Anyone have any distant relatives, looking back through time, worth mentioning? What I know of my family history, I'd be afraid to take one of those DNA tests. But, as a matter of history, my granddad and my great granddad took part in the Oklahoma land rush of 1889. My granddad must have been fairly young, but each rode is own horse. Only great granddad staked a claim though, in what is now Paul's Valley, Oklahoma. On a side note. I was traveling in my RV about four years ago. I was going to go through Oklahoma, so I emailed an ad to the "personals" section in the classifieds of the Paul's Valley newspaper, knowing I'd be heading in that general direction. My grandmother's married name was Harmon, so this was before I became a Russian. Anyway, I asked if anyone there knew of her, Mollie Harmon, or any of her offspring. I didn't expect an answer, but got one from a cousin who was then in her mid eighties. She and a sister still lived there, and both were born Harmons from the same grandma as me. I visited them in one of their homes and we had a great time piecing together bits of family history. The one who read my ad said she always looked over the personals when she read the paper.
I'm too concerned to do my 'family tree' research, all I do know is my husband's Grandfather helped to build Tower Bridge in London - its beautiful
None that I know of. No one on one side of my family has ever been able to trace back beyond two brothers in the early 1800's living in the US. My aunt even hired a professional one time. We always speculated they might have had something to hide. Does that count?
Have you tried doing the DNA testing, @Nancy Hart ? My daughter , Robin, got started on that, and then more of us in the family have had it done, and we are discovering relatives that we didn’t know existed. My experience is that the different companies do things a little differently; so it is good to either do more than one, or choose which one offers the benefits that are most important to you.
Yes, they do ! How it works is that when your dna is tested, then it is matched with other people’s dna, and they can give a good estimate of how closely you are related to other people. Here is an example of part of my list, which shows over 1,000 people that I am related to in some way, starting off with my kids, who are my closest relatives, and then continuing to further relatives. It shows whether they are on my mother’s or father’s side, and there is also a map that shows where my relatives are located. I can message anyone on my list, and we can then share history. Both 23 and Me and Ancestry do basically the same thing; but Ancestry also helps you to set up a family tree and share with other people’s trees, so that you can get some of the older relatives (before dna) listed in your tree. As new people have dna testing done, they are added to your list of relatives. Here is an idea of mine. I have only shown a page with more remote matches, but it started with close family and then works it way further out.
The dna tests are only going to show you living relatives, and only ones who have had their dna tested. If you want to trace further back in your ancestry, I would recommend using the Ancestry.com site, because not only do you get the dna results, you can also research family trees associated with your known family. So, even if you can only trace back to those two brothers , if other people in the same family are also tracing that lineage, then they might have more information than you have found. There might be 50 family trees with the same family names that you can search through, and find relatives, and Ancestry gives you “hints” when they think they have found a match for you, or someone you are searching for. Ancestry basic membership is about $20 a month, and you can keep it long enough to do the tracing back that you need to locate who your ancestors were. Ancestry has records from immigrant boats that came over, plus census records, birth/marriage/death records, and all of that kind of stuff. For overseas tracking, you need the full membership, which costs more, but then you can trace records from other countries.
My wife has been working on our ancestry stuff, through both sides. I didn't even know what relationship I was to some of the people who I knew growing up, let alone those who were gone before I was born. All of my stuff goes back to Sweden, though. It gets difficult in Sweden because they had some strange naming conventions. My surname is Anderson because, at some point, someone in my family was the son of someone whose first name was Anders. By that convention, my son would have the surname of Kenson or something of that sort. It gets worse. A practice that died out earlier was to name daughters similarly, so you'd have girls named Andersdotter or some such nonsense. This was all compounded by the fact that there were no strict naming conventions. Sometimes, when a man was married, he would take on the surname of his wife, but most often not. Once they immigrated to America, of course, they were named according to what the person checking them in at Ellis Island decided. So we have, within my family, people named Anderson, Andersen, Andersson, Anderssen, and probably some others; and I am also related to people named Peterson, Johnson, Nelson, Olaffson, etc. To the point though, no one famous.
Interesting stuff Ken. I knew about the son, daughter naming and I've seen young ladies on TV on popular athletic competitions with names like "Andersdotter," and they are often strong, tall, attractive blonds. Like you indicate though, that has to stop somewhere or you end up with "Andersonsson" and so on. Unless you came from nobility and kept track for legal and prestige reasons, I think naming was slack in the early 19th century anyway. I said my way-back family name was "Harmon." It was also spelled "Harman" or "Harmen." When my grandpa Harmon died, there was a family argument over how to spell the name on his head stone. One uncle got tired of it, went to the stone mason who was carving and said, it's "Harmon" dammit, and shouted as much to any relative in range, so without him, it might still be "Harmen."
My father's family has been pretty well researched. There is a book published on his family that traces roots back around 1200 or so. Some professor at University of Pennsylvania (I think) who could read old German did much of the work. The family arrived from Baden-Baden in 1748, and there is a Pennsylvania and a North Carolina branch of the family. The surname was changed from the German spelling after they came over, and apparently changed slightly at a later date again. My mother's family emigrated from Scotland just prior to 1900, so they are relatively recent immigrants. They seem to be harder to trace, but my wife and our daughters have been working on it for years, and on of our daughters seems to be quite good at the details. As far as I know, no one in the family has sent off any DNA for testing. I wondered about having our daughters tested, as they are identical twins. I would like to see if they both came back with the same ancestry. We have identical twin sons as well, but the system would be keyed off the same surname, so it might not be a valid test. One of my former co-workers did research on her husband and found that his uncle was the last man hung for stealing horses in Tennessee.