Ancestry

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Utisz
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Ancestry

Post by Utisz » Sun Sep 12, 2021 7:02 am

Started dabbling in ancestry stuff. Started out as a gift idea for my now long-past father's 80th birthday, but it's gotten me a bit hooked. It's surprising how a bit of sleuthing got me from not knowing the first names of my grandparents to knowing shit going back five generations. Now I got birth certs and census forms stretching back to the famine, and can even see when the language shift happened in Ireland.

Anyone else hopped on this particular bandwagon at any stage?

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SomeInternetBloke
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Re: Ancestry

Post by SomeInternetBloke » Sun Sep 12, 2021 7:26 am

Madrigal wrote:
Mon Mar 15, 2021 11:03 pm
Do you think your ancestry is interesting and is there anything in particular about your heritage that you're proud of?
Well, when you say it like that. Among my other ancestry, I am a descendent of French Huguenots.



edit: an even better video.
"My favourite song from one of my favourite albums, Nena asking you to please, please let her be your pirate. So smooth and joyful, I have to listen to it three times if I listen once" - ashi

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Catoptric
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Re: Ancestry

Post by Catoptric » Sun Sep 12, 2021 4:23 pm

I was able to track ancestry from my maternal side back to Plymouth Rock, though nothing from the paternal side prior to the 1800's (and the hearsay BS about royal blood is just narcissistic posturing, which both sides of my family suffer from BADLY.)

If anything I may know more of why I'm pessimistic about humanity, as I didn't exactly come across anything which reaffirmed that having kids guarantees that they don't end up extinguishing their lives in some brief flash of glory, or that the father doesn't become abusive and triggers a continuation of intergenerational neurosis (such as developing personality disorders.)

Society was bred to be buried in the sands of time.

The ancestors that recently popped up are:
https://doigsden.com/Howard.htm

DNA tests seem to show nothing from my paternal side, and either the relatives decided not to have any kids (and they had A LOT of siblings) or they have very little incentive to discover their family. . .) I constantly get emails from my maternal side, though perhaps because I included their DNA into the results data, as well as discovered a lot of depression and suicidal dna traits that might explain why narcissism is so prevalent in her personality traits (because such people develop an exterior persona and vicarious ego-fulfillment to material objects, including externalizing their offspring as extensions of their ego-syntonic ideations.) I am reluctant to interact with my dad, for this same reason and he has mostly abandoned his family since he divorced her nearly 3 decades ago.
Last edited by Catoptric on Sun Sep 12, 2021 4:30 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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HighlyIrregular
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Re: Ancestry

Post by HighlyIrregular » Sun Sep 12, 2021 4:25 pm

I have a "DNA relative" from 23andMe who's anxious to find out stuff. I hope he joins Ancestry because I don't really want to but I take advantage of the free deals where you get partial access.

My genes say I'm likely lactose intolerant and I don't metabolize folate as well as I should. I eat Total cereal for the folate and I don't do squat for the lactose. I fart, get used to it.

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HighlyIrregular
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Re: Ancestry

Post by HighlyIrregular » Tue Sep 14, 2021 4:44 pm

I hate when possible relatives keep their Facebook friends lists private. I have fractional brothers and sisters I'm trying to track down! And the damn females need to keep their maiden names, or else how am I supposed to know! And I don't care about their damn kids or pets, use your own photo for your profile!

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Utisz
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Re: Ancestry

Post by Utisz » Sat Sep 18, 2021 8:00 am

Well I got back to the famine and bit before that. It's kind of sad in a way, that your existence was sort of recorded in Ireland before 1865 in a civil record, but before that it all depended on the handwriting and sobriety of the priest. Also there seems to be a bit of inbreeding going on in my past, and a great-great-grandmother who died in a workhouse. All farmers and a lot of people who couldn't write. Kinda giving up on the idea of being a descendent of Brian Boru or some shit now. Will have to settle on making these findings presentable to my family.

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Ferrus
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Re: Ancestry

Post by Ferrus » Sat Sep 18, 2021 11:06 am

I kind of looked into this but my aunt did a lot more.

In terms of illiteracy I have seen a marriage record of my great-great grandmother in tge midland where she signed the document with an 'X' because she couldn't write. My impression is that far more people could read that write. We assume the two are linked but writing is a more advanced skill. There were cheap, private or charitable initiatives called dame schools run by spinsters usually.

They could teach reading and writing but sometimes just reading from a hornbook, a paddle with the letters of the alphabet printed. If you weren't destined to be a clerk, or lawyer or doctor or in the church it was mainly all you needed in order to navigate officialdom.

Also this state of affairs existed for centuries. Poorer people were traditoonally taught in these semi-formal dame schools
blackletter - somewhat standardised forms of 13th/14th century scribal writing adapted to print - from hornbooks and in government proclamations and other official acts that were often printed both in more modern Latinised scripts and blackletter so 'the common people' could understand it. This was well into the 18th century in Britain. And in places like Denmark and Germany into the 19th/early 20th century.
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HighlyIrregular
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Re: Ancestry

Post by HighlyIrregular » Thu Sep 30, 2021 5:08 am

I signed up for a free trial using the almost spent debit card that I got for getting my Covid shot. I'm pretty disappointed.
  • The search "tab" (I hate when a menu item is called a tab when it's not tab shaped) brings up different things depending on the page you're on, to the point where one of the Help sections didn't help.
  • You can't upload genetic data from another company like 23andme.
  • Nobody I entered from my 23and me "DNA Relatives" list had a public family tree on Ancestry, and I tried about 10 people.
  • The Fold3 and some other thing that came with my free membership isn't accessible through Ancestry as far as I could see.
  • I don't think you can search JUST for birth records.
  • It doesn't say whether for a marriage search you could enter the wife's married surname.
  • There's no way to send a comment or suggestion to Ancestry, except, I think, if you say that a page doesn't have what you want then you can explain. Otherwise you have to send the comment as a problem and go through a narrowing down process that's annoying.
  • The format for a location isn't clear. When you start typing a location, suggested locations pop up in some weird formats, like a county and state instead of a borough and state, and I don't know whether it's ok to just use a zip code.
Bottom line, I didn't find out about anyone I wanted to find out about.

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Utisz
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Re: Ancestry

Post by Utisz » Tue Oct 05, 2021 4:15 am

Well, based on the names of the grandparents, and the web, managed to figure out a few odds and ends ...
  • Managed to get a full list back to and including great-great-great-grandparents, and got a good lead going back to a great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.
  • Got a photo for all grandparents and a great-great-great-grandmother, and nothing in between.
  • Half of my ancestors couldn't write.
  • Ancestors born before 1840-ish were bilingual, and then they all only spoke English.
  • All of the place names and some family names are fucked because some twiddle-dum Anglicised them however the fuck.
  • None of my ancestors owned their land, rather they leased from some absentee dickhead like "Marquis Conynghan" who probably didn't even care for potatoes.
  • They all still paid tithes to the Church of Ireland despite being Catholic.
  • They all had like 12 children.
  • In my grandfather's family, 12 kids were born and 6 survived childhood.
  • All the ancestors I found were all from the same county in Ireland, and probably a fair bit of inbreeding.
  • A great-great grandmother died in a workhouse.
  • No civil records were kept until the 1850's.
  • Before that relies on church records, and deciphering some random semi-literate priest's handwriting.
  • The most legible parts of the church records are the words ILLEGITIMATE or VAGUS.
  • There's a literal black hole around the famine, except for Griffith's Valuation.
  • They held a census every ten years in Ireland from 1821 until 1911. The censuses from 1821 to 1851 were lost in a fire during the Irish Civil War. The censuses from 1861 and 1871 were immediately destroyed. The (British) government opted to pulp the Irish censuses from 1881 to 1891 during the First World War because they ran short of paper. At least the 1901 and 1911 censuses are still around I guess.

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HighlyIrregular
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Re: Ancestry

Post by HighlyIrregular » Tue Oct 05, 2021 3:54 pm

MyHeritage found far fewer relatives than 23andMe so I tend to trust 23andMe.
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