Did they send the list of eligible cousines with?
I have very close Iranian friend and the more I learn about Persian culture and customs, the richer and more fascinating I find them to be.
I would love to travel there one day.
Have you ever been there? Can you speak Farsi?
Tell your cousins to release the British sailors before Prince Harry comes down and fucks up their shit, like in 300, man.
You people are so hung up about this ancestral homeland shit. Dude, you're American now. Your homeland is the mall, just like all the rest of us.
Yay! That's great!
The bad news is he did this because he's becoming a Mormon.
B, just because you're a Belgian/Moldavan mix doesn't mean that the rest of us have crappy homelands.
That's far enough back
How far back in years?
I met an Iranian a couple of months ago who claimed that around 1950 when everyone had to register a first and a last name, a lot of villagers came up with names like "Mister Ali the most honored honorable kick-ass pious awesome dude, from Shiraz."
Haji Agha Najafi
Indiscretion error?
Yeah, one bit of my family on my father's side is big into genealogy, and we have a complete tree (it's enormous) that goes back to the 1500s. Compilation was greatly facilitated by the family living on the side of the same rainy hillside for about 450 years. It also has this odd fractal quality, because until my generation there were about 8 names for boys and 8 for girls that just got used over and over according to some loose rules. So every bit of the tree looks much like every other bit.
Even better, though, is that one of the family genealogists is also a bit of a loon, and wrote a book that extended our heritage back beyond the documented records in a rather, uh, freely speculative fashion, all the way to Biblical times, and one of the sons of Moses. No, really. He privately printed a thousand copies of the book and everyone thought he was going to lose a lot of money. But our American relatives, god bless them, bought it in huge quantities.
I've posted a link to this picture before but will do so again because I like it. Those people are all distantly cousins of your Clownae.
"Haji Agha Najafi"
Reminds me of Robert DeNiro's SNL skit.
Very cool stuff Ogged.
Geneology is very interesting. Last summer, I spent a week in England and a week in Ireland in a huge family reunion. We were in Ireland to see where the father of our immigrant ancestor died. Drunk and bankrupt, he abandoned his family in England and fled to Ireland where he died several years later. Ok...so it was a week excuse to go to Ireland.
Gonerill and I must be related. I really enjoyed the book, even though it cost me $90.00.
until my generation there were about 8 names for boys and 8 for girls that just got used over and over according to some loose rules
My wife discovered in a family bible, and pointed out to my dad, that his family had reused the name of a dead child in the same generation. He said he'd noticed that himself, and couldn't account for it.
This entire post is a discretion error!
You could totally throw the lifeguard off your trail by casually mentioning your ancestor Haji Agha Karbali.
One of the nice things about a big family tree is that it kind of takes the pressure off: your life is a drop in the bucket, regardless.
@12: Fantastic. When and where was that taken?
Tracing my family line through the 18th and 19th century shows a huge preponderance of Richards and Abrahams. Around the beginning of the 1900s, it's suddenly all Roberts, Stephens, and Josephs.
6: Lake Woebegon isn't a homeland, it's a bedtime story for addled children.
18 -- around the turn of the 20th Century, I believe in southern Illinois.
21 - I don't know the story. I have had pointed out to me my paternal great-grandfather, who is a young teenager in the photo, but I don't remember now which one he is. It is one of the scraps of family memorabilia that stayed around my grandfather's house -- another is a Stanley #46 filletster plane belonging to said great-grandfather, which is now in my wood shop.
Incredible picture. Look at how adult some of the poses and facial expressions of the children in the bottom row are; particularly the boy in the middle with his arms crossed.
So is one of the small children a grand- or great-grandparent?
Whenever I see photos like this I'm reminded of this idea from anthropology that there's a fixed horizon of about three to four generations into the past beyond which everything is just obliterated from family memory.
boy in the middle with his arms crossed.
He jumped out at me, too -- weirdly, he looks just like my brother.
15: That's actually not at all uncommon.
I'm thinking my great-grandfather is the boy on the far left-hand (the viewer's left hand) side of the front row. And my great-great- and possibly great-great-great-grandfathers must be in the picture too but I have no idea who they are, I don't think anybody currently living would be able to point them out.
great-great- and possibly great-great-great-grandfathers
(and -mothers)
Huh. We've got a picture almost that big of Buck's family from a couple of years ago (five, I guess, I've got Newt in a sling.) I suppose writing up who everyone is would be a good thing to do for future reference.
Look at how adult some of the poses and facial expressions of the children in the bottom row are
In order to set up this photo, I promise you, these children have been bored for at least an hour. Half of them have tried to run off and have been spanked for it, and everyone has been yelled at a couple of times.
There's an astoundingly impressive frown on a girl in the front row.
33: It almost took that long to expose the plate too.
That's very cool. I need to get that stuff together before people forget it/die/leave the ancestral house.
Ogged: must be heartwarming for you to learn more about your family. My uncle died last week; no big deal because we were never close. The passing of an era, he was the last, did tug at me. Notwithstanding the fact that none of my cousins called to let me know, nor did they attend my father's funeral years ago. It would have been better not to have such a fragmented family. I am glad for you that your family has shape and substance.
33 is totally true. It would be true even if the photo were being taken in this day and age, just getting everybody to pose. And but, consider that photography technology was not nearly as advanced 100+ years ago.
I love sitting and looking at the faces of the people pictured. The bearded guy with big ears? The skeletally thin older man with the glare on his glasses? The pouting grandmother in black? A couple of places to the right of the girl I think idp is talking about are two girls who are smiling, which lightens up the mood considerably.
The more you look the more there is ... check out the little girl behind the boy identified in 30 -- sitting on her father's knee, it looks like, and was probably too shy to sit with the other children in front. Her father is almost the only young man wearing glasses.
For Christmas, my wife's Austrian-born father gave her a family wedding picture from 1903 with 20-odd people in it (evidently the rest had emigrated to be in Clownae's family pic), but better yet, there's a key with everyone's name and, I think, an indication of relations.
I can't help but think that, while photography and some other modern tools may help geneology (even as the death of letter-writing cripples historiography), the stretching out of generations is shortening our window into the past: my wife & I are in our 30s, with 1 small child, and between us we have 3 living parents + 1 grandparent in his 90s (plus a step-grandmother who's beloved, but not contributing much to family history). Even with growing lifespans, there's no chance that any of our parents will become great-grands, and so passing on family history becomes an ever-thinner thread.
JRoth
President John Tyler's grandson is still alive.
I don't know any of my great-grandparents' names.
I suppose writing up who everyone is would be a good thing to do for future reference.
Yes, simply doing that is all you need to do. We're frustrated by several pictures about which my grandmother says things like "Well that's my great-aunt Matilda when she was studying to be a teacher, with three of her friends, but we don't know which is her." It loses so much value that way.
This is great, ogged. Information must be organized before the people who know it disappear and it disappears with them.
Flickr will still be around in a hundred years, right? That should make it easier.
/sarcasm
42: I know all of my great-great-grandparents' names. All of them were born in the US except the two that bore my last name, an immigrant to Canada who married a woman who was born in Canada when it belonged to Britain.
The four of my great-great-grandparents that I know the most about were all born in the 1840s, almost 140 years before me. Whereas I have some friends who were born with great-grandparents who were less than 60.
There are pictures out there of one of my great-great-grandfathers, and my wife thinks I look just like him. I disagree, but I agree that there is some resemblance.
41: Holy shit.
Was Tyler the one who was dug up a few years back on the theory that he'd been poisoned? How would a grandson feel about that?
I'm always fascinated/amazed by historical linking, like needing just 9 baseball players to get back to the first professional game, or 3 steps from Bush to Queen Victoria (via QE2 and Churchill). By contrast, I can't definitively name a single relative born before the 20th C, except a certain Joe Roth who fought in the Civil War, but wasn't a blood relative anyway.
Was Tyler the one who was dug up a few years back on the theory that he'd been poisoned?
That was Zachary "cherries and milk" Taylor. That gave rise to possibly the best Letterman top ten list ever.
My genealogy is complete back to about 1810, and parts go back to the late 16th century. There's a glitch in the Emerson line -- the American Revolutionary soldier may have been a deserter -- his son may have been born just across the border in Quebec. Or maybe not.
There are several presumably-fictional links in a chain that goes all the way back to Bad King John, whom we apparently supported.
P.S. B: Lake Wobegon isn't real. It also isn't my ancestral homeland, my own parents and ancestors didn't come from where I came from.
Sorry I said anything about that touchy Moldavan connection of yours.
"The Oggeds"
I always thought Ogg was a verb.
Just googling one day I found that some guy had posted a multigenerational family tree (maternal patronimic) that ended with my maternal grandfather's older brother. Traced the lineage back to the original ancestor some nine generations previous. I had known our particular branch, but the scope of the entire tree was amazing.
Having Quaker ancestors makes some of this easier, or at least provides a lot of data, since the wedding documents have the signatures of the guests/witnesses, as well as the immediate participants. My grandparents' house (the semi-old family estate) has the wedding documents going back perhaps eight generations.
I guess none of you are Irish-Catholic. Using church records, the Irish part of my family can be traced to the 11th Century.
Bless you heart, Ned, it's only because of that Top Ten that I even recall it happening.
I almost said something about whether Tyler's grandsons's wife was a very lucky woman....
Hunting around on the Internet, I just discovered that my great-great-great-great-great grandfather fought in the Revolutionary War.
44: That's the one thing that bothers me about digital photography. I know all about backing things up and transferring to new tech before the old disappears. However, if my great-grand-kids (should there ever be such) find a box of old CDs or DVDs around and they don't play on what they have available they're not going to spend massive amounts of time or money to find out what's on them. How many people can read an 8" floppy from 1960's era word processor now?
I've found boxes of old prints and negatives from 100 years ago. That's not going to happen near as often in the future.
I guess none of you are Irish-Catholic.
O'hem.
Eleventh century? Pshaw. That's nothing.
Our family has labelled photos of ancestors back to about 1850, plus other photos which are apparently ancestors we can't identify, plus a whole book of pictures that are almost certainly from some completely unrelated family. It apparently came from the attic of an abandoned house or something like that.
Aha! Not Illinois, it was Indiana. My father says it is a "family reunion of the Adin and Lucy (Jewett) Nordyke about 1901 at the family farm in Seafield, IN". "The photo includes nearly all the Nordyke siblings and their spouses and numerous children and grandchildren, as well as some of the Jewett cousins."
I wonder how many generations back we'd have to go to find a common ancestor for two of the Unfoggetariat.
Depends if we exclude Jackmormon and gswift.
I know I have the same last name as one of you, so not more than 1 billion generations.
Unless one of you is a Bengali Kayastha, the chances of our being related closer than 1000 years are a little slim. That's something that's kind of cool about Anglo-American muttery. . . .allt he surprises in the family tree. . ."oh look, we're related to the Queen." I remember once I was googling for something from the life of Henry Percy Hotspur, and I found all the random Americans who are descended from him. A friend of mine discovered he's like a 15th cousin of his ex-girlfriend.
The giant family tree watched over by the vampiric ancestress was about the only cool Anne Rice idea I still like.
64.--We tried to connect the dots once and didn't come up with anything.
This reminds me that I inherited a huge box of photos after my mother and then my grandmother died. I really need to finish scanning them all.
Last time I did a big batch of scanning my sister and I had a good time trying to figure out who everyone in the photos was, and what year they were taken. Write dates on the backs of your photos, everyone!
"Mister Ali the most honored honorable kick-ass pious awesome dude, from Shiraz."
Brilliant.
How are the Jews running the world then, when in a similar situation they all decided to name themselves "Green tree" and "Small stone"?
Man, I really need to get on the stick with this stuff. All of my grandparents are dead, my dad's dead and has only one surviving sister. We have a family farm on my Mom's side that goes back to the 1810's, but shit if I know anything about the people who lived there before my grandparents.
One branch of my family lived in China for a couple of generations in the 19C, and supposedly some of them went native. I have no idea if this is investigatable.
How are the Jews running the world then, when in a similar situation they all decided to name themselves "Green tree" and "Small stone"?
I was under the impression the names were assigned to them, by nasty bureaucrats, often to be offensive, always to be silly and recognizable as Jewish.
One of my friends is, as far as he can tell, the only person in America with his surname aside from his parents, and maybe the only person in the world with its particular anglicized spelling. He says that three or four generations back, all the Azeris in Turkey were forced to change their surnames to be more Turkish, and his ancestor chose the word meaning "groceries", because that was his job. But now we can't figure out in what language his name could be taken as meaning "groceries". I say this in case John Emerson knows anything about that situation, because he doesn't even know when the mass renaming occurred.
In Quebec, you have the same thing: marriage registers signed by all the witnesses. Very helpful.
My ancestry has been worked out pretty completely back to the revolution, and then mostly back to the 17th century. A few very lines beyond that, but some back as far as actual documented ancestry for Europeans (outside of Ireland, apparently!) goes. I find that it's very likely that I have ancestors in common with people who have any New England WASP ancestry. I'd think it very likely, for example, that Jack and I could find a common ancestor, probably someone who lived in the 17th century, though.
That's far enough back that it's not even a real name, just a bunch of vague descriptives meaning something like "the gentleman from Najaf who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca."
That's so awesome.
72: Actually, I think the story goes that they gave them unpleasant names like "Billig" (poor) if they didn't pony up a bribe, in which case they got names like "Koenig" (king). Was this discussed here previously? Anyway, if true, this was only in some places.
Although Unfogged seems to be a relatively diverse group, I cannot imagine that it would take that many generations to find common ancestors.
One of my friends is, as far as he can tell, the only person in America with his surname aside from his parents My father, then I, used to look us up in hotel phone books while traveling and very rarely found us. Now we're all over the place. The sexual revolution did good. Or they all bailed out of the witness protection program.
I guess none of you are Irish-Catholic. Using church records, the Irish part of my family can be traced to the 11th Century.
Irish RC church records dating back to the 11th century? They must be forgeries. There are no RC parish records earlier than 1671; for most parishes, no records earlier than the late eighteenth century; and for many parishes, no records earlier than the mid to late nineteenth century.
When I was a kid I took great pride in being a descendant of William Bradford of Mayflower fame. (Mormon grandmothers love genealogy.) I've since found it's not at all uncommon. Bradford is like the Caesar's Last Breath of American genealogy -- ancient enough, prolific enough, and famous enough that now his seed is everywhere. I'd bet at least 10% of this group could trace back to him somehow.
78: My previously-mentioned FIL spent a night in the town whose name he bears... and was the only person in the town with the name! Not a single B---- lives in B----, Germany (70,000 people!). Odd, isn't it?
74.---Not unlikely indeed!
80.---I'm not positive about my family, but it doesn't seem implausible. I have heard the name.
80 -- DaveB, I can, and so we are related. I'm not sure that 10% is accurate, though.
77 -- It depends on what you mean by many. There may be a few people who can do it in under 8 -- most likely Mormons. Most of us though, it'll be like DaveB and I, if at all: 13 or 14 generations.
80: Brad DeLong has covered this ground a few times. Given how small populations were just a few centuries ago, we interrelate quite recently, especially those with localized bloodlines (e.g., 75% British Isles).
Sample math: At 25 yrs/generation, 500 years=20 generations, each generation splitting. So 2 to the 20th power = 1,048,576 ancestors. Whereas there were no more than 35 million total Europeans at the time, and ~3 million Brits. Obviously intermarriage has massive effects, collapsing family trees, but at the same time, shortening generations to just 20 years gets you a potential 3.35M ancestors in 1507.
79- Church, before that clan, before that oral tradition. Easier for us than most because the entire region we lived in was named for us and there is an actual historical record of the first person to have my surname.
"77 -- It depends on what you mean by many. There may be a few people who can do it in under 8 -- most likely Mormons. Most of us though, it'll be like DaveB and I, if at all: 13 or 14 generations. "
13 or 14 generations? I find that hard to believe. Maybe 13 or 14 generations from a patriarchal lianeage. But following matriachal lines?
"Church, before that clan, before that oral tradition."
Yeah, that's how our guys got themselves back to Moses.
Yes, quite a few William Bradfords here.
My claim to Mayflowerism isn't through him, though. It's through the same ancestor as Robert Lowell's.
86 -- Will, I mean everything. In the interim, I've been poking around in the ancestries of a couple of waspier Unf'arians (whose names I know), and found connections to me. But only in the 17th century, and usually pretty early at that. Just based on your present location, I doubt you and I have a demonstrable link, even back that far.
I don't think this is at all strange.
84 -- I think that racism and classism makes the compression much more substantial than assumed.
58. Printer mfgs. claim their archival inks imprinted on archival paper have a dark storage life of 200+ years. Of course, none of us will be around if the product claims turn out false.
Carp, do you have access to genealogical databases that people have to pay for access for? I was under the impression that doing genealogical research on strangers was not a hobby that you could idly do in your free minutes.
I hope to find some info on my great-great-grandfather in the British imperial army records at some time in my life.
Ned, that shouldn't be too hard. The Brits kept a LOT of records, and many of those should be available in some form at a good university library.
So, Charley, are we related?
Ned, I have a subscription to ancestry.com. And it's easy to look at the ancestry of people included in the database. If I didn't, the free LDS site isn't half bad -- if you can just get to the 19th century.
Jack, I'll look.
CharleyCarp:
I've got Ferguson's within three generation. Plus, you have Richmond Virginia people on your cousin project. If those people were in Virginia long, we've interbred.
Ned, if his rank was lower than that of officer, you'll probably need to know his regiment.
What are his dates? You should be able to find him in the British census.
82: I know for a fact that a town of some scores of thousands was named after a collateral ancestor of mine. I believe, however, that he never visited the place. Given the infrequency of the name, it's very possible there are no resident holders.
92 -- Yes. I counted half a dozen individuals or couples, and then quit. Not much of your ancestry is in Ancestry.com, at least not easily organized, but there's enough to catch some of the the waspier bits.
One of my great-uncles has spent decades working on this and claims to have a complete lineage going back to the 17th century but by "complete" he means "accounting for those who live within sight of him." It's not complete, it's just very linear.
My parents have a few of the photos of huge gatherings from around the era of Clownae's, one of them a beautiful picture of the whole family and a bunch of people from their communities gathered at the river for a baptismal Sunday. Pretty amazing. It's way more fun to play the game of guessing personalities rather than having dry facts to go on.
The weird thing about our family photos: all the women who died young look exactly like one another, from my great-grandmother down to my oldest sister.
94 -- Ferguson is a common name, the two I have in my CP are unrelated to each other, so far as I know. The Richmond cousins are 20th century arrivals -- nonetheless, you're probably right. I forget about my Scottish ancestry, because it's so goddam frustrating tracking Scots.
91- Have you looked at this site for British Army Family Research?
I mostly resist genealogy stuff, partly because I'm lazy and partly because I generally try to avoid the tribal thing. But if I'm related to Charley and JM (based on weird old great-aunts' tracing ancestry to 1636 in Mass. to get into DAR), that's kind of cool.
97.--Ha. I just finished composing you an email with all the names of my forebears. Right then.
So what happens if you qualify for DAR? Do you have to pony up cold hard cash before anything exciting goes on, for some definitions of exciting?
103 -- Debutante balls. Free use of the library, which was a way bigger deal before the internet was invented.
DaveL, send me an email.
Few people have 1,048,576 actual different ancestors in the 20th generation, though, because of inbreeding. Inbreeding more distant than the second cousin isn't even worth noticing, and first-cousin marriage is not at all unusual. I remember looking at some royal couple that had 12 ancestors total at the great grandparent level (as I remember) when they should have had 16. (As few as 6 is possible with the maximum number of cousin marriages). I imagine that Gonerill's rural Irish ancestors (above) are not terribly many 10 generations back.
The inbred Habsburgs had lots of problems coming from that. I knew a Dalmatian Habsburg back in Portland and he had the hogjaw.
I knew a Dalmatian Habsburg back in Portland and he had the hogjaw.
Really? That's really, really cool if true. I visit that nightmare portrait of Philip IV in the Frick fairly often, and it's a total trip to think that that was the commissioned version.
Debutante balls.
Awesome! Get ready, world, I'm about to come out!
103: Haven't a clue. On reflection, the relatives in question weren't great-aunts but my grandmother's cousins (she was much younger than her sisters), and I gather that neither she nor my dad ever had more to do with them than necessary.
On the Hapsburgs tip, PeeWee Herman's turn as the horribly mutated last living member of the Hapsburg royal line in a recentish episode of 30 Rock is fucking comedy gold.
a Dalmatian Habsburg
Here is Eszter Hargittai chatting with Otto von Habsburg, eldest son of the last emperor of Austria, and grand-nephew of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
I can plug into this too, knowing ancestors down one line to the Planter, 1635, and through his wife to the Mayflower. How do we connect up?
Mayflower? Arrivistes
Jamestown, baby.
Now I'm envious that you people are related to Heff.
Hugh Hefner. Publisher, founder of Playboy.
Hugh Hefner → Glenn Hefner → Lois Householder → Lurena Woodward → Masury Woodward → Asa Woodward → Mary Bradford → James Bradford → Thomas Bradford → William Bradford → WILLIAM BRADFORD
109: He's disappointing normal-looking. Eszter is cute for a sociologist, however.
My parents were members of the Mayflower Society through Doty and Warren. They reported that the members were unpretentious. They didn't say undistinguished, but the one member I've met was a low ranking co-worker (LPN) and a nativist winger. If the most notable thing your line has accomplished in the last 400 years boarding the Mayflower, there's reason to suspect some sort of problem.
My parents were members of the Mayflower Society through Doty and Warren.
I thought you said you were Welsh?
A different line was supposed to be Welsh, but I've found no evidence of it whatsoever and can't even figure out how the rumor got started. None of the names back to 1800 are characteristically Welsh, and most are characteristically non-Welsh. So I have renounced the thieving, short, dark, dirty Welsh in all their works and all their ways. (Take that, D^2!)
If you have to claim a meaningless sentimental ancestry, Welsh is one of the best, though.
DaveL, you're not related to me, so far as I can tell. You do appear to be rather closely related to Thomas Jefferson, though, if that's any consolation.
DaveL and I are likely related (I'm descended from TJ's brother). (I know random shit that has theoretically been proven, I just don't know where the info is).
They reported that the members were unpretentious. They didn't say undistinguished, but ...[i]f the most notable thing your line has accomplished in the last 400 years boarding the Mayflower, there's reason to suspect some sort of problem
This could be my family. Our presidential connection is the breathtaking Millard Fillmore.
all the way back to my great-great-great-great grandfather, Haji Agha Najafi. That's far enough back that it's not even a real name, just a bunch of vague descriptives meaning something like "the gentleman from Najaf who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca."
Does this also apply to Ali Haji-Sheikh?
I think that's "Ali, honored dude who made the pilgrimage to Mecca."
DaveL, the ancestor you share with TJ was a fellow named Henry Isham. He apparently knew a good time when opportunity was presented.
117: Interesting, and not something I'd ever heard before. I knew one line came west from Arkansas and assumed there must be more southern roots there (also from my Texas mutt maternal grandfather), but I figured random farmers, not presidents.
Pretty much, although I think "sheikh" means different specific things depending on where you are (old dude vs. patriarch vs. some semi-official position, etc.)
Our presidential connection is the breathtaking Millard Fillmore.
You and me both. A fine workaday president, not one of those showhorse types.
I can't figure out how to email you, Charley.
I have a friend whose grandfather or great-grandfather showed up in Idaho from Texas and to the end of his life never said a word about his pre-Idaho past. He also had an ex-Mormon ancestor who was burned out of Utah because he apostasized. My friend really really hated genealogy and ancestry shit.
I've mentioned before that I'm related to Meriwether Lewis, and that this explains a lot.
My aunts are geneology nuts. They are DAR, Jamestown Society, all of the above.
I find it interesting to trace your ancestors, but I always assumed that virtually everyone can find some tenuous trace back to become DAR.
I had some thought of joining the Jamestown Society in time for the big celebration, but I was too lazy.
Several ancestors were Mayors around the time Bunyon wrote Pilgrams Progress. I take heart that perhaps my family has been made fun of for a long time.I also curse my ancestor for selling his large tracts of land in the northern part of my state. Would have been nice to own now.
I've done a fair bit of the family genealogy, and it seems my family is pretty evenly split between super-WASPy respectable types and batshit crazy poor people. Some lines I have information on back to the 1600s; others I've lost the trail on just three or four generations back, usually because someone left their hometown rather quickly for mysterious reasons.
My great-grandmother sat her mother-in-law down back in the '40s and got at least 30 pages' worth of amazing, detailed stories out of her. My great-great-grandmother's parents fled Ireland, met in Australia and moved to the Sierra foothills in time for the Gold Rush. There were SIX daughters in the family, which needless to say made them something of a curiosity on the frontier.
On the old WASPy side, some ancestors on my mother's family came over on the ship after the Mayflower.
We could still claim stuffy WASP cred because we qualify for the DAR, which has been a point of bemusement and mild horror for several generations of women in my family.
Very cool Magpie.
The stories are the most interesting part. Particularly about the batshit crazy members of the family. Of course, I do not have to go up any lines for that.
I can get mildly charged up about the idea of tracing lines that go somewhere interesting, but the really cool thing would be if you could figure out what each of your then-living ancestors was doing in a particular year. I assume we're basically all mixtures of king and galley slave once we get back very far. There were a lot more commoners than kings, but the kings got around more.
Some stories are much funnier with a generation or two of distance, though.
There were a lot more commoners than kings, but the kings got around more.
Depends on the commoners. Mine got around, largely because most of them seemed to be running away from something.
I could give a rodent's ass about the kings (sorry, PK); it's the stories that you can dig up on the commoners that keep me going back to the library. You'd be amazed how much information you can get from the right sources. My favorite example: according to her hometown paper, my grandmother was robbed of her rightful place as Raisin Queen of 1928 when some boring blonde from another city took the title.
I am with you Magpie. The commoners are much more interesting.
I keep meaning to sit my dad down and interview him to get as much information from his as possible.
My mother's the big genealogy nut in our family. I've got freedmen, Germans, even a Mayflower connection -- and NOT tatty old Bradford either -- mine was a member of John Carver's household. Yay, proletarian roots!
138. But Magpie, had said dishwater blonde not stolen the crown, you would also be descended from royalty, albeit of the produce variety. Fresno?
My favorite example: according to her hometown paper, my grandmother was robbed of her rightful place as Raisin Queen of 1928 when some boring blonde from another city took the title.
It's never too late to demand reparations. Or at least a public apology.
I'm surprised by the number of people here with Mayflower and/or DAR ancestry. How typical, or perhaps atypical, is this? Does anyone know how many Americans could (credibly) claim such connections?
One branch of my family tree saw two manslaughter cases within a 4-year period. In one case, my ancestor was the perpetrator, in the other case, my ancestor was the victim. Both crimes were brother-in-law against brother-in-law, and were committed "whilst in a state of intoxication," according to newspaper accounts. One of the miscreants had a longstanding grudge against my family, and was known to swear up and down the township that he "would gladly forfeit his own life to have the life of an Adjunct."
Sadly, one of my grandmothers was a member of both the DAR and The United Daughters of the Confederacy. I always thought that it was strange to belong to both.
would gladly forfeit his own life to have the life of an Adjunct
I had a longstanding disagreement with the Ex about whether this kind of sentiment was best described as "true hatred" or "being middle eastern."
But coming, as it does, a mere day after you were trying to talk me into moving for the love of your sister, I have to wonder whether this means you've had a change of heart and are trying to put me off, or whether you're just getting ahead of the story, as they say.
128: They say that the probability approaches 1 that you have African ancestors if your family has been in the U.S. since 1800 or before, but I don't think my racist grandmother is making any claims for Sally Hemmings. Like a lot of families that trace back to early Virginia, we do make claims about Pocahontas. Because, y'know, she was a princess.
Ogged, in Newfie families only brothers kill inlaws.
136: The royalty and other higher beings also are stickier after death. I've never heard one of those past lives people claim to be in touch with the sub-assistant redundant accountant in the most boring firm on Wall Street.
145: I hope that's true (and it's certainly plausible) because it would get my kid's ancestry up to four continents. Then we just need to find a South American and an Aussie (or declare Australia to be just a fucking big island).
147: That's why I think it would be cool to be able to identify the mixture of high and low in your ancestry at random points in the past.
whether this kind of sentiment was best described as "true hatred" or "being middle eastern."
Not true hatred, I think. Which I guess leaves "middle eastern," or some sort of approximation. See how much you have in common with us already?
These guys were in the Ottawa Valley, not Newfoundland, but Emerson's point still stands: you have nothing to fear from the women. Well, at least not in terms of outright murder.
Newfoundland extends as far south as Maine and as far west as New Westminster.
not in terms of outright murder
Good enough!
151. For Canadians of "middle eastern" (or closely approximate) ancestry, it surely does.
152. Great! And now it's time to get serious about negotiations. No multiple wives. And do you know how to skate?
No multiple wives.
Agreed. There can only be one first wife.
And do you know how to skate?
Yes! I know how to skate by.
The water up there is frozen, Og. Skating is serious business. Your swimming skills will be useless.
Hey, wait a minute, why exactly is the one who lives in the most beautiful city in the country moving to the (charming, I'm sure!) provincial backwater?
Because it's way nicer than Guantanamo.
Agreed. There can only be one first wife.
When I said you had nothing to fear from the women, Ogged, I didn't mean to suggest you had nothing to fear from the men.
Skating is serious business, yes, as Ned points out, but it's probably not a deal-breaker.
Hockey, on the other hand...You don't need to have hockey hair (known in the US as the mullet, which my sister would never stand for, in any case), but you do need to have, or at least purport to have, an opinion on Gretzky versus Lemieux.
Curling is really very exciting if you understand the game.
Lemyooks is a cancer brother, so that one's easy. Do I pass?
So, one side of my family are Sicilian immigrants. Poor as all get out, eight children. Among eight children there are six names. One died young and her name was re-used for the youngest daughter. And we had an Augustino and an Augustina (which I am counting as the same name.)
One died young and her name was re-used for the youngest daughter
They were so poor...
It's a little weird when you see the family tree. It's like they ran out of saints after five kids.
160. Oh, you had to bring up curling, didn't you? And just when I was about this close to sealing the deal.
Instruction in curling was part of my high school phys ed programme, if you can believe it. For real. And though it's not exciting in the least, it's actually a helluva lot harder IRL than it looks on TV (and who, outside of Canada or Scotland, would actually watch it on TV?).
Shivbunny played curling in gym class, too! Apparently it was about what you'd expect when you give a bunch of fourteen-year olds the opportunity to slip around a lot on some ice with rocks.
I'm cool with curling. We Americans find it has calming, meditative properties. That's not to say that you're doing much about the provincial backwater perception. Still, I think we're making progress. How does this mysterious sister of yours feel about an Iranian/American (depending on his mood) with 1 2/3 kidneys?
Just try not to get rejected on the curling rink.
We Americans
Whoa, not so fast there, immigrant.
Also, it's 3 minutes in, and the clip in 168 has nothing to do with curling. I call shenanigans.
I looked for a shorter clip but found none.
CharleyCarp, I just plunked down $20 bucks for the intro membership at Ancestry.com, and it is refusing to give me any of the good stuff. Do I really have to drop $150 to get at the interesting stuff?
Update: Although I have now managed to trace my ancestry back to Yorkshire in the 1100s, there is still no one famous from whom I'm directly descended.
Ask and ye shall receive! My dad just sent me a complete key to the identities of the people in the photo, which I will post tomorrow on Flicker. The patriarch, Adin Nordyke, my great-great-great grandfather, was a Quaker who served as a Captain in the Civil War.
Chopper, the Emerson family is also from Yorkshire or thereabouts -- the Bad King John stooge was made a commoner and exiled there.
The actual chain linking me to Aimeric has at least two purely conjectural links, one from Yorkshire to London and one from London to Massachusetts. There's also something a little fishy around 1800 but I think that the genealogy is good, but the ancestor had something to hide.
My America-hating Canadian brother watches curling on TV and second-guesses the announcer's calls. He went native in a big way.
I'm not actually related to all the my-real-last-names, since my dad's step-dad adopted him. I'm more of the Etheridge, Callaway, Munnerlyn types on one side and the Mayhews, Parsons, Blanchards, Wainwrights, Goulds and Stuyvesants on the other. I'm directly descended from Peter Stuyvesant, so I kind of always wanted to smoke that brand, but what with the lungs and all...in my NYT wedding announcement they changed the "robber baron" I had suggested for Jay Gould to "industrialist." I thought that was pretty awesome; fealty to capital. I'm pretty much guaranteed to be related to any DAR types here at unfogged, and chances are good with the daughters of the confederacy. actually, I'm related to George Bush, via the Walkers. my mom's mom knew GHW Bush and campaigned for him in the '80 primaries. when my grandmother's dad was a little boy he went with his grandfather to one of their plantations in georgia and met an old man who was a former slave and was happy "to have seen the master one more time" before he died. high on the list of things my family used to own which would come in handy is: all of southern manhattan (well, below like houston.) at least I'm sure we got something better than some punk-ass beads in return.
is that a great big indiscretion error? only to the determined and well-informed, I think. I have to run off so early rising unfoggeders can decide.
Jay Gould's reputation as industrial boogie man is way overdone: he was a m/a guy of a kind we've gotten used to since. A lot of moralism in the reporting of the time. I sure hope business history is better taught in hs than it used to be. I can find a good essay on the subject of Gould at home.
My dad's curling broom from the fifties looked like a witch had owned it; watching the wag of those things, the pattern thy made crossing one another was one of the pleasures I associate with the activity. When I saw the little push brushes they've gone to since I was nonplussed.
We have no real clue about ancestry.
My uncle traced my mum's side of the family back to the 18th century. They seemed to have yo-yo'd back and forth between London and Yorkshire/Lancashire every couple of generations for 300 years.
My dad's side of the family we have no real idea further back than my grandparents. I know one great grandfather got a medal in WW1 and that both my grandparent's families were based around Glasgow in the late 19th century. However, it's possible they either immigrated from Ulster with the Irish Catholic diaspora or that some of them were indigenous to the west coast going much further back. Since the name is found both on the west coast and (more commonly) in Northern Ireland.
http://www.spatial-literacy.org/UCLnames/Map.aspx?name=MCGRATTAN&year=1881&altyear=1998&country=GB&type=name
In 1881 they were all around that area. According to that surname profile 92% of people in the UK have a higher status (socioeconomic) name!
Chopper, you ought to keep a few grains of salt handy for genealogies on ancestry or in the LDS site. There's a lot of GIGO, and so 'trust but verify' is the watchword.
I've long since stopped hunting out dead ancestors, btw, and spend my time at this looking for live cousins. Like the rancher in Manitoba who, with her husband, is an avid curler. She gave me some good tips during the Olympics, which helped me get a little more out of watching it. I'm kind of intrigued to meet the cousin who's a guard at Guantanamo -- maybe in a decade or two.
Incidentally, re: 35 and 38
Photograph emulsions were pretty good by that time. Exposures wouldn't have been significantly longer than with modern film when shooting outdoors in daylight and glass plates are actually surprisingly high quality.
Chopper, you ought to keep a few grains of salt handy
Of course. Isn't the number of children who are reported to have one father but are actually from another something like 1 in 10, anyway? I'm guessing that means just about anything besides purely matrilineal descent is broken after a few generations anyway.
I remember seeing a study on last names that contradicted that somewhere -- that people with no known genealogical connection who share a last names are also quite likely to share genetic markers of common patrilineal descent.
Thanks for the info, CharleyCarp. I guess it'll be hard to find out what the deal is with my mysterious great-great-grandfather who has a slightly different name, religion, and nationality than he's supposed to have.
I don't feel disappointed to know that he was listed on the census as being a servant...except that I somehow don't feel the desire to tell other people of this fact.
141: Bingo. Maybe she was DQd because her father grew oranges instead.
Isn't the number of children who are reported to have one father but are actually from another something like 1 in 10, anyway?
According to this, 1 in 25, though they admit it's an inexact figure. Paternity tests should probably done as a matter of course at birth.
Paternity tests should probably done as a matter of course at birth.
Ooh, I think THAT would create more problems than it would solve.
Paternity tests should probably done as a matter of course at birth
The social utility of which is...?
Yes, I read about the heritable diseases, and how this is coming anyway, but that doesn't mean we have to welcome it.
Why is it a bad idea? Along the same lines, it's generally encouraged to tell an adopted child that they're not being raised by their birth parents.
If mom's the only one who knows that dad might not be dad, and she's not telling, where's the harm? And is the birth of a baby really the ideal time to have a nice discussion about what was really going on when she was "working late" nine months ago?
Immediately after the birth of a child is probably not a great time for the kid to have its mother's marriage break up, maybe? You could argue that a man's interest in not unwittingly raising an unrelated child as his own overrides the kid's interest in this case, but you've got to see the downside.
The harm is that the child, and the presumed father, are both being misled. And birth is probably the most ideal time to do it, if it's to be done at all--the earlier the better, really.
Also, having the test be made routine would hopefully encourage people to discuss the issue well in advance of birth.
Aren't we all Genghis Khan's kids anyway? No need to get hung up on the details.
Being misled, without more, isn't harmful. Finding out you've been misled sucks. People have enough different ways of dealing with sex, fidelity, etc. that it seems kind of nuts to declare as a matter of policy that we should set out to make sure everyone's fully informed about paternity at the time of a baby's birth.
