ComradeCosmobot posted:

Yeah, I have generally found that descent from nobility tends to be sketchy at best.

One branch I've been eyeballing (but haven't confidently connected to yet; it's still pending one or two anecdotal-quality links in New England) is the Josselyn family, which has some dubious quality before the 1200s. Ironically, it also features no royal links in that whole line despite its reported age.

The other branch is stuck at the turn of the 18th century in Bohemia with two as-yet-unverified individuals and another troublesome guy who is in the right place but possibly at the wrong time who prevent me from linking up to another hand-me-down nobility family tree.

So yeah, those nobility links are nothing but trouble in my experience!


Those turn of the century newspapers are great, if still under-digitized. I found one claim recently about a distant cousin who was shot by some guy in Atlanta during a fight the other guy started by calling him a slur (the newspaper leaves the word unsaid, but since the cousin was Jewish, you can probably guess what it was). The story went on for several days as the shooter hid from the police until the cousin was out of the hospital.

It's also kinda fun to see your grandfather's name mentioned as participating in some patriotic parade when he was 5 years old.


Ugh, yeah, that's obnoxiously common, but one learns to live with it, I suppose.

As for "self-doxxing", consider me rude, but given how sensitive personal information is these days, I no longer feel comfortable listing the grandparents of anyone living, just because how easy it is to find people from that, even though the old-school practice is "anyone dead is fair game"


Depends. Jumping the Atlantic is pretty difficult, but it's not always impossible. It usually comes down to a combination of researching as much about the immigrant and their family as possible and a little bit of luck. Some of my luck has involved my ancestors alternately:

• being well-enough known to earn a German Wikipedia page
  
• literally handing-down the information of their ancestors in Europe since they immigrated in the 20th century
  
• coming across a mention in a printed biographical sketch of a son of the immigrant which noted the immigrant's birthplace (though for that one, I was also crazy lucky to have a US census record which didn't merely note the country, Prussia, but actually the city: "Lisser" -> Leszno)
  

The best shot you have at finding something if all you have in your immigration/naturalization/census records is "Germany" everywhere is by doing a cursory search for the marriage or birth record in the German register indices on FamilySearch. Again, this often comes down to luck, but I've found at least two of my ancestors' German records this way, so it's not a completely impossible task. Just be aware that it's not uncommon to find middle names and other baptismal names you didn't expect, so you'll still want to do as much limiting on other criteria as possible (age or parent's names, for example).

I won't lie that it's easy to make that jump, and it can often take time to gather enough American information to make an educated guess, but it's not impossible. Just keep researching, and you may well be able to make that leap given enough time.