genealogy [family history]

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LakeCondo

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From time to time I've worked on my family genealogy. Now is a good time to do so, as the 1940 US Census is indexed & available for free on ancestry.com.

I think I & other relatives have gone back about as far as we can reasonably go, so I've been finding descendants of various relatives. So much depends on the family you're dealing with. Smith, Jones etc are difficult, but regardless of the name, there always are more of them than you'd think, so keeping people straight is a problem, especially if people moved around a lot.

Today I came across some people I shouldn't have that problem with. Someone married into a Hoopengardner family & had a bunch of kids. A daughter married a Quackenbush. Normally I'd say that Quackenbush would be a name I wouldn't want to have, but I guess it's a step up from Hoopengardner.
 
The most unusual name I've found in my family is Theophilus.

I really like geneology :)
 
I always enjoyed finding the rapscallions of the family. Especially what they considered bad then vs now.
 
I would love to learn our genealogy. My dad and grandpa swear up and down that we're related to General Robert E. Lee and my grandpa is a bit of a fanatic, but honestly, I'm not so sure we are. They say my aunt made a book of our genealogy in high school to prove it but I never looked at it. On my mom's side, I'm apparently some sort of cousin to Princess Diana, but again, I don't have proof of this. I always thought it would be really cool if I was related to the Roosevelts. Teddy Roosevelt is the coolest man who ever lived, I mean that.
 
On my Dad's side one of his uncles traced my grandmother's side(Dupont) back 700years in France. We have a giant 4" thick binder with all the info its really cool. My mom is also working on her side of the family but is more interested in more recent stuff and the stories that go along. Like my grandpa's last name is Yaremco, but his brother's are Jaremco. The story is that my grandpa's name changed when a principal decided that the J in jaremco should actually be a Y. It got miss translated from the actual Ukrainian letters.So from then on my grandpa was Yaremco and his brothers, who didn't go to school, stayed Jaremco. Its also harder to follow back my mom's side as they left Ukraine during the war and most of the records are destroyed. Also lots of the names got changed when they moved to Canada, or mistranslated from Ukrainian.
 
Everyone has something different to work with.

My most recent immigrant ancestor came to the US in the 1870s. 3/4 of my ancestry was here by the Revolutionary War. One interesting line came on William Penn's 2nd ship. They weren't Quakers before that, but became Quakers & kept moving south until they were in North Carolina. A whole bunch of related people moved from Orange Co NC to Orange Co IN, because of slavery. They then stopped being Quakers.

Ashtin, it shouldn't be that hard to prove or disprove a relationship with Lee. Whether you'd be willing to risk disappointing your father is another thing. I'm sure people have worked up Lee's ancestry & put it on ancestry.com & you can see if you fit in. They don't list anyone living, but if you have your great-grandparents' names, you should be able to make the link or not.
 
Yeah, I have my great-grandparents' names. I don't think I would tell them if we ended up not being related to general Lee. It would totally crush them. :(
 
I've only traced back as far as 1840 to my great great Grandfather on my Dad's side through a few census records we have available free on line to us here in Ireland. All I know is we must have had money back then, or he must have just been incredibly lucky to have survived the famine which started when he was five, and not left for America.

Funny thing is, we still live in the same area 172 years later!
 
Yes, the potato famine in Ireland. 1/3 died, 1/3 left Ireland, 1/3 survived. It's hard to realize that these things happened.

Astin, I don't want to get you in trouble & genealogy can be addicting BUT you can start at either ends or both & work toward the middle. Start by registering at ancestry.com. Ignore the additional stuff you can get free for 14 days; they want a credit card # right away. Then enter search in a horizontal list, then censuses, then US census. There will be a form to fill out, but first go to the bottom & click on 1940 Census. You can do more than one census at once, but I find it confusing because the censuses aren't listed in chronological order.

Then enter what you know about your grandfather or his father & find his record. Go backward with any new names of parents & find them in the 1930, then 1920, etc. Just keep track of it all & remember that all records have the possibility of various kinds of errors. My grandfather's first name was read as Lillian rather than William. Back then people named Lillian weren't the spouse of someone named Jennie! And in another case the Census taker got mixed up with what was the 1st name & the surname. So I couldn't find them in the index. Fortunately I was able to find it because some of the people whose family it was were still alive then & they told me their neighbors' names that they could remember from back then. I found them, then found what the problem was.

And there are the problems with people of similar names & of similar ages. Sometimes these are cousins who all were named after the same grandfather & sometimes they aren't related at all. This is one of the reasons it's good not to do just a straight going back, but also doing the other siblings & their kids.

And or you could start with the general. In search, click on public member trees. These are a combination of everyone's trees of site members. These can be of different quality. Again, you;ll have a form to fill in. If you don't know his wife's name, you can get it from leaving the name at the top blank & in the family members part, enter spouse Robert E Lee. You'll have to wade through a lot of records to find the right one, or you can enter a date of birth for her in a 20-year range, so there won't be as many to look through.

Once you have the wife's name, you can find the children by changing his information from spouse to father & enter the wife as mother. List the children's information & repeat the process of finding wife & kids.

Have fun.
 
I think the weirdest thing I've found isn't names but a website of a complete stranger dedicated to the family tree of my relatives. I randomly googled my Grandad's name one time and found the family tree.

The most interesting is probably that I found out my Grandad was married once before he married my grandmother, when he was in the army. They married while they were in the army, and divorced not long after he got out.
 
I think that often happened. People get married because they were going to be away & they wanted another connection to home. Sometimes a near stranger was married & then probably alcohol was involved.

My father was surprised to find that his grandfather had remarried after his 1st wife had died. Unfortunately the 2nd wife, who'd been widowed too, also died before Dad was born. Back then women died earlier on average than men, because of pregnancy & childbirth.
 
Yeah, It was odd mostly because even my Great Uncle (grandmom's brother) didn't know about it, or he did and he hasn't told us.

Historically speaking, I always thought that especially in the 40's, people rarely divorced or had children out of wedlock, but apparently it was more common than you'd think, it just wasn't spoken about often.
 
Divorce started getting going about a hundred years ago. In some cases on the censuses, they reported they were widowed, especially the women. Like in 1930 I found a female relative saying she was a widow, but I found her ex. He wasn't remarried yet, but did so twice. And in pioneer days, some men would just take off West & start a new life minus wife & kids.

Thru the 1960s at least, out-of-wedlock pregnancies were more common than were births. [And I don't mean there were abortions, because there weren't.] There often was the shotgun wedding. Afterwards, divorce was ok, but bastardy was to be avoided at all costs.

And I think after WWII, women might have claimed to be war widows.
 
my dad actually wrote a book about our genealogy and the history of our family. they were like one of the first settlers of israel or something along those lines. it was interesting until he had me go through and do all this stuff for his book. oh god. the only thing i eventually did on the book that i was proud of was the cover. but after spending something like 40 hours on it i was sooooo over it. my dad wanted me to read it and everything but i am just i dont even want to see it! talk about a deterrent. hes very technologically impaired (the nicest way i can think of saying it) and i would ask him over and over again what exactly he wanted half way through... he would change his mind or ask me to change something that was already layered over and going back to fix it the way he now wanted was just near impossible.... i never wanted to hurt someone so badly in my life. ive lost all interest.
 
LakeCondo, thanks for all the good tips.

My parents have both been working on their geneologies. But we really should go on one of those geneology sites. So far they've done what they know from memory. (They're in their mid 70s)

The US census won't do us much good since I'm first generation born here from one parent and third gen from the other.

I understand the name confusions. I have some great uncles who have different variations of their last names because of the person who took their information when they came over from the Old World. And my husband's relatives who came from Norway & Sweden actually had their name (unwillingly) changed. I guess there were too many Larsons, Eriksons, etc. so they gave them totally new names. One has to know the original to check the records in Europe.

It's all so fascinating to find one's roots.
 
Blue eyes, after your parents have written things down, they might want to write to the homeland city for more information. like to churches for baptismal, marriage, etc records. Enclosing a cash donation usually helps get results. And if they still have cousins there, they too are a resource.

You can get some information here on when immigrants arrived & the name of the ship. I'm not sure about arrivals post-WWII, but my immigrants came steerage class with the males & females housed separately for the trip.

And on myheritage.com, you can start 1 or more trees & after awhile, the site will come up with possible matches. Some are the same people & others aren't. Like my Louisa Blum came to the US, but apparently another woman with the same name & born in the same year [1860], stayed in Germany, or what later became part of Germany when it was formed.

Lauren, just remember your parents aren't going to be around forever.
 

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