My father’s first name, and my middle name are his mother’s maiden name and she was from the Chicago suburbs. (She’s the DAR one though.)
Inspired by some of this discussion, I googled some unusual family names and found all sorts of references to long dead relatives on various sites. Makes me wonder who is doing the research that is related to me. My patrilineal line is impossible. David commonnameson, is ubiquitous throughout the English speaking world. Not interested now, but perhaps someday with more time.
^ If you know anything more, you can add that in google. The only references to one ggf (other than civil records, census, etc,) are related the company he worked for and his church.
Paternal 1639, what is now New Haven, CT. They later pulled up stakes and were among the first settlers in what is now Newark, NJ. Maternal, from Prussia and Germany around 1850
Wow, how interesting- and another path for me to check, thanks. I knew her father was in Gorham, which is Cumberland County. Funny, but I’ve spent time there, Harraseeket, a-yup. Your tip makes sense because her father was a sea captain.
My family – Plymouth Rock and other Massachusetts Bay colony folk. My husband’s family – 1954 via the Queen Mary under a resettlement program for Polish veterans who had fought for the Allies during WW2. My husband was conceived in Bradford. England and born in Manhattan NY – imported in utero!
@ great lakes mom
You might be surprised.
Don’t start with your immigrant grandfather. Start with your dad. Find out the names of his father and his mother, including, if possible maiden name. Work backwards. At EACH level, try to find out and fill in the names of siblings.
Partly because of my particular ancestry, as explained above, I research a lot of “collaterals.” By that I mean if I can’t find an ancester, I look for a brother or sister. Even if the brother and sister have common names, you can often find the family in the census.
Again, I’ll praise family search, which is free. To illustrate. Lets say I know my grandfather’s name is John Smith. His father and mother were William and Mary Smith. I can’t find any info about the grandfather except his birth record–ad maybe not even that. So, I use the search box on family search. I leave the first name blank. I put in the last name. I enter the names of parents in the appropriate boxes. If I know at least about when my grandfather was born, I limit my search for children born 10 years before until 10 years after his birth. So now I am searching for any child born to William and Mary Smith within a 20 year period. It’s still probable that I’ll get lots of “hits” and some of them will be for the wrong person. Still, I’ll get a lot fewer hits than I would searching for John Smith.
Often I’ll hit censuses and If I check them all out, I may get lucky and see the direct ancestor. Maybe my grandfather’s real name was John Smith, but when I click on one of the censuses for William and Mary Smith, I’ll see a Jack Smith, who is about the right age. I now have William and Mary Smith with son Jack and the names of his siblings. John/Jack may be impossible to trace, but his sister Charity or brother Horace is a bit easier.
Dad’s side dates back a long time. One great, great, great, great something-or-other was killed in the Salem Witch Trials. Another branch came from Scandanavia in the 1800s. Then there is the English side which went to Canada around WWI then eventually to the US. Mrs. Caster doesn’t know her background. They have been here so long that even the grandparents said they never heard of anyone ever coming over from anywhere. We guess they have been here for hundreds of years. Another branch had two brothers that fought against each other in the Civil War.
So how many here have a connection through Plimoth (and maybe MB Colony?) Maybe we compare a little, at some point. We’ve got a few more besides Cooke. (I shouldn’t say “we,” as it’s DH’s line, but I feel like it’s my research.)
Family Search just doesn’t give me the level of additional detail I want. I used it for leads, sometimes confirmation. But I agree totally on collaterals- or even flying wildly off target, at times. “Swing wide and see if you can find the path back.”
One delight was finding a great uncle was a census taker in the family town. Finally, got names spelled correctly and birth dates/origins. Same Census, found gggm’s missing relatives by just reading a few pages of that Census. There they were, a few doors down.
One of my complaints about Ancestry is: I put in, say,exact, Buster Brown, b Pittsfield MA 1870…and get Bernice Appleby, Oklahoma, 1949, etc. Anyone with hints, I’d welcome them. Way better than it used to be, but still odd.
I have the name Keller in my family tree. In the Phila census it was listed as Killer. No wonder I couldn’t find it!
Also interesting to see family members who either had servants or who themselves worked as servants. i was surprised to find the Russian census that my grandfather’s family had a 14 yo servant girl living with them. Otoh I’ve got another branch with 4 Irish sisters who came over as teens / young adults and were split into being live-in washerwoman for 4 different families.
In the Census for my neighborhood, at the turn of the century, most of the families in larger homes also had an Irish gal listed as a servant. Someday, maybe I’ll track one of those.
My MIL’s family didn’t have much money. Despite some nice ancestry, when her father skipped out, that was that. Her mother went to work for the phone company. Nonetheless, I asked her once, who cooked? “Why, the cook of course.”
I’ll tell you another confusion. In some cities, not all houses appeared on a street in today’s numerical order. MIL’s grandparents lived in 1101, which, per an old city map, was the third house in on the down side of the block. Today, it’s all been corrected and 1101 was reassigned to the first house, up at the other end. Sheesh.
*Paternal grandmother in the late 1860’s from Poland and settled in Warsaw North Dakota (though emigration country was listed as Russia on one of the US census reports)
*Paternal grandfather from Canada in 1880’s (Census always referred to them as French Canadian) His ancestors came from France to Canada in the late 1600’s
*Both maternal grandparents came in the very early 1900’s from Sweden (one via Ellis Island & the other via Quebec) and their families settled in the same Minnesota community.
My mother is in her late 70’s and did not speak any English until she started first grade.
I only saw one mention of Y-DNA analysis in this thread. Has anyone utilized Y-DNA testing to facilitate their genealogy research?
@JustOneDad I have used my dad’s YDNA to prove my paper genealogical tree. Using YDNA at Y111 my dad matches another man at a GD of 3. They both descend from different sons of the same father b. 1637, in either Watertown, MA or Wethersfield, CT. He has another Y111 matches to a man in Essex, England. All the same common name.
Pizzagirl’s comment reminds me that it’s often wise, in searching census (and other) indexes, to use wildcards (? for a single letter, * for multiple letters) to substitute for vowels and sometimes consonants. Not only are names misspelled (or spelled in a variant way) in many old records, but the people who transcribed the records to create the indexes were often atrocious at deciphering handwriting – especially for Jewish and other “non-American” surnames. But there are ways of getting around that, not only by using wildcards in searching, but through narrowing searches by adding known first names, names of spouses or children, approximate ages (although people often lied outrageously to census takers about how old they were), countries or states of birth, current residences, etc.
If anyone doesn’t know the names of an immigrant ancestor’s parents or the exact town where they were born, a good way of finding that information if the person immigrated from 1924-1944 – i.e., after the restrictive 1924 U.S. immigration laws came into effect, imposing annual quotas for people from different countries, and requiring a visa to immigrate – and you can’t find the information in the usual places like death or marriage certificates (for parents’ names) or naturalization papers (for the exact town of birth) of the immigrant (or of any siblings), is to order copies of the person’s visa file from the U.S. government (the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services). Those files always list the immigrant’s exact birthplace, their parents’ names (and sometimes the names of living siblings), and usually contain color copies not only of the visa and visa application (including a photograph) but also of documents such as birth certificates, good conduct certificates from local police, affidavits from friends/employers, etc. See http://www.uscis.gov/history-and-genealogy/genealogy/visa-files-july-1-1924-march-31-1944 for more information. The one drawback is that it’s taken me between 3 and 6 months after ordering to receive the documents. But I’ve been able to get the files for my mother, her parents, and a whole lot of other relatives. A pretty amazing resource for anyone who came over during that period.
I find the cultural ignorance of the transcribers pretty funny at times.
According to family search, about 15% of the people in the 1900 census in my dad’s home town in New England were born in Arizona. Of course, that’s absurd. If you look at the actual record, you’ll see they were born in “Az.” The transcribers changed that into Arizona, even though the postal code of AZ for Arizona wasn’t introduced until decades later. The people in the census were actually born in the Azores!!! To someone in New England in the 1900s, that’s what Az meant. I suspect, however, that there are some poor souls who are trying to find the birth of their Azorean ancestors in the Arizona territory thanks to family search!
For my own family, AmericanAncestors.org is one of the best sites. (It used to be NewEnglandAncestors.) The people who belonged to the New England Historic Genealogical Society in the “old days” tended to be DAR types. They were woefully ignorant of Catholic/ethnic names. According to AA, there are lots of boys with the first or middle name Plus born in New England during the early 1900s. The name is, of course, Pius, as in the various popes named Pius. So, if anyone happens to be searching for an ancester named Pius born in New England, search for Plus and you may find him!
I just wanted to thank @bevhills for starting and everyone else for keeping this thread going. It inspired me to go back to my Ancestry account and I may have poured way too many hours into researching my family over the last few days. It’s been fun and a great way to spend my few days off lol.
Another tip for anyone who is researching maternal lines. Often, women wouldn’t discuss their first marriages but keep the same last name so many family members think one thing is grandma’s “maiden” name when it was really the name of her first husband. (This is most common when the first husband passes away- which makes sense since divorce was quite rare.) If you hit a brick wall not finding birth records or whatnot of your female ancestor, see if you can find another marriage record that belongs to her 
I have found many transcription errors in the handwritten census records vs.hows up in print online. One of DH’s relatives had “Lumsk” listed as his hometown. No hits as to where this might be. Actually LOOKED at the handwritten record – it was Schumsk – which yielded me info to locate more relatives. Have also found misspelled names in the transcribed versions – so read the primary documents carefully!
I think most white Southerners of Anglo-Irish-Scot descent will have an overwhelming majority of ancestors who arrived before 1730 if not 1700.
I’ve had a lot of fun playing around with Ancestry.com. I found that Stonewall Jackson is my third cousin four times removed (or my great-great grandmother’s third cousin).
One of my ancestors was accused of being a witch in 1671. This was in Virginia, where no one was ever hanged for witchcraft, nevertheless the matter was taken seriously and court hearings were held. “Granny” Neale as she was called was all of 50 years old. People aged more quickly back then. I would guess that I probably share Granny Neale as an ancestor with a million or more people. The exponential nature of genealogy is such that racial groups tend to share the same distant ancestors over and over again, and some people will have the same ancestor repeatedly.
Good tip, rom
Another issue is numbers wrongly transcribed. No he didn’t die in the 1890’s, it was the 1870’s. I guess the curlique 7 looked like a 9. After a while you just adapt- similar to autocorrect mistakes.
Side note: this guy, the GA planter, went to Union College in NY and when I look around, so many of the family names or associates did. I tried to interest D1, but she wasn’t buying. After a while, I told her she might be able to claim legacy. Still zip.