There is family lore on my (adoptive, so I’m not bio related) dad’s side that so-and-so was chief silversmith to a Romanian King (Ludwig maybe? I’d have to look it up). But it’s a side that is all filled with tall tales, so I highly doubt it.
Who knows, @Pizzagirl ? Could be true, or partially true. My grandfather shared a story from before he was born that I discounted as so far-fetched as to be wholly unbelievable. But a few years ago I ran across a newspaper story that matched my grandfather’s account completely.
What I find frustrating is my DNA on ancestry.com shows a whole bunch of people at the 2nd and 3rd cousin level but when I message them, no one responds. I’m sure we each have family photos the other may not have, amd it’s sad to think of not sharing that, along with other info. Did they only do DNA in order to verify their ethnicity?
Has any chinese adoptee used 23 and me to help locate birth families? If so can you share your experience?
Yes, I returned to the old country. I met with the historical society in the town where my ancestors lived and gave them information on what happened to the emigrants. I stood in the church where my ggggrandparents married. It was an experience.
I traveled to England about 30 years ago and visited the little village that my great,great grandfather, and his 8 year old son - my great grandfather, emigrated from back in the 1840s. The place looked exactly like a Masterpiece Theater version of Small English Country Village for filming a BBC series or something. We saw the headstones a bunch of ancestors buried in the yard of the old Gothic-style village church.
I was looking for the small thatched-roof house where my grandfathers had lived, but the streets and addresses were not marked. So we stopped into the combination post office and general store to ask directions, and the young woman behind the counter had our same last name - a distant cousin. She was a descendant of the branch of the family that stayed put, and I am a descendant of the branch that packed up and left for the US.
We found the little thatched roof house too. Apparently still unchanged and people were still living in it. I have a picture of me standing in front of it.
Oh oh oh, I LOVE genealogy. That is what I do when I’m not preparing one kid or another to go off to college.
First, I have to mention my FAVORITE ancestor and part of why I do this. My 4th great-grandmother on my maternal line (mother’s mother’s mothers…) I was able to find through Danish church and census records. Her name was Woldborg Sorensdatter (b. 1752 in Denmark). She and her husband were farmers and her husband died early, leaving her with seven children. Most women in this position would re-marry (usually to a younger man with his eye on the farm). But she continued to work the farm with her children and raised at least six of the seven to adulthood (quite a feat in those times). To me this is a perfect example of why I do genealogy.
And even families like mine, filled with farmers, day laborers, and tradesmen will have a dash of excitement here and there. My 11th great uncle was John Proctor, hanged for witchcraft at Salem. Here’s a bit from the Bowery Boys’ NY history site (they have a great podcast) on my 11th g-grandfather, Thomas Baxter, whose materials built the Wall that Wall Street is named after:
There’s already lots of great advice here, so I’ll jut add a bit. I’d ignore the Y and mitochondrial study until you’ve spent a lot of time with the “regular” DNA. Although as others have said, if you’re female do get a male relative who shares your father’s Y to do one of the Y tests if possible so you’ll have that info when needed.
I have tests at Ancestry, 23andMe and FTDNA. I’d recommend Ancestry for genealogy research, though 23andMe is getting a little better. Absolutely talk to every relative possible in your background and scan/photograph any photos or paperwork they have. My great-grandmother’s immunization paper from Denmark was key to tracing her family and everything matched up with the church and census records in Denmark. WARNING: Don’t “click and add”!!! Many (probably most tbh) people at Ancestry have trees that are at least part (sometimes mostly) crap. We’re talking children who are older than their parents, women having children at age 4 or age 90. And lots of stuff that is just as wrong but not as obvious. If a tree’s “sources” consist mostly of other trees, run quickly in the other direction. If they have “real” sources, it’s still best to take the time and verify for yourself. One other hint – dig sideways as well as back. It can be very helpful to see the birth/marriage/death certificates of your ancestors’ siblings, etc.
To me, the paper trail is the “real” genealogy. DNA is great to verify relationships and to link up with cousins (close or distant) with whom you can share information and find together what you couldn’t find alone.
Someone mentioned gedmatch, which is a great resource. You can download your DNA info from each of the three sites I mentioned (or could at the time) and upload to gedmatch. This allows you to match with people on another service. They also have some really interesting tools if you just want to know your “geographical” history.
For genealogy, definitely check out familysearch.org. This is the LDS genealogy site and has TONS of information from around the world. Sometimes they have photos of the original records or have all the info recorded. Other times you may have to order the microfilm to be delivered to your nearest LDS family history library. The prices are low – mostly just to cover the shipping I think. findagrave.com is also useful.
As you can tell, I could go on and on and on…
If anyone has ancestry in Denmark, Norway, or NYC, I am pretty knowledgeable in researching those areas, so feel free to message me any questions you have. Or any general questions!
My friend who did this with his Romanian ancestry went with a whole group of like-minded searchers who all had roots in Romania. They were mostly 30s and 40s young professionals who had done this research and were very interested. He told me that many of them had very elderly relatives who had left these countries as youths (often fleeing persecution) and who couldn’t possibly understand why their descendants were so eager to go back. They felt like - we risked everything we had to leave these hell holes, it was a horrible hand-to-mouth existence, why do you need to see it? Interesting perspective.
@hayden “I’m sure we each have family photos the other may not have, amd it’s sad to think of not sharing that, along with other info.”
You might try adding some photos to your family tree. Some of those people may eventually find them. Anyone can copy it, but It will show you who copied it. Then you can reach out to them again once their interest is piqued.
@snoozn “To me, the paper trail is the “real” genealogy. DNA is great to verify relationships and to link up with cousins (close or distant) with whom you can share information and find together what you couldn’t find alone.”
Some people prefer working with the paper trail, and don’t do much with the DNA. Many more don’t know how to use the DNA effectively to help them construct a better tree. The best approach to building a high quality tree is to work back and forth between the two. My friend has a tree on her grand father’s side (Mother’s father) going back 8-10 generations on almost every line. After the DNA testing and a bit of analysis, she now knows that he was not her DNA grandfather, and she is now working on discovering who her DNA grandfather was. The point is that you need to have both to get it right.
How is FamilySearch different from Ancestry? Aren’t both based on records the LDS has collected over the years.
(Years before the internet I visited the Family History Library in Salt Lake to do some genealogy for a day. It is great! that the days of searching microfilm are over and everything can be done from the comforts of home).
@Pizzagirl My mother was the one in my family who couldn’t understand why anyone would want to go back to the old country. In her view, those who got here were lucky to get out. She was also of the view that it was crazy to dig up the past.
For her, that was very personal. In my research, I found out that my mother had been married before she married my father and that her first husband and young daughter died in an accident. I uncovered the i formation (all happened in this country) after both my parents had passed away. My brother only knew that my mother had been married before. My only relative who would have any additional information remembers going to my mother’s wedding but she was young. She did remember that no one talked about my mother’s first family.
My two younger half-siblings didn’t know that their father had been married prior to being married to their mother until I showed up on their doorstep. Their existence was not a secret to me (I had seen my half-brother when I was about 5 or 6 and he was a baby), but mine was a secret to them. I was from a fully legitimate first marriage - born 11 months after my parents got married – and it was an amicable divorce, no abuse or adultery or addiction or anything where anyone had anyone to be ashamed of in those days. It was all so ridiculous, the secrets.
Bromfield, it’s a real shame your mother couldn’t be honest about her sorrows and the death of her first husband and daughter. That must have really haunted her. I think we are much better now in acknowledging that it wouldn’t have taken away from her love for your father and you/your siblings to have acknowledged / mourned these other folks.
^ This raises the question of what to share with others. In other words, where does hurtful gossip end and family history begin?
One of the people on my DNA circle is descended from my grandfather’s brother (B1). Another brother (B2) died in his early 20’s. My grandfather told me that the whole family was attending a family reunion and B1’s wife and B2 were caught fooling around. B2 was so distraught at the embarrassment and shame that he shot himself. He took a while to die and in that time came to regret his suicide. Really, really sad.
Anyway, if this person who is descended from B1 doesn’t know the story, would you consider this family history and share it? I wondered about that and decided it was none of my business until all people in living memory have died. So I plan to put it in my own notes as a rumored story, but not mention it to B1’s grandchildren or even grandchildren. Anyone disagree with that? I would be interested in your thoughts.
It’s interesting to me to see where my ancestors came from geographically, but I have no desire at all to research people I may share lineage with.
From my perspective, we are all related as humans. And we share 50% of our DNA with bananas, so I just don’t feel this pull to find the genetic connections that some of you do.
But I think it’s a cool hobby if you like it and it resonates with you. As for family stories-the ones that we had Iroquois Indian and pacific islander in our lineage, it was neat before I found out it wasn’t true with the genetic results. Now it’s just kinda sad that I didn’t have Pocahontas as a great great grandmother. The real stories (as mentioned above) are often a lot less epic and romantic, and probably best left to the sands of time, in my opinion.
“But I think it’s a cool hobby if you like it and it resonates with you. As for family stories-the ones that we had Iroquois Indian and pacific islander in our lineage, it was neat before I found out it wasn’t true with the genetic results. Now it’s just kinda sad that I didn’t have Pocahontas as a great great grandmother.”
Yes, it’s very common for Americans to have family stories of an “Indian princess” ancestor, often a Cherokee. But most of those stories turn out not to be true. This has given rise to the saying among some real Native Americans that the largest Indian tribe in America is The Wannabes.
I don’t know what you should do, but it is interesting to think about how that information might affect things.
I am very close to one of my second cousins. I was talking to her a couple of years ago, and she mentioned how concerned she and her mother were about her brother’s apparent depression “given the strong history of suicide in our family.” I didn’t what she was talking about, and it turned out that several deaths in our shared extended family that my branch of the family had always talked about as “accidents” had always been openly acknowledged as suicides in her branch of the family.
This difference in how these family stories were conveyed had led to very different versions of family narratives for the two of us, and fundamentally different understandings of the essential character of our extended family. Her branch’s narrative had always been of a very sad, tragic family steeped in melancholia, while my branch’s version was more of a family history of swashbuckling daredevils who died young doing daring things. And it even caused different interpretations of present-day events; for example, while I might think that our extreme-sports-enthusiast cousin was merely reckless, she thought that he had a death wish.
After that conversation, I started talking to my elderly relatives in my branch of the family and, sure enough, they had to acknowledge that great-grandpa probably didn’t just fall out of the window, and great-uncle “might not have been” cleaning his gun when it “accidentally” went off, and that it probably wasn’t a coincidence that these deaths happened in close proximity to other family deaths that were not also probably not-quite accidents.
This wasn’t even anything that directly affected my identity, but it was jarring nonetheless.
I think our family should have been honest about the stories from the start, but I think these are different kinds of stories the one you are thinking about.
@TatinG familysearch is free, ancestry is not. Ancestry seems to give me better results. Familysearch results often lead to records held by ancestry. Ancestry.com can be accessed for free from a LDS Family History Center. You can even print stuff, save jpgs, etc.
OK. Thanks. I have a subscription to Ancestry which seems to be the most complete source, although some individual states have a nice comprehensive online record of deaths, births and marriages searchable for free.
We have no Indian princesses in our family lore although we do wonder where the brown skin color comes from when all the people on that side came from Scotland. (I guess I better do the dna test!) Our family myth goes back to Peter Stuyvestant- governor of New Amsterdam. I had a great aunt with Stuyvesant as her middle name and according to family lore, her parents received $100 from some society for doing that. I, however, have never found a link to the man.
My favorite family true story involves my great great grandparents who with a couple of children left Scotland and went to Australia. They were there about ten years and then packed up a bunch of kids, losing one on the voyage and landed in Canada to farm. I would love to know why. And why Ontario for farming? Fascinating stuff!
If anyone sees a deal for the dna test for Ancestry.com, please share!
@TatinG, For me the difference is more like using a different search engine. Sometimes familysearch is google and ancestry is bing. Sometimes vice versa. In cases where the information but no image is available online, I like to get the microfilm of the original document. There’s often additional information in the original document. Also old documents are just cool!
Speaking of family lore about Indian princesses, I’ve noticed something rather similar in the course of participating in various Jewish genealogy groups on Facebook, and in corresponding with people who contact me: the phenomenon of people who aren’t Jewish saying that there’s a family tradition of a Jewish great-great-great-great-great-grandfather (usually a rabbi, of course!) and that they have an intense desire to prove it true. Sometimes because they’ve always “felt Jewish” (whatever that means), even though it’s obvious that they barely know anything about Judaism or Jewish history. To me, it’s very reminiscent of the Indian princess idea. As someone for whom being Jewish doesn’t seem the least bit exotic, it’s a strange thing for me to encounter. Even though I always try to help if I can.