Family history

[mattdavis11]

My brother traced my mothers family all the way back to the Mayflower. One of my long dead relatives founded Providence Plantations, which became the Colony of Rhode Island. Mom has the manifest from the Mayflower and several silver dining utensils which are engraved RW.

My dads family is hard to track as there are a ton of Davis families.

[Bigtoe32067]

My parents died young and I don’t have hardly any lineage info.
It would be nice to know. Maybe ancestry dot com has something. I don’t want to pay if they don’t though.
Thanks for sharing your stories. They are very informative and entertaining.
Keep up the good work
Tony

[rockfan4]

Originally Posted by Bigtoe32067

My parents died young and I don’t have hardly any lineage info.
It would be nice to know. Maybe ancestry dot com has something. I don’t want to pay if they don’t though.

Tony,
The Mormon church also runs a free site - familysearch.org. Chances are, if you know your grandparent's names and dates of birth and death, you can link up to existing information. It's not as nice as ancestry.com, but it is free. One issue, since it is crowdsourced, people who really don't know what they're doing, but have a copy of a family tree some relative did 20, 30, 50 years ago, go on there and try to "fix" the info to match their family tree, which is often very wrong. I just had that happen with my 5xgreat grandfather.

I've done a lot of work on my family tree, and my wife's, and for her kids, her ex's tree. My best story comes from his tree.

His ancestor, don't want to look it up right now, died from an illness while in the Union army during the civil war. His widow then married a man from Vermont.
Well, a short time later his first wife shows up in Wisconsin, and accuses him of bigamy, adultery, and lewd and lascivious conduct.

That riled up the locals, and a group of them came to the house, forced their way in, smacked them both around, then stripped her naked, tarred and feathered her, then put her on a rail and tossed her in the field. They then did the same to him. Turns out, he got out of the bigamy and adultery changes on a technicality, he was married in Vermont, but the ceremony was performed by a minister who lived in a different state, and Vermont law said the minister had to be a resident of the state for the marriage to be legal. He was convicted of lewd and lascivious conduct and served six months in jail. All the men who tarred and feathered them came up with alibis, and none of them were charged with anything.

Some time later, one of the men who allegedly led the assault was driving his wagon on a road that crossed the property, and he was stopped by husband #2, holding a gun, saying he was trespassing and he was going to shoot him. The man in the wagon pulled out his own gun, and shot the guy dead. He was tried for murder, but claimed self defense, and was acquitted.

That's more interesting than anything in my family history.

My dad's second cousin did write an autobiography, it's unpublished, but a relative sent me the first few chapters, which talked about his grandfather, father and his life growing up in La Crosse. That was interesting, but only if you're from here.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Bigtoe32067

My parents died young and I don’t have hardly any lineage info.
It would be nice to know. Maybe ancestry dot com has something. I don’t want to pay if they don’t though.
Thanks for sharing your stories. They are very informative and entertaining.
Keep up the good work
Tony

Ancestry.com has a ton of stuff on darn near everyone. I think you can often get an introductory free week or month or something like that.

[sprio]

Originally Posted by masraum

Ancestry.com has a ton of stuff on darn near everyone. I think you can often get an introductory free week or month or something like that.

Your local public library will also have a "library edition" you can use for free - if you have a library card, you can access it through the library's web site. It's how I got started.

[GH85Carrera]

Be warned, ancestry.com is addictive. I spent a lot of time over a year and a half doing my family tree. Fascinating and a real time suck.

One of my wife’s friends saw my tree, and started on hers. She spend tons of time on it.

[sammyg2]

I've traced my father's family tree back to 1462 in Essex, UK (documented) and back to 1274 in Wiltshire (undocumented and sketchy).
But my grandfather's dad on my mother's side apparently never existed. No records, no one ever spoke of him ever. Ghost.
He must have been a real piece of work. I'll never know.

Mom used to say she was related to the Dixon from the mason-Dixon line surveyors, but I've proved that not to be true. At least not directly descended. But she is related to Harry Reasoner from 60 minutes fame.

On dad's side there's Willie Nelson and manbearpig (documented) I'm super serial, and a couple barons and ka-niggits (knights for people who are M. python-challenged).
And a London mayor, sheriff, and a couple aldermen way back in the day. No mention of Sherwood forest tho.

First decedent to set foot in this country was around 1630.
There was talk that we were descended from one of the guys from the original Jamestown colony, but research proved he died in the first two years, wasn't married, and didn't have any kids. So that pretty much rules that out. Still could be a cousin 200- times removed

[sammyg2]

This was grandpa's castle in Ireland back bout 400 years ago, it's a little run down but with a little paint and elbow grease .....

He had come to Ireland as a commander of a troup of horse and in 1602, he was despatched to accompany Rory Ó Donnell to a meeting with Queen Elizabeth I of England. [3]
He sat as Member of Parliament (MP) in the Irish House of Commons for Ballyshannon from 1613 until 1615.[4]
On 2 February 1622, he was created a baronet, of Magherabegg, in the County Donegal.[1]
He married Isabella Wycliffe, daughter of Francis Wycliffe and niece of the 1st Earl of Strafford.[5]
They had thirteen children, seven daughters and six sons.[6]
He was buried at the Abbey Church of Donegal.[3]
His eldest son Ralph succeeded to the baronetcy and was ancestor of the Earl of Ross.[6] His son Arthur was himself created a baronet and was ancestor of the Irish creation of the Earls of Arran, the Barons Harlech as well as the Irish Barons Annaly.[3]

Course, there was bit of political turmoil back then, and the new king decided to change things up a bit especially in Ireland. So he took away the land and gave it to his buddy, and gave gramps a less desirable grant. Truth be told, it originally belonged to a guy named Colonel Thomas Bourke but he chose up sides with king James II in the Williamite war, and that didn't sit well with the original orange-man.
Evidently that was the start all kinds of trouble between England and Northern Ireland, and I hear tell it went of for a really long time.

Talk about going down a rabbit hole, I spent many days studying that whole mess. Worse than any soap opera.

[sammyg2]

Every family has their black sheep or three.
Here's one:

Virginia
The family had been in America for 124 years by the time Henry Sr. was born. He was Emmet's great grandfather.
Henry moved from Culpepper County Virginia to what is now Shenandoah County. (Originally part of Frederick County then Virginia became Dunmore County then finally Shenandoah County).
It is believed he met and married his first wife, Margaret around 1756. They had eight children. Our lineage comes through Henry Sr. and his second wife, Ann Catherine Keller.

Henry Sr. and Ann Catherine married in 1779, a time of Post Revolutionary War. They lived on a plantation near New Market, Frederick County, Virginia. Shenandoah County to what is now Summers Creek, Summers County, WV.
Their youngest son Henry Jr. with Susanna Swinney is our direct line and his story would take a full page. He was notorious for being a bigamist in addition to having a child by a black slave.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

Be warned, ancestry.com is addictive. I spent a lot of time over a year and a half doing my family tree. Fascinating and a REAL TIME SUCK.

One of my wife’s friends saw my tree, and started on hers. She spend tons of time on it.

Emphasis added. I think I signed up for a free month or maybe just decided to spend $20 for a months-worth a year or two ago. You can easily spend 8-12 hours a day going down the many rabbit holes.

You just have to be careful. With the scanned documents, you can view the documents and have a pretty good idea if they are the person that you're looking for. If you're looking at other folks' family trees, then I generally don't trust them at all, and use a "verify then trust" model. It's like when doing a math-word problem, "you had $500, and put it in a savings account for a year at 5% interest, how much money do you have?" and the answer that you come up with is $12,878. Yeah, clearly that's not the answer, but there are folks that would be perfectly happy to let that ride. Those same folks are out there creating their family trees.
Jebediah Smith married Hermoine Jones in 1865.
Jebediah Smith was born in 1775. Yeah, probably NOT the same Jebediah.

[sammyg2]

My dad did the DNA thing before he died, and mine's identical on the paternal side whatever that's called.
I was contacted by a guy named from England who had 50 out of 58 markers identical.
We haven't completed tracing ancestry back to determine links but that's another rabbit hole that can eat up huge blocks of time. I got burned out on it for awhile but will get back to is eventually.
And like Steve said, you gotta weed through the BS to find the truth.
Some folks believe whatever they want to be true, instead of what really is.

[David]

I did the DNA test and found I'm a European mutt. Mostly Great Britain countries.

I did get contacted by a cousin I didn't know. One of my first cousins put a child up for adaption many years ago. My cousin said she'd been looking for her daughter but like everything with that cousin, her method of looking for the daughter was probably to just think about and talk about looking for the daughter but not actually doing anything. The mother and daughter were happy to be reunited but the better result was my cousin's two daughters gained a sister.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by sammyg2

My dad did the DNA thing before he died, and mine's identical on the paternal side whatever that's called.
I was contacted by a guy named from England who had 50 out of 58 markers identical.
We haven't completed tracing ancestry back to determine links but that's another rabbit hole that can eat up huge blocks of time. I got burned out on it for awhile but will get back to is eventually.
And like Steve said, you gotta weed through the BS to find the truth.
Some folks believe whatever they want to be true, instead of what really is.

That's pretty cool.

Originally Posted by David

I did the DNA test and found I'm a European mutt. Mostly Great Britain countries.

I did get contacted by a cousin I didn't know. One of my first cousins put a child up for adaption many years ago. My cousin said she'd been looking for her daughter but like everything with that cousin, her method of looking for the daughter was probably to just think about and talk about looking for the daughter but not actually doing anything. The mother and daughter were happy to be reunited but the better result was my cousin's two daughters gained a sister.

Very cool.
I'm interested in the DNA thing, more info about the past, etc..., but it's also a little concerning that your DNA is then floating around out there available for the gov't or whoever can get access.