sweasel.com

Things I learned: my grandmother was a lying hound (but I knew that). My great grandfather was not from France. In fact, I haven’t found any French ancestors at all.

My great-great-great-great-great grandmother was born about ten miles from where I’m sitting. (Maybe. I’d like to see some corroboration).

I found a lot of Irish I didn’t know I had, but WAY early. Like, mid-17th C.

In fact, all my family trees went back way, way farther than I expected before I hit any Europeans. Like, nothing later than late 18th C.

I am apprehensive as to what I may find should I look into mine. My foliage is going to be heavy in the Danish soil on one side, that set of grandparents having been part of families that braved a boat at beginning of WWII. On the other is a mish-mosh of Euro-American Deep South Skullduggery, allegedly coming over circa early 1800s if my lying were-bitch of an aunt is to be trusted to have ever spoken anything resembling truth.

I am uncertain whether some confirmations would bring me any entertainment or joy. I have always been a big fan of plausible deniability.

My Ma got hooked on it for a while…we were thinking of getting her a membership but choked on the price of the things.

Wow.

I have an account. Went to the front door (www.ancestry.com) and got a blank page, except for a footer. Oh, ok.

Turn off blocking and reload. BAM, big flash graphic and an explosion of trackers, beacons and what have you. Yeesh!

Blocking back on. Go to home.ancestry.com instead. Not nearly as big brotherish.

I would just note that while you are beavering away, you are adding to the value of their product. Those leaf connections you make are available to any other customer in the future . . . and anyone else that they give/sell their and your data to. YMMV, but I’d rather not since I don’t know where the data ends up. As for their DNA testing, same problem but even worse from my admittedly paranoid and not a nice person point of view. Once again, YMMV.

The LDS church will let you do all of the research in their libraries and databases for free, but you have to do the legwork, and they don’t have the slick GUI.

My Mom tried to do family genealogy research many, many years ago. Both of my Parental Units are from the same general area in Arkansas and their extended families too. All the old public records of births, deaths, marriages, etc. were all in the county courthouse. Which of course burned down some time in the smokey past. Before the late 1890’s there’s not much to find. Although, who knows what might be found in other record sources that are now much more easily searchable.

I’m happy, grateful, and oh so relieved that someone else has thoroughly researched and documented my direct line—all the way to 1465.

But my mother diligently researched all the other branches on the family tree. When she died, I packed up 26 file cartons of genealogy records, and so many books that I lost count. I am the only child remotely interesting the continuing her work, and I am overwhelmed by the task.

Early on in her genealogy research, she determined that we were eligible for the Daughters of the American Revolution, but she didn’t document her work properly (the DAR are exquisitely fussy), so that is my first task—to follow her tracks and do it over. I wasn’t especially interested in it 20 years ago, and now I think about it all the time (prompted by the arrival of two granddaughters I suppose 🙂

Considering how hard she worked and fortune she spent—this was pre-Ancestry.Com—I would consider the paid website a huge bargain and worth the expense.

What Pupster said. I pounded away on my genealogy in Phoenix (Mesa, actually) at the LDS facility for months getting my family’s history. I stuck a couple bucks in their contribution box each time to keep them smiling.

I also visited local libraries in “birth” towns or counties where ancestors were born.

BTW: the goal I set myself was to have two pieces of documentation on each lineage person (father/mother, grandfather/mother, g-grand, etc) , e.g. birth certificate, census record(s), marriage cert. death cert. or other evidence of existence and relationship.

I use Family TreeMaker V9.0 to keep track of all the stuff. I think they were bought out by Ancestry_dot_com.

Amazingly, FTW still works on Win8.1.

I don’t know if you shop in Tesco (yes, I know it’s a bit downmarket for you) but for £30 worth of their loyalty vouchers you can get the Family Tree Maker software which comes with a 6-month membership of Ancestry.com Worldwide. Not bad considering the monthly subscription is £20 (£180 for a year).

Also, I think you will find that you can access Ancestry.com for free at the library in Rye.

Grampa paid a guy $50 to look up our genealogy but it cost $250 to keep him quiet about it.

Yay a bank holiday, that means extra challenging cryptic crosswords from Guardian and FT …