I have been doing research on and off for years on my Mom's side..the pandemic has me back online more often and I have chosen a focus.

My last job had me in London and Dublin where I was able to visit sites of my Mom's side of the family, including a girls school that my grandmother's half sister attended and the graves of family, the last having died in 1992...So sad I missed her.

In years past, not much was available yet online so I had to pay folks from far away or spent hours at the local National Archives office with a toddler asleep in his stroller..I could search micro film until he woke up.

Long before the real internet with weird text back then, I found a distant cousin who is even more engrossed than I. He is Australian and when we emailed photos to each other, we found we had different views of the same person...a potential adopted child...so cool.

I am currently back as far as I have ever been. This time on Dad's side. I have records of an old will from 1947 that listed all the heirs that were in my late aunt's papers...YAY! My 4th great grandmother, Julia, who looks to have been born in Ireland about 1780 or so can be traced from that.

I am lucky enough to have found her resting place in Brooklyn and will visit later this month.

So now the quest is to find where in Ireland the branch is from. (They came before the potato famine).

What I love about this line is that they came to NY in 1841, settled in Brooklyn and until my own parents generation, never left, most often lived within just a few blocks.

It is like solving a puzzle..I so love it..but it is a time suck..

What about you? Do you do work on your family tree?

How do you document it? I so need a good recording method that is offline.

Does anyone care? I tell family about what I am doing and I get..."Oh, that's nice"

My mother/s family has a family book. The history of the family was surprising.

The major tale is in Churchill's History of the English Speaking People, but it is not quite the same as that in the family book. The hero is different.

Some of the tales in the book are contradicted by the accounts of historians. I suspect those tales appear in the same form in other family books. That sells more books.

I've been working on my family tree off and on for a few years, pretty much exclusively through ancestry. It's been really fun--but I do wish I had started a bit earlier when my parents were alive so I could ask them questions.

In particular, there are a few, um, black sheep (possibly) on both sides of my family. I know my dad's side was definitely struggling for generations. I discovered that part of his family was part of the initial group of Mormons/LDS who split off from the main group (the main group went off to Salt Lake, the splinter group remained in or near Nauvoo, Illinois). That's a fascinating history I knew nothing about. Then there's the couple whose census records show them as married, then she continues to appear in the census, as a widow. After a few decades, the husband pops up again, hale and hearty, in Oregon married to someone else. I assume that "widow" was a nod to social convention and much more acceptable than "husband ran off" or "divorce." It's been really fun.

Do you watch the genealogy shows on TV--"Finding Your Roots" and "Who Do You Think You Are." I love those shows. Both focus on public people, and research their family histories. FYR emphasizes African Americans (though not exclusively), which is its own fascinating topic. My fave of WDYTYA was the story of Christina Applegate's dad's family. It quite literally brought a tear to my eye.

ancestry.com shows that my father married his youngest sister. It also has his and his father's first name wrong.
A lot of people got the first name wrong, including one of his sister's. It was not Audrey. It was Aubra.

Yes, there are a lot of those types of things you need to decode. Misspellings are pretty common. I've found that you can decipher things fairly well with a bit of common sense and, if you're lucky, some triangulation with other documents.

One of the random things I noticed with my own family's census reports--the prevalence of "boarders" (either my family as boarders, or having boarders in their house) from about 1920- 1940. To me, it's one of those silent reminders that people did all sorts of things to make ends meet in tough times.

Also - Chas - for parts of my family their residence changed from Garfield County, CO to Meeker or Rifle. Civilization!

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:

Do you watch the genealogy shows on TV--"Finding Your Roots" and "Who Do You Think You Are." I love those shows.

I am obsessed with them. I watch many of the British episodes of "Who Do You Think You Are" on Youtube. One episode gave me some great tips on researching Ireland.

Another good source of info is archive.org. Lots of city directories are located there. Many are in off years between the census. Many often have the occupation with place of work listed as well. That is how I found the history of the man that built my current home.

I did manage to get my third great grandmothers death certificate just this week from the City of Brooklyn. It was sad. She died at age 83, 5 years after her husband but what shocked me first was her address at death..A few blocks from her marital home (that her son inherited). The description of the place was "tenement".

But after getting over the shock, I realize that she had dementia and this was probably some sort of group home set up for her care, close to her son. There are some newspapers ads of the time looking for help or stories of folks that worked at that address. My guess is it was group care privately provided in a time before nursing homes.

When I google the address it is now.....a community garden!!!

I have been deep down the well for some weeks..I have to stop myself now and then..

My Dad's cousin, (warning personal plug) Bob has been working on the forward generations, while I am going back. He has one source I am not so convinced about ..so we are collaborating.

The one ancestor I thought I would never know is my 5th great grandmother, Jane...Her maiden name is ..Smith...heh..yeah..and she was illiterate.. .

However, I have more info back on her than her husband..

The recent immigrant news has me thinking..we have been here before..hmmm..

There was a bank in Brooklyn NY, the Emmigrant Savings Bank (still in existence) set up by Irish folks to save and send money back home...

Damn if Jane didn't have an account..best yet, the clerks made notes on depositors, spouses kids..their home towns, their immigration years, even the ship they came on...Jane's records are all there...Wow. Imagine some wonderful person recorded for her what she could not write down herself.

I can get back to the very town she lived in even though she could not read or write. I have her parent's names from her death certificate..apparently the oral history she passed down to her kids was strong so they could record that at her death at 83 years old.

It is all so amazing to me...Off to Aughnacloy Tyrone, Ireland I go online! Hopefully in the not to distant future in real life.

My maternal grandfather spent years on genealogy after he retired, including visiting church basements in Yorkshire.

Amazingly, he traced our family back to the late 10th century, unbroken. My direct descendant was a Lord in pre-Norman England who lost his land and title in the Battle of Hastings in 1066. My grandfather was able to go 2 generations before that unfortunate guy.

My first American ancestor arrived in MA in 1638, less than 20 years after the Mayflower. My grandfather was the first to leave MA, moving to Schenectady in 1928 to work for GE.

After meeting some of my grandfather's half sisters I am afraid to look too closely into that side of my family. An grandmother and a great grandmother of Irish descent is far enough. My surname is from Yorkshire. The name is a Norse word meaning turning point. The northernmost point of Scotland is called Point Wrath. Viking traders settled in Yorkshire.
My mother's family traces back to England. Some historians credit a grandfather generations ago with killing Llewellyn, the last Welsh Prince of Wales by cutting his head off when he caught him on a bridge.
Her mother was a Montgomery. They had a heyday with a castle and connections to Elizabeth I. The ruins of the castle are in Scotland.