I’m glad you understand, Nottelling! There’s also the thought for me, when I find the name of a previously unknown ancestor or other relative in an old document, and learn something about their life, that this was a human being just like me, who was born and lived and died, and was someone’s child and (often) someone’s parent, and loved and was loved, and yet nobody has thought about that person, or said their name out loud, in hundreds of years.* And to me, that’s a good feeling – although it’s rather sad when it’s someone who died in infancy or childhood, and it’s bittersweet when I realize that someday I’ll be forgotten too. And, yes, except for the very personal connection, it’s reminiscent of the feeling I get when I’m exploring an old, overgrown cemetery and looking at old tombstones. (One of my son’s favorite pastimes when he was younger. He was a rather unusual child!)
After all, when I was a child, the "family tradition" from my mother's parents' generation remembered the names of only five ancestors who were alive in the 1700s, and a few vague facts about them, some of which turned out to be very garbled. And that's probably more than many people.
I fell in love with my great-grandmother’s name, Amalia.
Unfortunately, she was an evil person who caused her husband’s death and quickly remarried. So I guess that name is out of the running…
I also found out that one of my maternal British ancestors wasn’t allowed to be buried in the local cemetery because she was part of some group that advocated for separation of church and state- and this was back a few centuries ago. I guess the strong-headed woman genes are strong in my family
Yes, DonnaL I like thinking of the poignancy of their lives as well.
One of my ggguncles brought his wife and four little children to the U. S for a better life. They arrived in St. Louis and were just settling in when a cholera epidemic killed all four children and his wife. His entire reason for emigrating to the U. S. for a better life for his family was wiped out by cholera in one week.
(But then he remarried and had five more children, who oddly, never married or left home, although they lived to be old people. Some sort of psychological compensation to their father perhaps)
It’s strange that I’m just understanding this now, because I’m very drawn to art or works of culture that have similar themes. Two contemporary artists that I really love are Philip-Lorca di Corcia and Sophie Calle, both of whom explore the idea that the very act of paying attention to someone – shining a spotlight (actual or metaphorical) on an ordinary person – will reveal the extraordinary in them (by implication affirming our own specialness). Di Corcia is a photographer who quite literally shines spotlights on individual faces in crowds on the streets of New York and other cities, creating these amazing portraits in which the very ordinary subjects appear as icons.
Sophie Calle has a wonderful piece called Suite Venitienne where she chose a person at random to follow and through her reporting we, the viewer, suddenly becomes utterly transfixed by the subject’s every movement, no matter how mundane. It’s as if paying attention is enough to spark infatuation.
And my all-time favorite episode of This American Life is House on Loon Lake, where a group of kids discover artifacts in an old abadoned house, sparking their intense interest in the lives of these ordinary people. We hang on every new detail they discover about the lives of these people who suddenly seem very special to us.
I think this is related to what we are talking about, sort of! There’s a creepy side to those examples because of privacy concerns (diCorcia was sued for invasion of privacy and some people have questioned the ethics of Sophie Calle’s work) but there are obviously no ethical concerns about cyberstalking your own, long-dead ancestors!
I did 23andme years ago. Recently I uploaded my results to FamilyTreeDNA (free for limited matches, $39 to unlock all matches) and GEDmatch.com (free).
On 23andme I connected with a 2nd cousin & her son. Completely accurate.
Through FamilyTreeDNA or GEDmatch, a distant cousin contacted me & shed light on the immigration of my GGgrandmother in 1860, such that I was able to access, online, the image of the ship’s manifest. Seeing old original records like that always gives me a thrill.
I am not able to follow my father’s line back, through lack of known living male relatives, and knowing very little of his family history. Following the male line can also be thrilling when you realize the Y chromosome is passed down largely unchanged. So your father’s Y chromosome is pretty much the same as his GGG[insert any # of G’s]grandfather’s if you follow the direct male line back.
It was also moving, to me, to realize I carry the exact same X chromosome as my father, because that’s all a man has, to pass on to his daughter. My father died when I was young and I like having that connection. His mother (my paternal grandmother) died before I was born and I like knowing one of my X chromosomes is directly from her (although jumbled up compared to her own 2 X’s) whereas the X that I got from my mother is a mixture of X material from both her parents.
Donna’s post is very helpful - and also explains why the genetic analysis isn’t all that helpful for piecing together Jewish genealogy. For example, my results simply say 48% Ashkenazi Jewish (representing my father’s side). Well, I know my grandfather came from what is present day Łomza, Poland. But at the time it was Russian territory and he spoke both languages. And then some of his tree had apparently lived in what is present day Belarus. And others in what is present day Germany. So does that make them/me Polish, Russian, Belarussian (that doesn’t look right), German? Or basically just wandering Jews, lol. Similarly my H’s paternal line is Hungarian - well, again, is that coterminous with today’s Hungary? Were they among those Jews in the Austrian part of Austria-Hungary where they only allowed one male per family to marry so they fled to the Hungarian part and are “really” Austrian?
And the relative matching on 23andme is somewhat useless because today’s Ashkenazi Jews are all more related to one another.
Still, you learn a lot about history and borders from doing this work and my work is nowhere near as complete as M2L and Donna’s. You take it as far as you want to. I did the bulk of my work in 2001-2003 when the Internet wasn’t as it is today. I have no doubt the databases (such as on JewishGen) are more robust today, and a lot more is digitized.
Nottelling, the rabbit-hole obsessiveness is the cool part. Also trying to prove/disprove family lore. For example, I had always been told that my grandmother’s mother had emigrated here from a “part of Germany that went back and forth between Germany and France.” The way it was described led everyone to Alsace-Lorraine. But it didn’t make any sense to me based on other pieces of data. Sure enough, it wasn’t. It was present day Bavaria. Having said that, if I dig deep enough in the rabbit hole of history, it looks like the local capital of this particular area might have indeed been in play at some point, so maybe there’s a germ of truth buried in there somewhere.
One of my little “humanizing” bits of trivia is this - my maternal grandmother (who just turned 97 on Monday) was older than my maternal grandfather - just by 8 months, but that was unusual in that day. As I did her tree, many of the women in her line were older than their husbands. Just an unusual and fun finding.
And you corns across unexpected surprises. I am a mother of twins and as I was working to get some documents translated, I asked our housekeeper if she would look at them (she is Polish Catholic but can also pick her way through Russian and I had documents in both languages). Turns out my great grandfather - for whom I was named - was a twin. His twin brother came over here at 15 by himself and became successful. He on the other hand never made it to America and died there when my grandfather was a child. I also found on a different line young boy/girl twins who died in the flu pandemic of (I think) 1917-1918. Of course that touches me because I cannot imagine. So it’s things like that that keep it interesting.
The thing you have to watch for is verification if you find someone else’s tree because a lot of people aren’t as smart as M2L, Donna or Romani :-). For example, my grandparents were Jack and Rose Lastname. I have a relative who actually works for ancestry.com (in a tech capacity) and wanted to share what she was putting up with me. So what you can do on those sites is put up a name and the system might search for matching trees, documents from census, marriage records, etc. The problem was - she put my grandmother in as Rose Lastname instead of Rose Maidenname. So it pulled in all these records to a completely unrelated person from Ohio which couldn’t have been my grandmother, the years were all wrong, other people were trying to link up with us, it all made no sense. Because she just didn’t THINK. I was quite exasperated because I wanted to use what she’d put up, but now I didn’t trust any of it - if she made that elemental mistake, there’s no telling what other nonsense there is. You have to think through what you find and not accept it at face value. And you also have to triangulate data.
“However, for the majority of non-Jewish Europeans, who don’t belong to endogamous populations, it’s basically impossible to draw fine distinctions between different ethnicities and nationalitie, like German vs. French vs. Dutch or whatever. Never mind the English. Especially given all the migrations and intermarriages between different peoples in Europe over the last couple of thousand years – really the fundamental flaw underlying these estimates, which are based on DNA databases of people who live in particular countries or geographical locations NOW, not 500 or 1,000 years ago.”
This is correct. Even a light reading of the past 2500 years of European history, with all its invasions, migrations, subjugations, and relocations will tell you that it’s going to be pretty much impossible to tell a German from a Frenchman from a Slovenian based on DNA alone. Just think how far and wide the Vikings must have spread their Scandinavian genes during their three centuries of seafaring raids. Same for the Romans with their 12 centuries of military conquests all over Europe, the Near East, and north Africa.
However I did read one paper by Svante Paabo and his group (they are the big human genetics researchers that demonstrated the remnants of Neanderthal genes in modern humans) that showed that its basically impossible to distinguish any particular current European nationality or ethnicity from Generic European via DNA but with a few exceptions. He said that modern Finns, Greeks, Sardinians, and most strikingly Basques can currently be seen as distinct genetic populations.
The example of Basques is particularly fascinating, since they are also linguistically distinct. They speak a language that is completely unrelated to any other current language in the world. Physically they don’t look any different from their Spanish and French neighbors, but it’s clear they have been a distinct population for a very long time. They are believed to be the direct descendants of the cave painters who lived in that same region thirty to forty thousand years ago.
@pizzgirl “You have to think through what you find and not accept it at face value. And you also have to triangulate data.”
I could not agree more. A lot us on cc: think in similar ways. I remember trying to explain to someone who contacted me that if their paper trail says A, but the DNA says B, that does not mean the chances are 50%/50%. lol
Reading through these ten pages, y’all seem to have European roots. Any insight into the accuracy or value of Ancestry and/or 23andMe and the like for those of us with Asian roots? I imagine that smaller databases may not be as accurate, and I don’t want to waste my money.
I don’t know about Asian roots but I know someone with African and European roots and for Africa the report gave percentages for Ghana and Senegal, etc.
The real answer to that situation is “it depends.” Because sometimes, of course, paper trails – especially the ones people find on the Internet and take as gospel without checking the underlying sources – are ridiculously and obviously inaccurate. But sometimes what the DNA says – according to a company’s interpretation – is equally obviously either meaningless noise, or represents the ethnicity percentages’ fundamental underlying flaw that I explained in post # 135. For example, if I were to get a report back claiming that I was < 1% Irish, or < 1% Native American, I wouldn’t believe it for one second. I would remember (given my known Jewish ancestry back hundreds of years, and the fact that nobody in my family left Continental Europe to go west before 1883) that it’s simply a trick of the database’s reference populations, and most certainly did not mean that I ever had an ancestor who actually lived in Ireland or was a Native American. Instead, it would probably mean that someone who lives in Ireland NOW and I have a common ancestor who lived in Continental Europe a few thousand years ago, before there were Jews and before the Celts went west into Ireland. (Or else, that that Irish person had an unknown Jewish ancestor more recently who came over from the Continent after converting.) Or that someone who’s a Native American NOW and I had a common ancestor in Siberia 20,000 or 30,000 years ago, some of whose descendants went west and some of whom went east. And so on.
Similarly, because of Jewish endogamy, the predictions by these companies as to how many generations back a given pair of Jews with no known relationship had a common ancestor, are notoriously and wildly inaccurate, and heavily underestimate the distance. If they say the most recent common ancestor was 4 generations back, you can almost guarantee that the real distance is at least 6-8 generations back. And so on.
While Donna is correct and it could really just mean there’s an Irish person today with whom she shares a common ancestor, I wouldn’t really get worked up over it if I had had that kind of result. It’s not as important for me to be “pure” in any of my branches as it apparently is to her to be “pure Ashkenazi Jewish.” Stranger things have happened and who knows who slept with whom in the mists of time.
One of the things I regret about the DNA databases is that it doesn’t appear that many Europeans, Asians or Africans participate. I would love to connect with family who did not emigrate.
Has anyone ever done a trip to “the old country” to meet those relatives and visit an area your ancestors came from? I haven’t (and have no immediate plans to) but I have a Jewish friend who did so in Romania and a non-Jewish friend who did so in the Czech Repulic and Italy.
I’ve been thinking about doing the Ancestry one. I have an 12,000 person genealogy data base and can remember five of my great grandparents. One entire side is German and the other is German and Dutch and I have records to the 1500s with many of the branches (Catholic records).
Our family visited my father’s birthplace (an island off the coast of the Adriatic Sea) when I was 9 and my brother was 7. I was too young to appreciate the visit. My Dad would go back every 3 years. My Mom, who was also from the same country, but a different region, went with us that time and then never went again.
I have first cousins in Zagreb and on the island where my Dad was born and we are in contact with one another. There was a falling out amongst my cousins in Zagreb (I stayed out of it) about family property on the island. I correspond via email with a first cousin, who has visited me here in the states. We also play Words with Friends! I have a trip planned to the island and want to take H as well as my kids and oldest kid’s spouse (trying to figure out a time that works for all of them is a major hurdle). My mother was an orphan who came to this country with her much older sister and brother. I know nothing about her relatives in Croatia–my second cousin (on my mother’s side) and I have been working together to piece together stuff about my mother’s family in Croatia.
I would love to connect with family who did not emigrate. >>
I connected with a cousin-by-rumor (as my DH calls them) in the Netherlands. He was a descendant of the first child of the first marriage and I am a descendant of the youngest child in the third marriage - women died and the father remarried. He sent a copy of a family history that has my ancestor’s name and that he went to Amerca in the 1820s and they never knew anything else about him.
@Much2learn Thanks. My inlaws have been great about providing family history. Some great family legends on H side (possibly related to a Hungarian Robin Hood-kind of guy, for one). My family legend involves Ireland and a story about a maid in the Manor House running away with one of the stable hands and they came to the US.
We’ve got a divorce a few branches up on the family tree that put some roadblocks up for years. Ancestry.com has proven to be a great resource. Some previously unknown relatives have reached out to me that way (“You’ve got my great grandmother in your tree.” or “The date you have for Tony m0minMD is not correct…”) Both my parents were only children so us kids have grown up without cousins or relatives beyond our grandparents. To find out we’ve got oodles of people running around is overwhelming. And amazing and fun to think about.
It’s more the idea that they’d have to give up their DNA in some form to an outside group.
I went to an Ancestry.com related event a few years ago where they offered the DNA kits at a much cheaper rate than what they have now. I now kinda wish I had bought at least one at that price!
As far as medical, I don’t need a DNA test result to tell me that there are heart health issues in the family.
My parents have visited the region of Northern Italy where my Dad’s family came from. My paternal grandfather was born in the US, but the family went back after his father died so he was raised in Italy. It was a very small family, but there is one living cousin who my parents were able to meet. I don’t know if they are still in touch.
