Anybody doing genealogy?

Thanks to all for the responses to my post.

Without going into details I may just nuke the thing on ancestry.

I have the all information and think I'll just pass it along to my kids.

One thing I have found over at familysearch.org is a branch that goes further back than a couple of years ago, but some of the information differs from records previously submitted.

 

I'm still fooling around with it, and I have definitely found out some very interesting stuff, so I thought I'd dig this one out of the vaults.

See, I always thought our family was pretty much 100% purebred Irish, but it turns out... not quite.

Now the trail for the 7/8ths of my family tree which does trace back to Ireland pretty much all dries up within two generations of jumping back over the ocean. Seems they weren't too good in the years 1800 and before about keeping vital records on the Irish Catholic farmers. So for most of those families, once the thread goes back to Ireland it's pretty much a dead end.

One of my eight G-grandparents (on my mother's side) was colonal New England stock, dating back to several of the real founding families. Back to within a couple months of the Mayflower. And those people documented EVERYTHING.

Turns out a distant cousin (I've never met) on that side applied to the DAR 30 or 40 years ago and did just craploads of research to document the family connection to revolutionary times. (She got in.)

Finally I got another cousin to ship me her documents (a box of about 30-40 pounds) and I've been spending months sifting through it (and I've still only just started).

That's where I found out that Giles Corey, executed at Salem for witchcraft in 1692, is my 10th G-GF,

Digging a little farther I find out that our lineage in fact traces back FARTHER than the Mayflower -- another of my 10th G-grandparent couples was a pair made up of an English settler and the daughter of one of the Native American chiefs in the Barnstable County, Mass. area (Cape Cod), Mary Little Dove Hyanno.

Her grandfather, Iyannough, was supposedly the sachem (chief) who helped the Mayflower settlers through the first winters on the Cape. Although I gather the era of good feelings went to hell within a couple of years, mainly thanks to Myles Standish.

The family name lives on now, of course, in the name of "Iyannough's Port."

If it wasn't enough that I date ancestry back to the days of Cape Cod, another interesting tidbit came out in my Googlegasm: Mary Little Dove Hyanno, like most of the Wampanoag tribal group, was noted among the indigenous tribes for having unusually pale, freckled skin and reddish hair. According to the Googleverse, tribal legends traced the red hair from "men who came in boats from across the ocean" several hundred years before.

Most of my Irish ancestors on my father's side have reddish hair and freckles, and mostly hail from the northern and northwestern counties of Ireland, generally believed to have been settled in the Middle Ages by, yes, red-haired and freckled Vikings.

So while I thought this was the one branch of my family which was going to leave the ginger-haired Irish behind, turns out the Viking marauders may have beat me to the punch by a thousand years or so.

Oh, and while digging through the tribal connection, the Googleverse also revealed that either there is no God or he has a hell of a sense of humor: Apparently I am a 10th cousin once removed of ... oh hell, I can't even say it.

 

Say it. SAY IT!

With the red hair in New England, you could bypass Ireland directly there and take it straight to Leif Ericsson's party landing in North America. That's cool.

 

I'm still doing it. One side is Scandinavian and holy crap did those people like to keep records.

I kept the tree on ancestry.com and the malletheads are still quite active.

 

CUZ!!!

 

Somebody asked me if my "Native American" ancestry meant I was going to go the Elizabeth Warren route and claim grants, scholarships, etc etc, and I said no:

At the 10th-great-grandparent level, you have 4,096 ancestors.

As of now I have evidence that one (1) was indigenous Native American.

1/4096: .00024414.

Ehhh, I don't think so.

 

Sure, wouldn't surprise me at all.

In fact, googling back into the background of the Iyannough family of Wampanoag Indians, there is some very very weird stuff (certainly by our societal standards today).

Let's just put it this way: looks like they didn't seem to get out of the house much.

 

Oh boy. Fooling around today, I found out that I apparently share an 11th G-GF with ...



But, I am not a crook.


In the Starman Justice Department, I found out that one of my ancestors in one of the fairly adjacent "pods" of the family tree was at one point sentenced to hang for murdering Indians in the late 1600s in what was then the frontier area of Massachusetts. He was pardoned, apparently, through the successful use of the 'they needed killin' defense.

BUT (Paul Harvey inflection) 15 or 20 years later, I found out, he was killed in "an attack by Indians."

Imagine that.

Happily his daughter got out of there in time to marry some guy and spawn some rug rat who eventually helped lead to me.

 

For anyone doing work on Norwegian or Swedish records here are two resources I've found to be excellent.

Norway:

http://arkivverket.no/eng/content/view/full/629

Sweden:

http://www.arkivdigital.net/

You have to know the specific areas / locations to look in, and it takes a while to get in the rhythm working through the records, but these have been tremendous resources for me. The Swedish site is a pay site, but worth it if you know where to search. Knowing where to search is the key.

 

It's actually kind of sad: if somehow I printed out on some football-field-wide sheet of paper my entire genealogy in true "family tree" style, 7 of the 8 great-grandparent branches (i.e., mostly the Irish) wither out after about four or five generations, while this one humungous trunk mushrooms on literally thousands of years into the past.

What makes it even more ironic is it is through my maternal grandfather, who died before I was born, and even further it is through my mother's MGM, who died before SHE was born.

 

So the branch you have the most information about is also the one you have the least emotional/psychological sense of?