Are you interested in your ancestor's lives?

fuzzybuddy

fuzzybuddy

SF VIP
Location
The Sticks, Northeast PA.
I have only two "tales" about my ancestor's lives. One was hung for stealing a horse. And another ancestor married an Indian maiden. Knowing my family, the horse one is probably true. I'm of French Canadian stock. And unlike the English, French were quite happy to marry Aboriginals. So that's most probably true.
This is a "two fer one".
#1 Are interested in your ancestor's lives?
#2 How would you rate those online ancestor sites?
 

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I am extremely interested. A family member did shed light on one side of the family. Seems like I came from a bunch of farmers. So many records were lost during the war in Germany and Czechoslovakia it is next to impossible to find out much. I often wonder why they settled in New Jersey. I think they must have come through Ellis Island and being farmers immediately headed out to a more rural area. Maybe New Jersey was the closest, or possibly others who came before had success in settling here and wrote to them. I'll never know. I never tried any of the ancestor sites.
 
Our family has it's own genealogy site so it has been unnecessary to try others. My ancestors were an integral part of the USA, one was an admiral who sunk the 1st British ship in our war for independence and had a destroyer named for him. Our family name is on the declaration of independence. As far back as I have been able to search, we have all served our country. Family homes from the 1700's still stand in Providence RI as museums. My family line is eligible to join the "Society Of Colonial Wars", because a family member volunteered to fight the French for King Phillip before our nation declared independence. The stories are many and we have a small mountain range named for us on the California/Arizona border. At least some of their honor rubbed off on me....depending who you ask....
 

I'm interested and it has been pretty well documented for three corners of my family. The missing corner seems to be my maternal grandfather's family.

One of my more eccentric relatives was in the Revolutionary War and received a grant of land that he retired to and raised his family on, that was pretty typical. They say that when he became quite old his youngest daughter stayed with him and took care of him. One of her duties was to count his money, all in coin, every day until the day he died. It has been reported that it took up quite a bit of her time and that she was very well provided for after he died.

I have never used the online genealogy sites, I'm too cheap to join, but when I do searches on various ancestors the Find A Grave site pops up with some good information and often times has photos of the tombstones and links to other members of the deceased family.

I'm interested in the day to day life of average people in days gone by it really doesn't have to be about my family.
 
I have researched my genealogy on and off since the late 90s. I have collected piles of data and just really interesting stories.

Probably the most interesting material I got, was from my g.aunt Pearl, who grew up in Rowan County, NC in the early 1900s.

She described the daily going's on, and how visiting neighbours was a long walk down the dirt roads.

If you were looking for romance, you usually had to walk a bit further, as most everyone around was kin.
 
jujube said:
Very much so. My research has been an eye-opener. I've found out that some of my ancestors may have owned some others of my ancestors.....and definitely mistreated quite a few of my ancestors.
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That is very common in doing genealogy research on Southern families. I've had similar eye opening findings.

Sometimes when researching a white Southern family, you find a need to visit an African American genealogy site, like

AfriGeneas . Sometimes you find relatives there, sometimes you help someone get a lead on their relatives.
 
Traced mine back to the 1700's and hit a brick wall (very common sur name)..Great Grandfather survived the Civil War for 3 years.
Never figured out why the family moved from estates in Upper New York down to rural Illinois by wagon train!!
 
I'm interested...did some of my own research for a number of years, then quit. On one side of my family, some had already been researched by a deceased aunt.
The online sites when I was doing it were pretty good, although the #1 rule is NEVER rely entirely on online sites and always double-check info available online. Now...not so good online! Ancestry.com had always been for pay, then they bought up most of the free online genealogy sites trying to become a monopoly online business. Too bad even their original site went downhill, not to mention the other sites they took over. But there are still free sites. The Mormon site hasn't been sold to Ancestry, last time I checked.
 
My brother is, he's done a lot of research and has an account at Ancestry.com

Me, not so much, I just have my memories n' pictures of family and friends and that works for me.. :untroubled:
 
I'm very interested and have collected material about most of my ancestral lines back several generations.

Many states are posting primary (birth, death, marriage) records on line now which is great source material. Also, census records are available through 1940. Most public libraries subscribe to the popular for-pay genealogy sites and allow use through your library card.
 
Linda W. said:
I'm interested...did some of my own research for a number of years, then quit. On one side of my family, some had already been researched by a deceased aunt.
The online sites when I was doing it were pretty good, although the #1 rule is NEVER rely entirely on online sites and always double-check info available online. Now...not so good online! Ancestry.com had always been for pay, then they bought up most of the free online genealogy sites trying to become a monopoly online business. Too bad even their original site went downhill, not to mention the other sites they took over. But there are still free sites. The Mormon site hasn't been sold to Ancestry, last time I checked.
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Yea, I'm pretty irked that Ancestry.com was able to create such a for pay monopoly. I haven't visited the Mormon site in a while, perhaps I will, and see. The problem with the Mormon site is that some people were posting erroneous information, and as any genealogical researcher knows, if you don't have air-tight documentation, you go nothing....but here-say.
 
tnthomas said:
Yea, I'm pretty irked that Ancestry.com was able to create such a for pay monopoly. I haven't visited the Mormon site in a while, perhaps I will, and see. The problem with the Mormon site is that some people were posting erroneous information, and as any genealogical researcher knows, if you don't have air-tight documentation, you go nothing....but here-say.
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Correct.. According to them my GGGreatmother had a child at 40,two years after her husband passed away!!
 
tnthomas said:
Yea, I'm pretty irked that Ancestry.com was able to create such a for pay monopoly. I haven't visited the Mormon site in a while, perhaps I will, and see. The problem with the Mormon site is that some people were posting erroneous information, and as any genealogical researcher knows, if you don't have air-tight documentation, you go nothing....but here-say.
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To add: the place where you can find the MOST errors are census records. I was told about this decades ago by older relatives who were into research, but came across some real doozies when I started my own research- and the only way I knew the facts was the people were alive during my lifetime and I knew them.
One example: for a short period of time, my father and his parents and siblings stayed with his mother's sister, her husband, and their children; the census record lists my father and his siblings as the sister/husband's kids instead of as their nephew and niece. Another example: census record even got a much-older cousin's gender wrong by misspelling her name! Her name was Joyce, but she's listed as 'Joice,' male!
And these are only a couple of the many mistakes I've run into.
 
I've never had to use Ancestry.com as my family has told me their history. I was privileged to know both sets of grandparents and a great grandmother and a great great aunt. I know everything.
 
On that PBS program, where celebs find out about their ancestry back to 1522. They searched records of some tiny church in West Devonshire, and found some ancestor marriage information. I'm not sure, but I'm thinking it took a big boatload of money to pay people to check that far back.
 

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