Have you ever done your Ancestry

Sassycakes

Sassycakes

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Location
Pennsylvania
My cousin is obsessed with our family's ancestry. He has done so much research on my Dad's side. He found out that we are related to Jimmy Kimmel. Jimmy had an Uncle named Frank Iacono, which is my Dad's name. He also has a cousin Sal Iacono , which is my brother's name, and his cousin Sal has a son named Frankie which my brother Sal has a son named Frankie. I found that weird. He sent a message to Jimmy but never heard back.
 

Yes, I have gone way back and have more than a few historical figures in my tree. Nothing on my father's side though. They immigrated from Poland and I never could figure out how to get anywhere there. Thank goodness for my mother's family! I enjoy doing it and have met some cousins I never knew existed.
 

No, other than a casual look through "Scotland's people" site. I see that my maternal grandmother died during the time of the "Spanish flu", so I wonder if she was a victim of it.
I think that my ancestors came from another planet and settled on Earth after their space ship crashed. That probably accounts for the feeling that my parents and I lived in different worlds.:LOL:
 
I have traced my maternal side back to 1515 in England. But I was having a problem with my paternal side due to the fact he was Swedish and there was that pesky language barrier! However, a very kind man on this forum gave me a link to a Swedish website that helped people looking for their ancestors and I was able to go back 2 more generations with their assistance. That's a huge step for me...for 30 years I haven't been able to go further back than my great grandfather.
 
For 44 years a woman had been claiming MY husband was the father of her son, who began 8 or 9 years ago to contact my son. After 9 years (in fact, last week) my son agreed to a 23 and Me. They are NOT related. My husband was 25% native American; our son one-eighth. That woman's son NO native American dna. Whole big story that took up a chunk of our marriage but anyway.....................my side of my son's ancestry is 100% kosher. IOW, I am completely an Ashkenazi Jew going back over a thousand years. No mixing whatsoever. Wow.
 
I did, just for fun. Well I found out the man I thought was my bio dad was not. It turned out to be my mother's second husband who was told his entire life he wasn't able to have children. SUPRISE! She left him and remarried the man we thought to be my dad. I am left to wonder if she knew, she died before I found out. I have met my first cousin among other family and know for sure that my "real" dad never knew because he would have been over the moon to have a child. He was a Tracy and I have traced that side of the family WAY back. I still enjoy playing with the family tree.
 
Spent a month and a half on Ancestry.com. Following hints, you can very quickly develop a family tree back to 10+ generations using the standard $25/mo plan. And you find a lot of neat old photos. It is a great start but for serious work, you would want to do some leg work verifying lineage and gathering info or make use of Ancestry.com full more expensive options. Once you stop your plan, you can still see the tree you created. It was quite interesting and well worth the $25 I spent.The first two weeks were on a free trial.

I determined that my granddaughter is Polish, German, Swedish, French, Irish, English, Welsh, Scottish, and Swiss.
 
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katlupe said:
Yes, I have gone way back and have more than a few historical figures in my tree. Nothing on my father's side though. They immigrated from Poland and I never could figure out how to get anywhere there. Thank goodness for my mother's family! I enjoy doing it and have met some cousins I never knew existed.
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Poland is tough. Nearly 1/5 of all poles were killed in WW2 and many records were probably destroyed.
 
I was born in 1946 but given up for adoption in 1949. I never knew anything about my bio parents because my adopted mother would never tell me anything. Then, in 2006, I started looking on Ancestry and by then I had a few "clues" as to who my bio mother was. I found her right away on someone else's family tree. She had passed away in 2001. I learned that I had step-sisters and a step-brother. We made a trip from PA to MI to see them and it was an eye-opening experience. Suffice it to say, when we left, my husband said to me...Your mother did you a favor by putting you up for adoption. These people were something else and so was my bio mother. I tried to find out who my bio father was (and I think I did but he passed in 1996) and his family didn't want anything to do with me.

It was an interesting journey and a little disappointing but I did learn that my ethnicity (from their DNA test) is mostly from Holland, England, and Germany.
 
I'd like to find out about my ancestry.. I'm of French Canadian descent. I don't think there another Canuk in the area, yet my neighbor is related to Henry VIII. But I kind of noticed that somehow everybody was related to Henry VIII , or Charlamagne, Cleopatra etc. I kind of wonder how accurate this is. And secondly, I'm wondering about some problems- my dad was an orphan, and our last name is one of the most used name in Canada- there are statues, towns,, streets, islands named after people with the same surname. How do I know that this John Smith is my relative John Smith, and not that John Smith.
 
Yes, worked at it for years. It's a job that can never be completely 'done.' There is always another generation to find. DNA analysis found a previously unknown close relation as well as proved that a known was not kin at all.

It's a very interesting hobby though I never found a connection to anyone famous.
 
How do I know that this John Smith is my relative John Smith, and not that John Smith.

Do your own paper research. It's easy, cheap and fun. For recording your personal information, Google 'Family Group Sheet.' You can buy many different styles already printed for a nominal fee or download a PDF and print your own. Even Walmart and Etsy sells a small beginner packet for a few $$.

Then grab a pencil and begin filling in the blanks. Begin with your parents, then their parents and then your grandparent's going back a generation at a time. Your own knowledge/research should get you back to 1940 which is the latest census records that are available. Then pick up your people on census records and go back a generation at a time. Most city libraries can give you computer access to census records as will a free trial membership in one of the many on line genealogy sites. Yes, you can keep your records on one of those sites but, trust me, having your own paper records makes it far easier to do the basics.

Remember, Information from a public record is usually reliable. People's memories? Not so much. You can access a lot of amateur researcher's information on sites such as Ancestry but it is best to verify all with public records. But that said, it's wonderful to find an unknown 1st cousin who has done their own research and allows you to see what they know.

Warning! it's addictive.
 
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Have you ever done your Ancestry
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Oh yes, I'm not feeling 'long-winded' today so I'll just be brief.
Mom's side:
Swiss-German, with one g.grandmother that's Irish, and whose lineage I discovered was documented back at least to the 1600s.
Dad's side:
Maternal side- German, documented back to original immigrant(1717) from Palatinate, Germany.
Paternal side- Incomplete, 19th century ancestors living in a heavily German community(Salisbury, NC); suspect connection to Welsh colony in Maryland.
I should give Ancestry.com another go, I somewhat resent that they are charging me access to my family history, but am starting to accept that perhaps paying for per-compiled research is saving me the effort I no longer care to do.
 
I have been researching my genealogy well before records came online, when they did what a bonus that was. On my Scottish side I have traced back to 1600. Its like looking for a needle in a haystack for Irish records so many were either destroyed or burnt in the wars and fires. but found my ancestors from Donegal, Ireland back to 1800. My other UK and USA ancestors were relatively easy to trace.
Family Search is a free web site. Ancestry.com often has free records throughout the year.
I have gone just about as far as I can go with my search, but, I keep looking, you never know what records may come online.
 
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I haven't but my mother did a lot. She found lots of interesting things, like the great-grandmother who got pregnant at 16 yrs old by a visiting Frenchman and she had to marry a lecherous old man who already had a lot of kids from a deceased wife (unfortunately I'm descended from her subsequent offspring with the lecher not the romantic Frenchman).

And she found that my paternal grandmother was 10 years older than she'd told people. She'd gotten married at 36 yrs old but put 26 yrs on her wedding license. No wonder she was so much frailer than my other grandmother when I was young!

When I was making an unsuccessful attempt to go through my mom's boxes to dispose of stuff, I found she'd made cool photo/biography notebooks of our ancestors. There was a lot of "married, had a couple kids, spouse died, re-married someone with kids, had a few kids, spouse died" biographies, and these people kept re-locating farther and farther out of civilization (from Texas, to Missouri, to Nebraska - seemed to me like these ancestors were going the wrong direction).

Another branch seemed to be more civilized people who traced back to pre-revolutionary English settlers in America and even (finally) some French ancestors that had a family crest (that part of the family, tho presumably by no means legitimately inheritors of the family crest, sold paperweights and stickers with the family crest at the family reunions back East in Pennsylvania).
 
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