not befouled by disease neither man or beast
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Apr 15, 2017 04:51
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Powaqoatse posted:Btw: From ~1875 we had booklets for foreigners working in Denmark. Mostly Swedes, but lots of Poles and Germans working in southern Denmark. What are these called, and are they archived anywhere? I've never heard of them before. My great3 grandfather was born around 1865 in Prussia and moved to Sønderjylland some time between 1880 and 1890, most likely (he got married in 1891). The church where he was born was burnt in 1945, and from what I can tell the church books are lost.
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Apr 19, 2017 20:38
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They're called "opholdsbog". They functioned pretty much identically with Skudsmaalsbøger (for tyende = servants) and Vandrebøger (for håndværkere = craftsmen). Probably not many have been saved, as many probably threw theirs away when they were no longer needed. Here's an example of one: http://www.emu.dk/sites/default/files/20.%20Opholdsbog%20for%20J%F6ns%20Knutsson%20-%20originalt%20dokument.pdf Originally, the church registers were used to keep track of persons moving about, but as part of the same 1875 system of laws, this was done in tyendeprotokoller by the sognefoged. Some of these protocols can be found in the national archives, some are in local archives, and some sognefoged-archives have been folded into kommunal-archives. http://wiki.dis-danmark.dk/index.php/Tyendeprotokol Note this is for the kingdom, there will probably be differences in the Schleswig-Holstein areas.
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Apr 19, 2017 21:58
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Yeah, I'm a huge dumbass. Since this was between 1864 and 1920, he'd have been in Germany the whole time.
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Apr 20, 2017 06:35
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Maybe the personregistre are useful? http://wiki.dis-danmark.dk/index.php/Standesamt https://www.sa.dk/ao-soegesider/da/collection/theme/5 Or the lægdsruller (see latter link)
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Apr 20, 2017 10:43
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FTDNA kits are on sale now!quote:Beginning April 20th, our National DNA Day sale begins! The promotion ends at 11:59 PM Central Time on Thursday, April 27. Pretty good prices too.
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Apr 20, 2017 19:00
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Ancestry's offering 25% off for mother's day (US only) 6 month membership. Ends May 14th.
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May 4, 2017 18:01
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Genealogy chat in the historical facts thread reminded me of this snippet. This is one of my ancestors icing someone: A thrilling story, but John Coffee was probably not a nice man at all. The Hunter river valley was the scene of warfare between the settlers and aboriginals where a lot of nasty stuff happened, and would be optimistic to believe a mounted policeman would not have been involved. He'd probably been in battles in the war of 1812 and a roll from about the time of discharge notes he was an alcoholic, so I think it's likely that he seen some poo poo. But good or bad, he settled in Sydney and eventually one of his grandchildren made it across the Tasman, so he's an important part of my family history.
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May 4, 2017 22:09
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Sounds intense! If there exist like reports and such in the military archives, you should definitely try and check them out! Just spent 5 hrs today + 5 hrs last weekend scanning a binder full of all sorts of documents that my maternal grandparents saved throughout their lives. Letters from family & friends, real estate deeds, insurance claims, community stuff, newspaper clippings, certificates, what-have-you. Luckily my parents saved all papers that looked "interesting" when they were going through & cleaning up the estate. I had no idea there was so much! Like: A 1960 schedule between grandma and 6 others from the town, for a communally owned washing machine, who gets to have it which days... A list of expenses for a family celebration in 1915... Smallpox vaccination certificates from the 1800s... An undated draft of a sermon that my great grandfather probably held in the 1920s or 30s... A letter from June 1945 where my grandfather's brother describes his travails being suspected of espionage... Haven't had time to really read anything yet, just noticed things while scanning 
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May 6, 2017 16:50
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FamilyTreeDNA is offering Family Finder DNA tests for sale for 69 bucks for Mother's Day. Ends May 14th.
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May 10, 2017 18:10
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Jaguars! posted:I love the image of your mother tearing apart the fabric of genealogy, leaving a wake of rippling of half-truths and spurious connections to be cleared up or confirmed by a grumbling family history chain gang  its like literally having one's lineage traced back to King bloody Arthur  (her last message ends with "Who knew Odin was a real person? Is he? Mom" ) e. in more real life news, we found the grave plot of my great great grandparents easily enough, plus spent some time touring the graveyard. Turns out both my sister and I have the same passion for old graveyards and always make time to visit one or two when in Europe. Bilirubin fucked around with this message at 21:32 on May 30, 2017 |
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May 30, 2017 21:30
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hahahahaha that must have so many spurious links. My Granddad died recently so my Grandmother showed me one of those circular flower style family trees. Someone else also did an ancestor list that goes back 11 generations as well. That side of the family appears to have been upper middle class since it emerged around 1700.
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May 30, 2017 22:15
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Sorry for the loss of your grandad. Mine passed away back in April, was 97 and pretty ready for it for the past several years. He served in the Navy in WW2 so yesterday was a little more poignant for me that normal. Yeah, spurious is a nice way of putting it. Mom, if its only like another 8 generations from Fairhair to Odin you have some problems.
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May 31, 2017 01:13
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It's super easy to get caught up in the excitement of long and notable ancestry lines when you start out. I know I was less than critical in the early days of my research and I've had to correct some mistakes later on. Luckily none too embarassing. The biggest problem is copying other research wholesale without verifying every link yourself. Danish genealogist J.C.L. Lengnick wrote in the 1840s: "One would do well in seeing what is given only as a guideline, and thereby examine the sources." Many members of the society I'm in have completely sworn off collaborative sites because they make it too hard to fix the mistakes that keep getting added again & again. E: someone literally just started a thread on that forum about "what's the longest you've come back" and he links to Odin on geni.com lol https://www.geni.com/people/Odin/6000000001169221592 Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 07:33 on May 31, 2017 |
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May 31, 2017 07:27
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Yeah that's why I will never put any of my stuff on like familysearch.org man people on that site are nuts and will throw up any and everything. wikitree, lor' bless'm, have their hearts in the right place and to a certain extent their locking of records previous to 1700(?) to people who have proven track records helps, but man.
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May 31, 2017 19:05
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Powaqoatse posted:It's super easy to get caught up in the excitement of long and notable ancestry lines when you start out. I know I was less than critical in the early days of my research and I've had to correct some mistakes later on. Luckily none too embarassing. Agreed. I use collaborative sites very sparingly for this very reason. They're fundamentally at odds with the idea that different genealogists may place different trust levels in the information they read. The worst case leads to the "questionably long descent" problem, but there can be more insidious issues as well. One of my ancestors, for example, is "widely" assumed to have remained married to his wife for many years in early 19th century Kentucky, in part due to the most popular genealogy book on this family name saying as much. But a few years ago, my uncle and I pieced together some evidence that strongly suggested that they had separated before his death, which was far earlier and in a completely different county than we had thought. As a result, I'm convinced that "novel" (properly-sourced) research is still best suited to keep on independent journals and websites, especially when so many amateur genealogists have not learned (or don't want to learn) about proper research citation practices. Don't get me wrong; the sites are invaluable for research leads, because a lot of the info on them is at least partially correct, but if a tree doesn't have citations I can check myself, I don't even try putting it in my tree until I've got more proof.
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May 31, 2017 21:51
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I have a relative who swears (and other relatives also swear) that he has traced us back to Leif Erickson / Erick the Red. When I was told that I was related to Leif Erickson I said, "I'm sure half of Norway is too" but they swear there is proof. I will have to check out the records and get back. But you go back that far and most Northern Europeans are probably related.
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Jun 1, 2017 13:42
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bean_shadow posted:I have a relative who swears (and other relatives also swear) that he has traced us back to Leif Erickson / Erick the Red. When I was told that I was related to Leif Erickson I said, "I'm sure half of Norway is too" but they swear there is proof. I will have to check out the records and get back. But you go back that far and most Northern Europeans are probably related. Yeah, just like something like one in six people is descended from Edward the Third or something. Yeah, here: quote:Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.
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Jun 1, 2017 17:57
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The interesting thing to me is being able to prove it. As far as I know, Icelandic genealogies have pretty much been documented as much as they can for the entire population. This is of course only possible because of their geographical isolation. So in theory it should be possible to document yourself as a relative of Leif Erickson if you have ancestors in that area/period. I don't remember if he had kids or you'll be like a 2nd cousin 20th removed, though. See also the app that tells young Icelanders if they're too much cousins so they know whether to date or not. I think I read about a Jewish app like that too at some point? But yeah in general, the ancestral & descendant lineages of European royalty and nobility have been pretty exhaustively documented, and if you can connect to them somewhere, you get a ton of ancestors for free. It's not that interesting to me though, I prefer the digging into sources that I might be the first to discover. I usually just put a note "this guy was a son of [noble person] whose ancestry can be traced back to [progenitor], see [source]" and stop there. Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Jun 1, 2017 |
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Jun 1, 2017 18:21
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Well, geographical isolation and unique naming conventions that include the name of the parent in the names of the (same-sex) children. And the whole skald thing. Generally, you are only going to find documentation in Europe going back to about the mid 1500s. Any further back than that and stuff gets REALLY scarce/only done for nobility/royalty. One of the exceptions to this is the Chinese, who in some cases have genealogical records going back centuries upon centuries. Interesting article on it here. quote:What makes the Yu Village unique however, is that it is in possession of the longest-known continuously updated Chinese family tree. Using the family tree, every resident of the Village of the Yu’s can trace their roots back to one of Old Lord Yu’s five sons. The family tree currently lapses over 26 generations, and takes up five floor-to-ceiling canvases, one for each son. The canvases are hung on three walls of a rectangular building, specifically constructed as its enclosure. Why the hell are they so obsessed with genealogy? Because you are not allowed to marry within the clan/family group so they had to keep detailed records to make sure you weren't violating that taboo. Since villages were based on clan for the most part that meant you had to go out to the neighboring villages to find a potential mate, but since that's how it was done, its possible someone in your tree had done so at some point in the past, thus genealogical records to avoid inbreeding. Oracle fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Jun 1, 2017 |
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Jun 1, 2017 21:03
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Naming conventions don't change the advantage significantly in my experience. It's just a different way of searching. Instead of knowing the father's surname, you know his given name. You still have to figure out which of the possibly several men with that name are the correct one. It's only really annoying when say a register of 1700s probates is sorted by last name & you have to go all the way through looking at first names to find potential fathers. E: also bourgeouis/noble names and bynames were inherited even when we still used patronymics, so like a dude called Rasmus Pedersen Brown would probably be the son of Peder [_____son] Brown... But also depending on time/place, the byname stuck by the farm closer than it stuck by the blood, so Rasmus Brown could have married the daughter of some unknown Brown and gotten the name that way. I guess the main lesson is to read up on naming conventions where you're researching, it'll save you a lot of trouble. Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 1, 2017 21:14
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Good point, Powaqoatse. Germany is similar with the 'farm name' being inherited by the male via marriage to a female heir, because it was the more important name IIRC. (edit: check out the link, its even more complicated than that. Ugh Germany why can't you be simple!) Don't even get me started on the whole saints names thing. Sure I want to research my great-grandfather Johann Freidrich Wilhelm and his brother Johann Wilhelm Freidrich and his other brother Johann Wilhelm Freidrich Adam (who of course never went by Adam, that would be too logical. He's Freidrich, the oldest was Fritz and the middle kid was Willi).
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Jun 2, 2017 04:29
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Oh dang, yeah Rufnamen (which of their multiple first names they use in daily life) are super important in German genealogy. Copenhagen almost got really bad about it too, especially in the latter half of the 1800s, but it blew over thank god. They got pretty creative though: - Agda Maximiliana Eugenia Carla Larsen (born 1881) - Martin Peter Christian Theodor Ferdinand Larsen (born 1866) - Vilhelmine Adolphine Sophie Marie Lindberg (born 1853) - Angelica Napoline Florentine Francisca Larsen (born 1843) - Poul Henning Harald Heimburger Lindberg (born 1895) - Elvira Frederikke Emilie Johanne Axcine Philipsen (born 1879) like, come on, you're killing the poor children with those names Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 09:20
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At some point the govt literally said "4 given names + 1 surname is the limit", i forgot when
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Jun 2, 2017 09:21
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i forgot to mention some more weird first given names: - Alfa Anna Kirstine Olsen (born 1899) - Omega Adelaide Constance Anna Amalie Larsen (born 1905) They aren't related at all
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Jun 2, 2017 09:26
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Speaking of naming conventions, I've noticed that in certain branches of my family tree (mostly based around the English Midlands and Cheshire/Lancashire) there's a tendency for sons to take the mother's maiden name as a middle name. Does anyone know if this is 'a thing'? In my tree it seems to happen a lot in the 18th/early 19th centuries but I have a friend alive today whose middle name is his mother's maiden name.
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Jun 2, 2017 10:12
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That sounds pretty progressive actually! In the 20th century I've seen English women keep their maiden name as a middle name, then adding on surnames from men she married and survived.. For instance, a woman born Helen Annandale, who married a Burdett and then he dies and she marries a Ross. Sometimes she would be called Helen Annandale Burdett Ross... Not sure how official that is, though. Also I don't have lines that cross into the 19th century, but I'm definitely interested in hearing more
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Jun 2, 2017 10:22
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Powaqoatse posted:I don't remember if he had kids or you'll be like a 2nd cousin 20th removed, though. Two sons: Thorgils and Thorkell.
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Jun 2, 2017 13:12
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Owlkill posted:Speaking of naming conventions, I've noticed that in certain branches of my family tree (mostly based around the English Midlands and Cheshire/Lancashire) there's a tendency for sons to take the mother's maiden name as a middle name. Does anyone know if this is 'a thing'? In my tree it seems to happen a lot in the 18th/early 19th centuries but I have a friend alive today whose middle name is his mother's maiden name. My kid's got my maiden name as a middle name, but I'm into genealogy so I'm gaming the system a little bit there heh. quote:In the 20th century I've seen English women keep their maiden name as a middle name, then adding on surnames from men she married and survived.. For instance, a woman born Helen Annandale, who married a Burdett and then he dies and she marries a Ross. Sometimes she would be called Helen Annandale Burdett Ross... Not sure how official that is, though.
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Jun 2, 2017 20:28
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Owlkill posted:Speaking of naming conventions, I've noticed that in certain branches of my family tree (mostly based around the English Midlands and Cheshire/Lancashire) there's a tendency for sons to take the mother's maiden name as a middle name. Does anyone know if this is 'a thing'? In my tree it seems to happen a lot in the 18th/early 19th centuries but I have a friend alive today whose middle name is his mother's maiden name. A colleague at work, who is Scottish, took his mother's clan name as his first, which is also apparently a thing. My mother has been at work, although this time blessedly in more recent times than those of Harald Fairhair. I have a well documented lineage that arrived in Salem from England in 1636 as I may have mentioned previously. So she is now fleshing out the female lineages--work that has been long ignored because you know males are so damned important. Turns out that the wife of my great great great grandfather (not the Swedish immigrant, the Civil War veteran) is descended from Richard Warren, one of the passengers on the Mayflower in 1620. If correctly linked (and having eyeballed it it all seems plausible enough--a whole lot of old family names in the correct time and place), this means I am a distant cousin to Taylor Swift (and a whole bunch of other people as well, given the population dynamics discussed several posts up thread). 
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Jun 4, 2017 17:16
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Oracle posted:Good point, Powaqoatse. Germany is similar with the 'farm name' being inherited by the male via marriage to a female heir, because it was the more important name IIRC. (edit: check out the link, its even more complicated than that. Ugh Germany why can't you be simple!) Saints names  . These are currently the bane of my existence. I'm having to comb through parish records trying to figure out who belongs with who. Every man is either Jean or Joseph and every woman is Marie. Of course, it's a Catholic village, so everyone has like eleven kids. And the village was kind of remote, so everyone just intermarried for generations. Not just cousins, but uncle/niece, aunt/nephew, and my personal favorite, two brothers marrying each other's kids.It's not a family tree, it's a Gordian knot.
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Jun 5, 2017 05:42
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Bilirubin posted:A colleague at work, who is Scottish, took his mother's clan name as his first, which is also apparently a thing. You may want to look through the "Mayflower Families Through Five Generations" silver books for Richard Warren, if you can find them. The Mayflower Society sells them, but they're 40 bucks a pop. Otherwise, there's this if you can figure out how their loaning system works, and old Mayflower Descendants may help out as well.
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Jun 5, 2017 10:26
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I can't get enough of are Dan