Tracing Your Ancestors

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Ricardodaforce

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I downloaded the Ancestry app a few days ago. It’s quite addictive!
Managed to trace one line back to the 15th century.
 
My uncle has been tracing our ancestors. He has traced as far back as the 1600's at least. He was able to confirm that a painting of an Admiral in The National Maritime Museum with our surname was indeed an ancestor. Our ancestor has a monument and grave in Westminster Abbey.
 
My wife is really into genealogy and has traced her family line back to the late 1500s, to Huguenot ancestors who came over from Picardy in France.

My cousin has done extensive research into our family tree too.....and we’re also from Huguenot stock who originally came from Picardy :oops: :$ There’s a remote chance my wife and I are related somewhere along the line.
 
I got hooked using Ancestry a few months back and managed to trace my family back to around 1790. My 4x great grandfather was a sailor with the East India company in the 1830's, and went to China on a ship called the Lowther Castle. I've tried to find detailed logs for the journey but I think I need to visit physical archives in London to get any deeper with it.

It's a bit of a rabbit hole and I think you can start off looking out of curiosity, and then end up with a life long obsession!
 
My wife and I traced our ancestry a few years ago. The only problem with the internet resources is that you can get a tree going back centuries which is completely wrong. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to verify everything. I had a link to a "cousin" in the USA who had shown that we were descended from Edward III, on studying his tree he had english ancestors living in Pennsylvania before europeans had settled there!

One interesting thing was that although my origins are in Kent and my wife's London, her Grandfather's sister and my Grandfather's cousin were both nurses in the same hospital, if both names had not been on the same census page we would have missed that.
 
Suvv said:
My wife and I traced our ancestry a few years ago. The only problem with the internet resources is that you can get a tree going back centuries which is completely wrong. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to verify everything. I had a link to a "cousin" in the USA who had shown that we were descended from Edward III, on studying his tree he had english ancestors living in Pennsylvania before europeans had settled there!

One interesting thing was that although my origins are in Kent and my wife's London, her Grandfather's sister and my Grandfather's cousin were both nurses in the same hospital, if both names had not been on the same census page we would have missed that.
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Yup you have to be very thorough with birth dates . Often in older times if a child died the parents would reuse the name so you can get totally bamboozled. Also you get variations in spellings or people being given completely different names from their birth name by their family. I had a great aunt who everyone called Susan but whose actual name was Maude and a great grandfather called Amos who some of the family called Bill and others called Charlie!! :oops: :$:ROFLMAO:
 
My eldest brother has been tracing our family tree for years.
Impossible on dad's side, since his father is officially a mystery (but unofficially well known).
I've had alleged relatives contact me out of the blue wanting to meet etc. No thanks.
 
It's about hard work and leg work.

I'm not saying that web sites that make it easier if you pay are a bit of a con but you do have to put in a lot of effort if you really want genuine answers.
 
viv1969 said:
I've had alleged relatives contact me out of the blue wanting to meet etc. No thanks.
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On the other hand it can work out to your benefit. My wife was contacted recently by a long lost cousin who’d found her through a DNA testing site. The cousin had a whole stack of family photos, including some of my wife and her parents, that my wife had never ever seen. She could also fill in some blanks on family history through the cousin.
 
Ancestry.co.uk is free for 14 days but limited to the details you can access.

I pay their rather expensive subscription for world wide access and have found it time consuming and fascinating.
All my family sadly are gone now so to some it would seem pointless but I've found some fascinating things about my past generations, from soldiers that died on the Somme to second world war conscientious objectors, from Farmers and Butchers to family that were slaving in cotton mills at 13.

I also took the chance of a discount on a DNA ancestry which I'm waiting the results of.

Great fun and if you have the time quite rewarding. Best done whilst you still have relatives alive who can start you on the trail.
 
viv1969 said:
I've had alleged relatives contact me out of the blue wanting to meet etc.
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I've been dipping in and out for years. So far no shipping to Australia, or staying at HM's pleasure :D

A distant cousin found relatives in Aussie though, he's been to see them twice. (y)
More recently he discovered he was on the wrong "track" but didn't have the heart to tell them :D
 
viv1969 said:
My eldest brother has been tracing our family tree for years.
Impossible on dad's side, since his father is officially a mystery (but unofficially well known).
I've had alleged relatives contact me out of the blue wanting to meet etc. No thanks.
Click to expand...

I have had genuine relatives wanting to meet me ............. No thanks !!
 
No one wants to find me‍♂️‍♂️‍♂️‍♂️‍♂️
 
nilagin said:
My uncle has been tracing our ancestors. He has traced as far back as the 1600's at least. He was able to confirm that a painting of an Admiral in The National Maritime Museum with our surname was indeed an ancestor. Our ancestor has a monument and grave in Westminster Abbey.
Click to expand...
Cool
 
It's probably not a game I will ever play, even though potentially it's fascinating. I've been told my Austrian/German aunt once tried to trace the line thinking we were related to the Hapsbergs, but apparently instead discovered we had an ancestor hanged as a street robber.
 
We had a Canadian relative who eventually found us. He had used the internet and “professional” genealogist but they got it wrong and sent him up the wrong path from his grandfather backwards. When we had helped him sort things out he went as far back as he could and found we were as poor then as we are poor now.
Kate Winslet would love me!
 
Carl Hall said:
I got hooked using Ancestry a few months back and managed to trace my family back to around 1790. My 4x great grandfather was a sailor with the East India company in the 1830's, and went to China on a ship called the Lowther Castle. I've tried to find detailed logs for the journey but I think I need to visit physical archives in London to get any deeper with it.

It's a bit of a rabbit hole and I think you can start off looking out of curiosity, and then end up with a life long obsession!
Click to expand...
An awful long time ago, I worked in Cardiff in the buiding that was the Registry of Shipping and Seamen, and it appears to still be in Cardiff, albeit in a different building. I never went back as far as you Carl, but I did get some paperwork on my Grandfather and the ships he had sailed on between the wars. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=registry+of+shipping+and+seamen
 
Used to work in a gay bar many years ago and what (I think!) Ruth read was not uncommon for some of the punters!!!
 
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