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Woo a genealogy thread! Awesome! I've been into this hobby off and on since high school (a long time ago). I have subscriptions to ancestry and myheritage and have used familysearch extensively as well, and about two years ago got into the DNA testing side, which actually opened up a whole new branch of my tree and led to the discovery of a heretofore unknown great-great uncle. So if anyone has questions or requests about any of those things I'll tell you what I can. Luckily I have ancestors of French-Canadian and/or Catholic and/or Swedish heritage so a lot of stuff is documented really far back and available online, but I still have quite a few brick walls, mostly on my mom's side, two illegitimate males I'll probably never get past though the mention above of Danish newspapers and tax records and such made me curious: does anyone know if there's similar mentioned in Sweden? I know they have seriously extensive church books which is great and it looks like from the patronymics she may have named the kid after who she thought was the father but I have no evidence otherwise. This would've been in the 1840s. Oracle fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Jan 9, 2017 |
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Jan 9, 2017 21:24
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Owlkill posted:Has anyone dabbled in the DNA side of things? I've done Ancestry's autosomal DNA test which basically showed about what I'd expect (Mostly British, about a Third Irish, and the rest a mix of Western European and Scandinavian), although to anyone else doing that test i'd say bear in mind that there's a lot of overlap in the areas they designate, for example my "scandinavian" or "Western European" is just as likely to be "British"... and their "Irish" also covers Scotland and Wales.
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Feb 15, 2017 21:41
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Got Swedish ancestry? This weekend ArkivDigital is offering free access to their website!quote:Regardless if you are experienced or are just about to begin to search for your relatives ArkivDigital has all the material you need: church books, estate inventories, military records, tax records and more. (If anyone who reads Swedish wants to help me out digging into other records as I search for the father of my illegitimate 2nd great-grandfather let me know)
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Mar 16, 2017 15:00
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Brennanite posted:Saints names Lemme guess: French-Canadian.
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Jun 5, 2017 15:22
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. 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.
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Powaqoatse posted:Tbh It surprises me that yall can "identify" religion like from names like that. I mean I'm only recently beginning to notice certain name combinations that are more common in say north mainland Denmark as compared to south island Denmark. German names anywhere I'd only be able to say "south of here" p much Certain flavors of Christianity have names associated with them that are like 'yep.' Irish names are gonna be Catholic in America like 80% of the time, because Irish Protestants weren't persecuted like the Catholics were so didn't have near as many reasons to up and leave. In Canada the mix may be more even because Canada was an English colony and the Irish made up a good chunk of British troops. Since Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants... didn't like each other much (to put it mildly) your ancestors are gonna be one or the other (I in fact have an ancestor that was disowned by his Irish-Protestant family for marrying a French-Canadian Catholic woman). You hear 'French' and 'Catholic' in the context of American genealogy and its gonna be French-Canadian because they've been here since the 1500s, in 1625 Cardinal Richeleiu suggested they make New France Catholic-only (and the king did) and they moved around quite a bit by using the river system in the U.S. and were also encouraged to have a shitton of kids by the French crown to outbreed the savages in the New World (no, seriously. Legislation rewarded families with 10 living children with an annual allowance of 300 livres; the sum went up to 400 livres for those with 12 or more. Later laws required parents to marry off their children by the age of 20 for boys and 16 for girls—or explain to a court why they didn’t. See, kids, its important to know your history when you're studying genealogy). Catholics have very specific naming conventions in that they have to be named after a saint (that's been relaxed a bit in modern times) and the Holy Family are the most popular ones (Joseph and Mary, John the Baptist is also a big'un, which is Jean-Baptiste in French, and can also be feminine as Jeanne-Baptiste! Fun times). The Catholic church also kept all its records in Latin, so if you're seeing Latin after the Protestant Reformation in your family records chances are they're Catholic. You see a guy with 'Wesley' in his name chances are he's gonna be a Methodist with English heritage, because it was founded by John Wesley who was English and preached all over England and Ireland. And of course each culture has its own naming conventions as you've learned and those cultures tend to be influenced greatly by one particular religion or another. Bavarians are by and large gonna be Catholic cuz history.
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Jun 6, 2017 15:44
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And we haven't even gotten into dit names! Those are fun (and another marker of French-Canadianhood).
Oracle fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Jun 6, 2017 |
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Jun 6, 2017 19:19
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Yeah in those cases her full name was probably JOhanne Luisa blah blah and Lucy as the nickname/Americanized version, or Georg Louis LUdwig was the guy's full name and he just went by whatever at the time/person wrote down the last name they heard ecause gently caress it, its 1880s New York. Note that you can find state censuses online at Ancestry and familysearch that are half-years (1895 I think was one?) that may shed some light.
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Jun 6, 2017 21:18
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I dunno if you know this already but Reclaim the Records just won a court case to put the index of deaths in New York State online and made them available on Friday:quote:The genealogy community received great news from Reclaim the Records this morning – they have obtained images of the New York State death index from 1880–1956, and are in the process up uploading them online at Internet Archive.
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Jun 7, 2017 15:47
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There's another DNA Sale at Ancestry, 20% off, woo! Expect FTDNA to follow suit cuz Father's Day hoosier daddy. Edit: Yup, here's FTDNA's offer. 20% there too.
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Jun 7, 2017 16:16
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Well poo poo.quote:On September 1, 2017, FamilySearch will discontinue its microfilm distribution services. (The last day to order microfilm will be on August 31, 2017.)
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Jun 26, 2017 04:37
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And now for some good news (well for Roots Magic and Ancestry users): The RootsMagic Update that synchs your Ancestry tree records is finally loving here!!! quote:RootsMagic’s TreeShare for Ancestry will let you move data between your RootsMagic files on your computers and your personal Ancestry online trees. You can transfer people, events, notes, source citations, and even pictures between the two systems. RootsMagic is a nice, cheap but kinda ugly and barebones looking family tree software that has a bit of a learning curve but once you get into it gets really really useful. It was already integrated with myheritage and familyfinder.org but ancestry.com was the great white whale, especially after FTM was discontinued (it is of course being revived). Some day I will get five minutes where the world isn't making GBS threads on me to play with this upgrade.
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Jun 30, 2017 04:29
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What's the point of your presentation? Are you wanting to share with family? Are you doing some kind of research project where you have to show off your findings? What's more important to you the data itself or presenting it prettily?
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Jun 30, 2017 15:26
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bomrek posted:Are there any resources out there for non-European genealogy research? Familysearch is always the best first place to start. The language barrier can be a pain but is not insurmountable. If I can learn to tease out certain names and words in Sutterlin you can do the same for Ottoman Turkish (luckily a lot of records just repeat the same phrases or words over and over and you tend to get good at figuring them out, unluckily most are handwritten and there's jargon and abbreviations involved). As for the surname bit, that might be less of a problem than you think: quote:Naming customs in Turkey present a problem for family history research. Until the twentieth century, most Turks had no surnames. They followed the Islamic custom of using one name, given at birth, relying on a patronymic or a word indicating some special attribute for more precise identification. In most registers only given names and patronymic are given. In 1934, the new regime issued an edict requiring that all Turks take family names. Here is a nice beginner's guide to researching Ottoman Empire records. There's a preview of ebook on google books that might also be helpful to you. Chances are you will eventually need to either contract someone in Turkey to do your research for you or go there yourself, but there are more resources online than I thought there'd be when I started looking. Oracle fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Jun 30, 2017 |
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Jun 30, 2017 16:33
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ComradeCosmobot posted:It's mostly about sharing with family, so "pretty" is more important than the data, which is one of the reasons I've been more drawn to the narrative-like wikis than anything else. I like citations myself, but I kinda doubt the family would care as much about them as I do. I do like MyHeritage's layout and they do well with pictures (better than ancestry in my opinion) and a tree is free up to I think about 1500 individuals. To get around that just chop up your family tree into different branches and have multiple trees. If you find you really like their format you can subscribe and host your tree in the cloud with them and then you've got unlimited members per tree and they back up all your work, which is really nice. Its also got formatting for telling stories and keeping track of various bits of data, and you can import gedcom files. You can also set the tree private so only those you choose to invite can view and/or edit it. They include free Family Tree Builder software to synch your data on your PC with the online site including pictures, which is nice. You can also upload videos, which is new and I haven't used it yet. Ancestry's trees are also free to create up to a certain number of individuals, the layout is nice, they offer a kind of AI like Family Story feature that puts your data in a readable format (so and so was born on <date> at <place> and came to America in <date>. They married at <place> when they were <age> years old' etc etc. They also have the option to be made private and allow invite-only viewing or editing (via email address). Look at both of those and see if either appeals to you. They are the big two right now, pretty much. Familysearch.org is free but anyone can mess with your tree drat tree and the format isn't the greatest. I do not put data up there, though its a great place to do research.
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Jun 30, 2017 16:44
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No problem. You may also want to check out my introductory post in the African-American Genealogy thread over in TGRS for general guidelines and advice on how to start researching. A lot of it is broadly applicable.
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Jul 3, 2017 07:12
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Ooh ooh ooh Ancestry DNA on sale to Prime members for only 69 bucks and free shipping! This is as low as it gets y'all, jump on it if you can.
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Jul 11, 2017 18:59
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That's a really cool way to do that. I did something similar to old Dublin to see that one of my potential ancestors lived like 300m from his possible wife.
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Jul 18, 2017 16:37
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One of the things you (and everyone else, including Ancestrys' loving ad department) need to realize is that that poo poo is by and large guesswork based on limited samples of current populations of said countries that have lived in the same spot back to at least their great-grandparents. So British, Irish, Scottish, Swedish, Western and Eastern European are to a great extent pretty drat interchangeable because of all the genetic drift from the various invasions, emi/immigration, wars etc etc. People got around a LOT back in the day, a lot more than people realize. I go into it more in my DNA post in the African-American Genealogy thread here but 'Western European' is probably as close to accurate as most people are going to get without a paper trail to back it up (never mind countries like France flat out banned DNA testing for recreational purposes).
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Aug 1, 2017 04:31
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Yeah Y-DNA testing is only as useful as the population that's tested that matches you. Sometimes you get lucky and some family line has tested a bajillion people and has extensive documentation and some retired professor or other that's dedicated his or her life to their hobby and is awesome at it. Join the family groups if you find a match. Check out some of those links in that post as to how you can use DNA to try and narrow down MCRAs. Its painstaking, time consuming work but it can bear fruit, especially if you upload to gedmatch/myheritage/anywhere that'll take your DNA and search for matches (ancestry has the biggest database so is the most likely place to find matches but they STILL don't have a drat chromosome matching tool so they're kind of useless for people who want to get into chromosome mapping to find matches).
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Aug 2, 2017 15:13
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Oh hey, speaking of the Y37 test... FTDNA Friends and Family sale is on! 20% off all tests including Y37, ancestry and mtDNA!
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Aug 2, 2017 16:42
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And not to be outdone Ancestry's lowered to 69 bucks until August 15th! Jump on this it's as low as it gets. click here to order
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Aug 7, 2017 15:58
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I have a three year subscription to MyHeritage to host my trees. I like that they're backed up to the cloud and I find their user interface for pictures a heck of a lot friendlier than ancestrys clunky model. I also encourage folks to upload their DNA there as well. It's free to do and I found a promising match to try and solve my paternal g-g-g grandfather mystery.
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Aug 17, 2017 22:51
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My great-great grandfather apparently fled Germany after decking his commanding officer and accidentally killing him after being conscripted but that could be apocryphal. Then again my grandma used to like to say the family tree was filled with 'geniuses and madmen' so... So far I've found mostly farmers and blacksmiths and barrelmakers and stuff. All of whom have been crazy faithful, a few illegitimate/out of wedlock births but no NPEs (cheaters) yet. I've got genetic ties to people that stretch back to documented 4th great-grandparents, its pretty nuts. Course on the French-Canadian side they could've all slept with each other and I'd never know since they're all like second and forth cousins at the same time with each other. loving French-Canadians.
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Aug 18, 2017 19:25
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Oh I did have a 5th great-aunt on my Irish side transported to Australia for housebreaking in Dublin! Poor girl's mother had died and her dad was away in the New World fightin those drat Americans or some poo poo with one of her brothers and the other was enlisted as well so she was probably pretty desperate. One of her descendants contacted me the other day. She married a few times had some kids and apparently straightened her life out. Ironically enough she had a brother in the British Army as well who everyone thought died in the Battle of Ciudad Rodrigo but actually survived and made his way to Australia for a land grant. They settled some fifty miles from each other but we don't think either knew of the other's existence, sadly. 
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Aug 19, 2017 21:45
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I had several ancestors killed by those dang new-fangled automobiles. Apparently we are bad/stubborn at getting out of the way, especially when we get old and half-deaf. Though one was a kid (my great-uncle) who got hit by a car on Halloween while trick or treating We were always sternly admonished to stay out of the street, wear reflective tape etc.
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Aug 20, 2017 22:54
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Ancestry is FREE TO EVERYONE THIS WEEKEND GO GO GO CHORES CAN WAIT!* *May not apply outside US
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Aug 26, 2017 18:22
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Look at other pages, see how the person writing makes their letters. It looks like it starts with a P (see Poland up a few lines). If you can zoom in on it as close as will stay focused. Right now it looks like Pmleter or Pnleta. Was it being written by an English speaker or is this a manifest from another country? Like I see 'Tailoren' at the top, which kind of sounds German to me, but it could be tailoress. Need more examples of this handwriting style.
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Aug 29, 2017 04:05
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And as always, familysearch has tons of microfilmed and digitized records of german churches, and some aren't indexed so you have to page through by hand and read them all (whee! Sutterlin and Fraktur SO MUCH FUN AND SO EASY ON THE EYES. When you get some calligraphy lovin' priest with beautiful handwriting it makes you want to weep in gratitude by comparison) archion.de is a pay site, I know there's a free one out there with some familienbuchs lemme see if I can find it. Edit: here it is: http://www.ortsfamilienbuecher.de/ Oh! This site proved invaluable to me when finding my great-great-grandfather's death record. His son had recorded his street address on his Ellis Island entry form and using that and these address books I was able to find where my gggf lived in Berlin and use that info to request his death cert from the proper area and confirm it was indeed him (as he had the equivalent german name of John Smith). It goes back to 1799! Great if your family lived in Berlin and you have an address from some old document. Can give you occupations and who else was living at that address as well. https://www.zlb.de/en/besondere-angebote/berlin-directory-for-the-years-1799-to-1943.html Oracle fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Aug 30, 2017 |
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Aug 30, 2017 17:26
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Brennanite posted:drat that Martin Luther! Protestants are why we can't have nice things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Archdiocese_of_Freiburg You'll need to know the date of birth as well cuz borders changed and places got consolidated or split up. quote:I checked that site and didn't see the village or whatever is above a village in pre-unification Germany, so I guess it's off to familysearch I go. https://www.meyersgaz.org/index.aspx quote:This however might be helpful for a different line that my mom is working on. Thanks! Oh yeah this site too I forgot about : http://www.many-roads.com/manyroads-services/german-prussian-genealogy-aids/ Oracle fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Sep 5, 2017 |
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Aug 31, 2017 03:37
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I am looking for Catholics in Baden.
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OH, for those of you with an interest in doing genetic genealogy (Ancestry test etc) check out this doc, really really nice total newbie guide. Its specifically for using GEDmatch (a free website where you can upload your data from any of several companies so you can compare with others and find matches) but everything in it applies to genetic genealogy in general as well. It has a bit of a learning curve, and if its been awhile since biology class it starts from the very beginning and refreshes all that chromosome stuff as well as defines some terms that may not be readily apparent. Genetic Genealogy using GEDmatch
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Sep 7, 2017 15:25
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