I am a sucker for those shows on TV: Finding Your Roots, Who Do You Think You Are?, that Ancestry Roadshow thing on PBS.

Anyhow, reading the questions about dual citizenship and everyone's various responses made me think. I've also got a membership in, and have spent a long time with Ancestry dot com. I find it fascinating. But one thing for sure: I would not qualify for any non-USA citizenship on the basis of parent or grandparent birthplace. We go way back. I would also not nominate me for participation in these shows, because as far as I can tell, my ancestors were a pretty boring bunch of people.

Seriously, I am enjoying doing all the research. The few notable things: as expected, most of my ancestors are French/Dutch, some via Canada (but not recent enough to help with dual citizenship). So far, Civil War veterans have all fought for the Union side. I have a relative who may have been (drum roll), a mulatto. I am dying to get additional confirmation on this, because she (the relative) is from the more racist conservative side of the family.

Have any of you traced your genealogy?

I have my father’s side back to the 1600’s and my mom’s on my mom’s to the 1800’s. Great stories.

Mother's family to the 1200s. Landed in Virginia in 1643 if I recall the year correctly. Good stories if true.
Father's to the 16th century. Colorful bunch
Wish I had more details. Might not like the details if I knew them.

Mother’s side to the late 900s. Not a typo. My 30-or-so greats grandfather lost his land to the Normans after the battle of Hastings in 1066. In fact he was a lord in the ancien regime and there still exists a castle named after them. We have traced two generations before that.

That branch arrived in Massachusetts in 1638, less than 20 years after the Mayflower.

Still a lot of work to do on my Dad’s side. They are the newcomers, from Sweden. GF was born there, it’s conceivable I qualify for citizenship.

On my father's side, my grandparents were born in Italy and came to the US in the 1910s or 20s (through Ellis Island, they have their names on a plaque in the museum there).

On my mother's side, they are Scots-Irish and I think my mother or uncle knows which generation came to the US. I should ask.

My first-cousin-once-removed did my paternal side going back to the 1680s when our ancestors moved to Canada from France.

I've read the genealogical work of my relatives and I've had 23andme look at my genes. It's mostly boring and predictable and occasionally horrifying.

Cousin Matt and I have common ancestors who came over from Scotland in the 1700s and were in Mississippi pretty soon thereafter. There's a castle on the Isle of Skye that I'd like to see, but I'm pretty sure our people herded the sheep. That branch includes my father's mother's ancestors. As far as I know, everybody on my father's side came over from the British Isles at about the time of the American Revolution and headed relatively quickly to Mississippi. I'm almost certain they were all there by the early 1800s. It goes without saying that some of them fought for the Confederacy. I'm not sure if any of them were wealthy enough to own slaves.

My mother's ancestors were also all in Mississippi by the early 1800s. They are more vigorous researchers and they've traced some lines back to Europe, with some of them being tied to royalty. We are supposedly related to James II of Scotland and some of those ancestors are said to have gone to France with Mary, Queen of Scots. I have not inspected this research, and everybody wants to be royal, so I take that with a grain of salt. There were slaveholders on that side of the family, so that's awful.

Some of the family researchers wanted to be in the DAR, so there's a heavy dose of info around the time of the Revolutionary War. My great-great-great-great grandfather was a congressman from Virginia in the late 1700s. He also voted against ratifying the Constitution, because we have a habit of being on the wrong side of history. Someone has supposedly traced that branch of the family back to King Olaf Tryggvason, who brought Christianity to Norway by the sword. (Again, the family tree is full of people who aren't very nice.)

Family oral history says that there are Native Americans on both sides. There aren't many details on my father's side. On my mother's side, we have a name and a copy of a not-very-good photo of a woman, my great-great-grandmother, who looks like she has indigenous ancestry to me. Nevertheless, 23andme tells me that I am overwhelmingly white, more than 99%, and overwhelmingly descended from northern Europeans, more than 96% by some calculations. However, I looked into their data sets, and they seem to lack samples from the big Southeastern tribes. I suspect any indigenous ancestry in my family is Cherokee and/or Choctaw, so I am withholding judgement on that one.

I've been at it for decades. It all started with a copy of my great-grandmother's narrowed-down tree that she submitted for DAR membership. I have been fleshing it out bit by painstaking bit ever since.

With a couple of exceptions, they read like a textbook for the westward expansion of settlement in the US. The vast majority were already in North America before the Revolution, everywhere up and down the Eastern Seaboard from Massachusetts to Georgia. Their descendants ended up in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.

The few recent* additions were an Irish family that immigrated to western Pennsylvania in time for the 1820 census, and a pair of German siblings that plopped down in rural Illinois in the 1880s.

The curious aspect of the wide range of my American ancestors' locations is explained by the unusual marriage of two of my paternal great-grandparents. She was the daughter of a small town merchant in Iowa. He was the eldest of a large brood from a small town in Mississippi. The story, as told by my great aunt, was that they had met at a convention of Methodist Sunday School teachers in St. Louis, where they became smitten with one another. A long correspondence ensued, during which time my great-grandfather went to seminary and became an ordained minister. Finally, with a prospective appointment to a congregation in (Mary Anna's home town of) Hattiesburg, MS, he made the long trip to Iowa to formally propose marriage. After a few years in Mississippi and two children later, great-grandmother was homesick for Iowa. So, my great-grandfather having secured a position with a congregation in Iowa, off they went to Iowa, where they remained the rest of their lives.

I have discovered absolutely nothing of note in my direct ancestry other than a distant cousin being the mother of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Otherwise, just average, solid citizens who kept their noses clean and didn't go out of their way to achieve much beyond supporting their families, although one great-grandfather was a lawyer and clerk of the courts in a county in Iowa.

I've done DNA tests from both Ancestry and 23andMe. Both say pretty much the same thing: 100% European, although both indicate a strong Scandinavian streak that I can't explain directly. Observationally, the majority of my ancestors were from the British Isles, with a few Germans and French Huguenots thrown in.

I managed to infect my husband with the genealogy bug a few decades ago. His ancestry is far more interesting, including both Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln's families, the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts, and even Elvis Presley. He's also traced his more exotic Slovak ancestors back to the 1400s!

* - Yes, those are the most recent!

quote:

Originally posted by jon-nyc:
Mother’s side to the late 900s. Not a typo. My 30-or-so greats grandfather lost his land to the Normans after the battle of Hastings in 1066. In fact he was a lord in the ancien regime and there still exists a castle named after them. We have traced two generations before that.

That branch arrived in Massachusetts in 1638, less than 20 years after the Mayflower.

Still a lot of work to do on my Dad’s side. They are the newcomers, from Sweden. GF was born there, it’s conceivable I qualify for citizenship.

Wow! Did you do all that yourself? I'm finding ancestry (website) to be a blessing and a curse. You can mine someone else's tree and get a lot of information, but you need to be careful that you've accurately identified your ancestor before going down that route. Otherwise, you're mining for fool's gold.

I'm also stymied when I need to go to European records, because I'm too cheap to buy the additional access. To be honest, I will do it, but waiting for a time when I know I'll have some availability to research, because I find it to be a (good) time sink. Not having access forces some self control.

I've yet to find any famous, or even notorious, relatives. My peeps appeared to have come over to NY (pre-Ellis Island) or Virginia, then either stayed, went to Kansas, or homesteaded in Colorado. Wherever they went, they stayed. However, I found some interesting tidbits.

I'd grown up hearing that we were distantly related to Stonewall Jackson. Nope. Just another family myth.

I have one set of grandparents that allows you to read between the lines a bit: married, kids, then suddenly she is a widow in the next census. No death certificate or other records for the husband. Fast forward about 40 years, and he reappears, married, in Multnomah Cty, OR (what a coincidence). First wife still lists herself as "widow." I assume divorce or abandonment was too difficult to admit then, much easier to just say husband died.

Also we have a branch who were part of the reformed LDS church, and lived in and around Nauvoo, Illinois. I'm a bit fuzzy on the full history of this branch of Mormonism, but it had to do with line of succession. There was a lot of bad stuff that happened in Nauvoo--Joseph Smith was the mayor, arrested, and killed while in custody in the jail nearby. I still need to go back and check dates and see whether my relatives were around during all that. I'm pretty sure they were.

(As an aside, I always have a conehead moment when reading various documents and seeing an ancestor listed as "from France." I need to grow up. )

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:
Also we have a branch who were part of the reformed LDS church, and lived in and around Nauvoo, Illinois. I'm a bit fuzzy on the full history of this branch of Mormonism, but it had to do with line of succession. There was a lot of bad stuff that happened in Nauvoo--Joseph Smith was the mayor, arrested, and killed while in custody in the jail nearby.

My husband's g-g-great-grandfather was the guy who arrested said Joseph Smith and took him to the jail in Carthage. Guess who made out like a land baron when the Mormons left Nauvoo?

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:

quote:

Originally posted by jon-nyc:
Mother’s side to the late 900s. Not a typo. My 30-or-so greats grandfather lost his land to the Normans after the battle of Hastings in 1066. In fact he was a lord in the ancien regime and there still exists a castle named after them. We have traced two generations before that.

That branch arrived in Massachusetts in 1638, less than 20 years after the Mayflower.

Still a lot of work to do on my Dad’s side. They are the newcomers, from Sweden. GF was born there, it’s conceivable I qualify for citizenship.

Wow! Did you do all that yourself?

My grandfather did it in his retirement. Traveled to England for several weeks to do it.

There was actually a book published about the genealogy of this line of the family in the late 1800s.


https://books.google.com/books...&q=Spofforth&f=false

Wow ... I'm really blown away by some of your family trees and how far back you can go.

quote:

Originally posted by Matt G.:

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:
Also we have a branch who were part of the reformed LDS church, and lived in and around Nauvoo, Illinois. I'm a bit fuzzy on the full history of this branch of Mormonism, but it had to do with line of succession. There was a lot of bad stuff that happened in Nauvoo--Joseph Smith was the mayor, arrested, and killed while in custody in the jail nearby.

My husband's g-g-great-grandfather was the guy who arrested said Joseph Smith and took him to the jail in Carthage. Guess who made out like a land baron when the Mormons left Nauvoo?

Interesting. I wonder if my relatives knew his? Seems pretty likely, actually. I'm not even clear on whether my relatives left Nauvoo as part of the eviction (nice term), or if they remained. That would be a pretty clear indication of their allegiance/alliance. It's possible they just happened to live in Nauvoo, but that seems unlikely. I also recall my dad (very private about his family, which prompted my research in the first place) making an off-the-cuff comment at some point about how some of his his family were Mormons of some type in Nauvoo.

I was shocked.