Anybody doing genealogy?

Heh. As you see above, my 10th G-GF was Giles Corey, a fairly-prominently featured character in "The Crucible" who was executed by "pressing" (crushing under huge stones) because he refused to take part in the Witch Trials and thus was deemed a warlock. While they were crushing him with the stones, they kept yelling at him to confess. His response: "More Weight."

He was of course exonerated later, but was unfortunately still dead.

A funny story, maybe a cautionary tale, out of the genealogy search. One of my GG-GFs made a (then) huge fortune in the 1860s-1890s as a lumber baron in Michigan. In the 1880s, he built a huge ornate house, a 30-room mansion, almost identical to The Whitney, which still stands on Woodward Ave. about a mile north of Comerica Park as a luxury restaurant. My grandmother, who lived to the age of 99 before dying in 1996, told us of living in that house as a little girl in the early 1900s.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I get an e-mail from another distant cousin I've never heard of. It's a descendant of the brother of my lumber-baron GGGF -- they had a falling out in their 20s over business deals, lawsuits and everything -- and the branches of the family grew apart.

So, my distant cousin -- she's 80, about the age my mom would be if alive -- notices the photo of the luxurious house in Detroit on the Ancestry page.

The first week or so she's all chatty and everything, but all of a sudden she starts getting pretty insistent: Where is that house? Looks like it was worth a lot of money, where did all that money go? I can't believe such a beautiful house would be torn down without a trace, bet they got a ton of money when they sold it, did your grandma ever tell you?

Uh Oh.

The answers, of course, are, yes, they did tear it down in about 1920, it is now partly a site of a hospital, like about 98% of Detroit it's pretty much a disaster area, I don't know what the hell they did with the money, it was 90 years ago so they didn't let me in on it, if any of great-great-grandpa Thomas's money went to his kids, none of it ever came down to me, that's for damn sure.

 

Fascinating stuff, Starman.

I've had a subscription to Ancestry for about three years now, and it's really paid off, especially since I don't have a single relative anywhere near the places I've lived for most of my adult life.

But I can trace my paternal grandmother's line reliably back to about the 1590s (unreliably back to the 1480s in England). Learned they set sail for America on the Angel Gabriel in 1635 and were shipwrecked off the coast of Maine after a vicious storm. They survived; about five others didn't.

Have a pretty good list compiled of where multiple branches of my family emigrated from, which is kind of interesting. Slowly-but-surely working on a map graphic to visualize it better. Also have a TON of census records, military draft cards, obituaries, gravestones, voter rolls, city directories, and other documentation going back into the 19th century and sometimes the 18th.

My favorite list, though, is the one GB-Hack made for me explaining which soccer teams I probably would have rooted for if I had grown up in the towns where my ancestors were from. Go Bristol Rovers!

 

My brother is way into this and over the last few years has traced various lines back to Charlemagne, the first man arrested in England for the crime of buggery, Maria Shriver, Mrs. O'Leary (of Chicago fire fame), major league ballplayers Clyde Shoun and Denny Galehouse and one of Whitey Bulger's victims. Not direct descendants, but still interesting to see how the lines interact and diverge. Through marriage and immigration, one line from Newfoundland morphed into an African American clan. I told him he should do it professionally when he retired - genealogy pros can get $40-50 per hour.

But the Irish side is mostly a dead end on the other side of the pond, for the reasons cited above.

 

I like it because I love history. For me, the best thing to do is pick one line and go with it. That's what I've done.

My dad's side of the family goes cold very quickly. My dad's father has his last name spelled differently on his birth certificate than how we actually spell it, plus it shouldn't have been his/our last name, anyway. It seems my great grandmother decided she wanted a child but not a husband and got herself pregnant which was obviously a major whispering point in the 1910s. She lived until she was 97 and, to my knowledge, never gave up who the father was. There was some speculation, and my mom believes one of my great grandmother's sisters knew the father, but she never talked about it, either.

My dad still doesn't talk about it. I'm 40 years old and he has never actually spoken of it to me. I think it's kinda funny now 100 years down the line, and if ole great granny hadn't took it upon herself to get knocked up, I wouldn't be here today.

So, there's my funny tale of the day.

I chose my mom's dad's side because that was the grandfather I grew up closest to as a little sidekick. I have traced it back to the birth of my however-many greats (can't think right now, have to count) grandfather in England in 1688. His son came to the U.S. in 1705. His son moved from NJ to NC, and then in 1850s the family loaded up as a group to head for Sullivan County, Mo. When they stopped in East Tennessee overnight, my 3-great grandfather as a young man was taken by a local girl, stayed when the rest moved on, got married and we've been right here in the same town ever since.

 

Everyone has four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, 16 great-great grandparents ... you get the idea.

I'd love to take it out to the 256 and write a book about it someday.

 

Oh, no doubt. Never done the genealogy thing, but earlier this year my brother was contacted on Facebook by a cousin in Glasgow (part of a family of thugs and career criminals that my old man - no stranger to the thug life in his younger days - eventually distanced himself from).

Seems this guy, who has to be in his 60s now, was searching on FB for anyone with our last name (not exactly common, certainly in this part of the world) and came across my brother and since he had been here once when I was a little kid (how he got into the country given his record is beyond me, guess Canada's border was as leaky then as it is now) he figured maybe he was on to something.

 

Yeah, after your great grandparents, the numbers skyrocket with each previous generation.

Just think, anywhere down that line, you take out one link, and the whole chain is broken. If someone was sick one night or someone worked late or someone was just pissed at their significant other, an individual here today never happens.

Plus, throw in infant mortality even up until the modern era or sickness or infection killing people or chances are somewhere along family lines the odds are pretty good we each had someone involved in some kind of ancient gnarly battle were dudes were cleaving each other ... you gotta feel fortunate to be alive.

 

I have followed Ancestry links -- sit down now -- 101 generations deep on one branch of my family line. Back to 800-900 B.C. This is the only line I have found that goes back past the 1600s.

Around about the year 900 or so the links start getting a lot more dubious -- people 40 years older than their children, living to age 100, etc etc. I don't think that many people fathered children at age 40 or lived to 100 in the Dark Ages.

Plus there seems to be a high percentage of dukes, kings, etc etc., and I immediately thought of Crash Davis in "Bull Durham," "How come everybody is always (descended) from a king/duke or somebody famous, how come nobody ever says they were Joe Schmoe?"

Well, a couple possible reasons did come to mind:

1) Being born to somebody rich/powerful was probably a real good selection advantage for living long enough to have children yourself and having them survive in turn. There have been billions of Joe Schmoes over the course of history but most of their family lines dried up somewhere along the line. It's kind of a genteel and probably unconscious form of genocide, but probably most all of us everywhere are descended from rich people way back in the distant past.

2) The rich/powerful probably documented their ancestry much better than all the Joe Schmoes. Also when you are talking about hereditary titles, once one descendant is some kind of royalty most of his ancestors will be too.

3) In the feudal/slave eras, I would guess it was probably not uncommon for many peasants to regard their local king/baron/duke as their "father" and claim ancestry from them.


I take it all with a huge grain of salt and realize it's all probably a fairy tale once you get past the era of written books.

But it's a fun fairy tale to think Priam III, King of Troy who lived from 700-655 B.C. is my 100th great-grandfather. Somebody has to be, why not him?

Also: At least THEORETICALLY, the number of ancestors in each generation increases by a power of 2. You have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, etc etc.

Since your 100th great-grandfather is actually the 102nd generation, the number of THEORETICAL ancestors you would have would be 2 to the 102nd power = 5.0706024 × 10^30 (Never mind that's higher than most estimates of stars in the universe).

So why the hell shouldn't Priam III King of Troy be one of them?

 

It really is mind blowing when you start thinking about the vast numbers. Obviously, in everyone's line, someplace, somewhere, the tree's branches come together unintentional or otherwise.

Heck, we all are probably related to Ramesses II. He had 90 kids 3200 years ago. Imagine how many future generations they fathered.

 

Yeah, by sheer necessity of numbers, the idea of a perfect "tree" branching out in powers of 2 falls apart pretty fast. Plus, prior to the Industrial Revolution, people were pretty much limited to living within about one day's walking distance of their birthplace. In small farming towns in rural Europe a few hundred years ago, probably everybody in town was related within 3-4 degrees of consanguinity.

So you have a lot of third, fourth, fifth cousins marrying and the tree branches in on itself pretty fast.

 

I read somewhere that pretty much everybody in the world probably descended from Charlemagne. The trick is being able to prove it.

Conversely, we're just as likely to also have descended from the guy who cleaned Charlemagne's stables.

 

Can anyone who is on ancestry.com speak to how productive it would be for me, if my family came over from Eastern Europe in about the 1910s - 1920s? As NoOneLikesUs posted above, it seems like researching this area may be a dead end.

I've traced my dad's side back to exactly 1800 but that's essentially pure luck. My GGGF or maybe GGGGF, was a big cheese (because he was the chief candlemaker apparentlyp) in a tiny town in Ukraine in 1800. But my "research" was pretty much dumb luck because a distant cousin whom I had never met wrote a detailed story about our family on his blog about the family's history and made a family tree. I came across it when I was randomly Googling terms relating to my family.

I have no clue about anyone older than my great grandparents on my mom's side other than that they were born in the old country, meaning Poland or Ukraine or thereabouts.