I wish there were a “dislike” button on CC. As a female, I’d like to think that my future descendants would care as much about me and my family as they do about my ex-H and his. Maybe it’s because I’m female, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why anyone would want to fill in all the paternal lines before starting on the maternal lines.
@Pizzagirl this thread moves fast, but that “clock” thing that you did for your niece is an absolutely beautiful idea.
Also:
I think this really depends. As I mentioned way far back, spouse’s ancestors were here for a very, very long time before anyone bothered to learn English. They spoke German (or, what my MIL says was German… I have a feeling it was Pennsylvania Dutch or something similar) and no English. It wasn’t until spouse’s grandparents generation that they bothered to learn English (when they left the Amish or Mennonite community where they had spent generations).
My great-grandmother never bothered to learn English, though she was only here for about 15 years before going back to Hungary. I’m not sure about other immigrants.
@jonri I’m with you. I care far less about my dad’s family than my mom’s. I don’t think it has anything to do with the fact that I’m female really but more that I am much closer to mom’s family. I have never felt connected to my dad’s Irish or German/Jewish ancestry but I feel very close to my mom’s Hungarian Roma and British family. Of course, since we’re Roma that line of research dies with my great-grandmother as no one bothered to record Roma births it seems 
(or they haven’t been digitized and I can’t speak Hungarian). My British family was born, married, and died in the same church for several hundred years so those records were easy to track lol
Because you don’t have to go too far back to find that paternity controlled just about everything. Consequently, it can be much easier to find records based on it.
One generation back on my mom’s side and two back on my dad’s side everyone for as far as we know farmed. I imagine that’s the pretty typical situation.
Given that names follow patrilineal lines, I imagine it’s simply much easier to trace through.
On my mother’s side, most of my ancestors over the last 250 years or so were either cow dealers (a common Jewish occupation in Baden and elsewhere in rural southwestern Germany), or horse dealers &/or suppliers to the Prussian army (the same in rural northeastern Germany). I did not follow in their footsteps! Although until about 50 years ago, there were still some German-Jewish cow dealers from southern Germany up around the Catskills, still speaking their antiquated dialect, based largely on Western Yiddish (which died out through most of Germany in the 19th century) mixed with the local South German dialect.
@ Vladenschlutte,
Most Americans are descended from ancestors from different cultures. How far back you can go in any line depends upon who the males and females in your tree were! If I just traced my father’s father’s family, with myself as #1, I can go back 6 generations and I’m just going by Irish naming customs for the last male name. If I just trace my mother’s father’s family, I can go back 5 generations.
By following the lines I can find information about, I can get at least some names 15 generations back.
In my case, that’s in large part because I have 7 great-greatgrandparents who were poor Irish Catholics. Because of the penal laws, which made Catholicism illegal, you can’t go back too far. No baptisms or marriages performed by a priest could be written down during the English occupation because if the record were found the priest and participants were all facing prison or death.So, the parish records for the great-grandfather who supplied my surname begin two years before his birth. Before that, there are no written records.
Because my other great-grandparent was a New England Yankee, I can trace her family further back. Again, though, if I trace her father’s family, with her as generation #1, I can go back 4 generations. If I track her mom’s father’s family, I can go back 8 generations.
So, unless your ancestors all come from the same patrilineal culture, it may not be true that it’s easier to trace the male line. In a lot of American families, it’s easy to trace the family after it’s arrival in the US. Which line it’s easiest to trace may depend upon when the ancestors arrived in the US, not whether it’s male or female.
Other things affect it too. Some families are better about keeping family bibles, etc. than others. Some people were literate; others weren’t. Some served in the armed forces or did something else that brought about the creation of the record.
It is usually easier to trace the paternal lines of one’s mother and father, but I personally find it very meaningful to be able to say that after many years and with great difficulty, I now know all the names of my maternal ancestors back to my maternal grandmother’s maternal grandmother’s maternal grandmother – a woman named Hina who lived from about 1740 to 1777 in the town of Emmendingen, Baden, had three children, and was the first wife of a man named Seligmann Samuel (i.e., son of Samuel, since this was long before the Jews in Baden were required to take hereditary surnames in 1809). How do I know that was her first name, given that it doesn’t appear in any documents I’ve been able to find? Because I discovered that each of her three children named their first daughter Hina, and under Ashkenazi naming conventions, they almost certainly named them after their deceased mother. Once or even twice, I couldn’t be absolutely sure, but three times? Not a coincidence.
And why is it meaningful for me to know all these women’s names going back so far? I’m sure it has something to do with my own history, along with the fact that my mother (Marianne, 1923-1975) was very much my role model as a parent, and I know from stories she told me as a child that she modeled her parenting after her own mother (Dora, 1889-1946), who took it from her own mother (Lina, 1862-1944), who took it from her own mother (Rivke, 1818-1912, whose grave I have visited), and so on back through time. The way I look at it, all these mothers and grandmothers helped make me who I am.
I like my dad’s side better because they have different last name. In my mom side the last names are all the same. My dad and my mom has the same last name. It can get boring.
What a great story! You might find this interesting, bevhills!
I was really hoping your reason was purely expediency. That having been said, it’s not universal. Males were also more likely to emigrate, more likely to die suddenly from misadventure (which can result in just disappearing off the face of the earth, or at least the face of Family Search or Ancestry) and equally likely to change their names. I’ll grant they’re more likely to leave military records, though.
I work the direct lines, mostly, and on both sides. I just work at one family group until they begin to drive me mad, and then pick up a different one. I can usually find someone in the 900-plus assortment of individuals to keep me busy. And in my case, two of my three best (and most easily) documented forbears are women; my biggest roadblocks are two men and two women, three of them on my dad’s side.
Genealogy is an odd, and sometimes astonishingly equal-opportunity, duck.
It depends on the names. Given a common enough name, you may as well not have one. There are a terrifying number of George Smiths in England in the 19th century, even when you weed out all the ones who didn’t live in London.
Yup. Given the nature of the research, the fact that not everything was recorded (or recorded properly,) you start where you can. And if you are trying to forge some connection to those ancestors, some understanding, you may choose to pause on the ones of interest, whatever that means to you.
In some cases, my issue was going from a woman’s married name back. I knew X married Y, but a lot of the records didn’t name her parents (even birth records don’t always include the mother. Complicating that is exactly when the record was created. I have New England lines where even an old record assumed a 2nd wife was the birth mother. Some of that depends on who dug up what, when and how.)
For the gal from ME who married the guy from GA (in NYC, no less- I just found that record, yesterday,) her records generally show Cumberland, ME. That’s the county, not the town. Part of the fun is the puzzle. And like all good puzzles, part of that is, yes, how it can drive you mad.
Thank you Pizzagirl! IIt is interesting. When my father brought a date to a club Sophie would stop singing and say" You didn’t ask me for tickets! You must be doing better than I am! Very interesting.
Thanks for the tip about Ancestry and the free original 13 colonies stuff.
Remember that some of this research can prove valuable for college scholarships. There are scholarships for descendants of those who fought in the American Revolution, Civil War, WWI, etc.
I thought I’d have an easier time finding the patrilineal sides for both DH and me. Um, no – the women were far easier to find. The women tended to keep better records and save family documents! On both patrilineal sides, men have left their families, emigrated without spouse and children (making it harder to determine if this is the right guy without more names to match up as confirmation), or with the Irish side, too many Keatings and Whites who left in the 1840s as solo child travelers, and therefore difficult to find out through census records where they lived and with whom after they arrived in the US.
Yep, I agree it’s trying to fit the pieces together that is both the fun and frustrating part. Sometimes you get it wrong.
Some of my break throughs have come in surprising ways. One story involves a maternal ancestor whose name is lost. My male ancestor was married and had many children. His wife was the D of someone who came on the Mayflower. So, all of his descendants were thought worthy of membership in the Mayflower Society. If you look at old membership lists, some of my direct ancestors belonged. I thought that was great!
But then…somebody noticed that his wife was only 10-12 years older than the oldest child. Uh oh. Someone did some research and found a deed in which the H conveyed property which belonged to “my late wife” at a time at which the Mayflower D/wife was very much alive. So Mayflower D was wife #2. The descendants of his oldest 2 kids were declared ineligible.
This meant “kicking out” some members and “kicking out” an honorary member --a famous person who had never joined but whom the Mayflower Society included on its list of “famous descendants of Mayflower passengers.”
The person involved was…Winston Churchill! It was while reading the explanation of why his name had to be removed from the list that I suddenly realized I was related to Churchill. We are both descended from the same "too old to be Mayflower D’s kid ancestor. " And while, as DonnaL says, I have to verify, Churchill’s American ancestry has been very well researched, so I suddenly had lots of information about the family. (Interestingly, Churchill’s grandson gave credence to the idea that Mayflower D was the mother of the oldest two kids long after the Mayflower Society itself said that was too unlikely to allow his descendants to join. See next to last paragraph. http://www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/geneaology/churchill-s-american-heritage)
And while I know we are not supposed to discusss politics, it also means that “cousin Winnie” (well…7th cousin once removed, but still) and I are NOT related to Sarah Palin :)!
(A few years later, I did find a Mayflower ancestor, but a different one.)
Sometimes.
My paternal immigrant was Daniel O’CommonIrishName from Cork County, Ireland during the mid 1800s… yup good luck with that one 
I have been on Ancestry.com for years. I finally get it covered through the U because we’re using Ancestry for the project I’m managing. I’m not sure how she did it, but the PI got the U to cover the cost of my account claiming it was necessary for the project. I appreciate it lol.
My British side was easier to trace through women too but that’s because it seems that the men liked to die off young. They were all seamen and an astounding number of them were lost at sea.
On the subject of women’s status in society, don’t count out your New England Yankee grandmother.
Some of the Connecticut and RI families used a grandmother’s maiden name as a man’s first name.
Uncles and grandfathers Jerome (as in the link on post 195), Bennett, Gilbert, Waterman, Wells, Champlin and others acquired their first names from a maternal grandmother’ last name. These women seemed to be a pretty no-nonsense bunch, and their granddaughers I knew certainly considered themselves fully equal partners.
My great grandfather evidently agreed, and was fond of saying “educate a man, you educate one person. Educate a woman, you educate a family.” I thought that was really cool.
And today several news stories are carrying articles about the descendants of the real life “Uncle Sam.”
All of my ancestors were Ashkenazi Jews who came over in the early 20th century. My dad’s family came from the Russian empire in what is now Ukraine, my mother’s from what is now Poland.