Myoneandonly's crazy genealogy journey

[MyOneAndOnly]

thought I'd start a thread to show crazy shit i find in my genealogy search. I've been at this about a month. 99% of the people i run across as direct ancestors are farmers or laborers, and all i'll ever know of them is their name, birth, and death date from Lutheran church records. But here and there I run into some people who are known in the histories.

Most of the several thousand ancestors i've found so far come from small areas in Friesland (now Netherlands), Sunne (Värmland) Sweden, the Danish island of Zealand and Amager, Saxony (Germany), and a few villages in England. 7 out of 8 of my 1st great grand parents were German, Dutch, Danish, or Swedish. And each of those family trees seem to stretch back to Europe and stay mostly in the regions noted above, generation after generations.

But every so often i stumble on an ancestor who somehow fell out of a noble family to birth a dozen generations of commoners.... leading to me.



Today I found my 11th Great Grandaunt, Helena Snakenborg Bååt, "Helena the Red," Marchioness of Northampton, Maid of Honor to Queen Elizabeth I. She lived during the 16th century. Helena is the sister of my 11th Great Grandmother, Karin Ulfsdotter Snakenborg Bååt. She is on my family tree through my Grandmother Hendricksen and her mother, who was a Dahlström who emmigrated to America from Sweden over 100 years ago. There is a monument to Helen and her Husband in Salisbury Cathedral, England.

She was a member of the Snakenborg Bååt House in Sweden. Bååt was an important Swedish noble family, originally from Småland in south-eastern Sweden.
"The family is especially known for its long association with Viipuri/Vyborg castle in Finland (at present in Russia), the bulwark of the then Swedish realm, at the border against Novgorod/Russia." She came to England and her position behind Elizabeth I via marriage to William Parr, 1st Marquess of Northampton.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena...of_Northampton

[ilikeplanets]

Snakenborg is an amazing name

[ilikeplanets]

So how are you going about this? I want to see when my surname was assumed, since rumor in my family is that we're not really from the priestly tribe and I wanna know which asshole took the name and when.

[phang]

This is cool.

I imagine a lot of people have traced back to Helena the Red, as according to the wikipedia article:

"It has been claimed that Helena had no fewer than ninety-eight direct descendants at the time of her death. "

I know of someone in my family who has been patching together the family tree, but I don't speak to their side of the family now (and nor would I want to).

One day I might be able to steal their work and do this. My Dad's side of the family is kinda shrouded in mystery for reasons I'm not sure of, and I only knew one living grandparent through my life.

I'm very much at ease with that, but still, it would just be cool to know this stuff, whether it leads to good or bad.

[MyOneAndOnly]

Originally Posted by ilikeplanets

So how are you going about this? I want to see when my surname was assumed, since rumor in my family is that we're not really from the priestly tribe and I wanna know which asshole took the name and when.

I am using Ancestry.com. There is a monthly fee to build your tree on their site. But they have one of the largest databases of genealogical docs. And their site and app are very easy to use. They've kind of gamified it, and I find myself wasting a lot of time on it.

Another good site which is free is Familysearch.org. It's a very good site. it's owned by the Mormans though. But mormons are obsessed with genealogy for some reason.

I suggesting trying Familysearch.org before spending $ on any other site.


I found that many of the names my family used for great and great great grandparents was completely wrong. 4 generations ago all but one of my Great Great Grandparents were in Northern europe and they had first names that look and sound weird to an english speaker. They also changed spellings when they came over. So some of the last names in that generation shifted a bit. It appears that a couple of them had to choose new last names when they immigrated, because they came from a place that used patrimonic naming. Everyone's last name was the first name of their father. So married couples had different last names.

The 600 year old Dutch names in my tree don't even look like words. Some of them are just a vowel with two consonants. I can't make any sense out of them. But the Lutheran church kept maticulous records in Friesland, so it's all there. I have an ancestor from Friesland born in 1480 named "Siuerdt Taeckes Jaersma" and one from 1595 named "Doed Sijpts Rijpma".

Maybe it's simply me... I'm used to German, Swedish, Danish names... and i've enjoyed reading handwritten Gothic records in those languages. But when I try to read direct sources for the Frieslanders It's all just jibberish.

[MyOneAndOnly]

Originally Posted by phang

This is cool.

I imagine a lot of people have traced back to Helena the Red, as according to the wikipedia article:

"It has been claimed that Helena had no fewer than ninety-eight direct descendants at the time of her death. "

I know of someone in my family who has been patching together the family tree, but I don't speak to their side of the family now (and nor would I want to).

One day I might be able to steal their work and do this. My Dad's side of the family is kinda shrouded in mystery for reasons I'm not sure of, and I only knew one living grandparent through my life.

I'm very much at ease with that, but still, it would just be cool to know this stuff, whether it leads to good or bad.

I've gotten back as far as 30 generations in one branch of my tree. When you get to your 28th great grandparent (which is in the year 900 for one of my branches), you statistically have 1,000,000,000 great grandparents. As you go farther back we all become related. And many of the branches in your tree start to overlap, because there aren't enough people in the world long ago for them to NOT overlap.

I've started finding overlaps in my own tree. But so far i've spent most of my time trying to see how far back I can go, and not filling out each ancestor's siblings and children. When you start looking at extended family in each generation everything really does start overlapping.

[Disco King]

The more people upload their DNA to genealogy sites, the more worried I am that the fuzz is going to zero in on me for all those strangulations I committed in the mid-'70s.

[MyOneAndOnly]

Originally Posted by Disco King

The more people upload their DNA to genealogy sites, the more worried I am that the fuzz is going to zero in on me for all those strangulations I committed in the mid-'70s.

I just sent in my sample to Ancestry.com for DNA testing. My oldest sister got her DNA info last year through 23 and Me. She was able to make connections through 23 and me with a few surprising people. She found that one of our Uncles had an illegitimate child in the 80s. It appears to have been a secret he kept.
That love child is a bit younger than me and lives in Chicago.

[ourruseoffools]

muh genetics

[MyOneAndOnly]

Through the English branch of my biological father's family I found my 6th great grandfather, William Rush. Rush was an officer in the Continental Army under Washington, and a neoclassical sculptor, often referred to as "The Father of American Sculpture." I find his work boring, but he made quite a name for himself.

What i found most interesting about him, though, is that his mother, Rebecca, was a Lincoln. She was the Great Aunt of President Abraham Lincoln. My 9th Great Grandfather, Mordichai Lincoln, was Rebecca Lincoln's grandfather, and President Lincoln's 3rd Great Grandfather.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rush_(sculptor)

William Rush


Rush is famous for this wood carved sculpture of George Washington

[MyOneAndOnly]

Here is where the president and I share an ancestor.

the tree on the top is a section of mine, with my 6th great grandfather, William rush at the bottom-center. The second image is Abe Lincoln's tree. The president is at the bottom left. While both have the common ancestor, Mordecai Lincoln circled at the top

[MyOneAndOnly]

My 12th Great Grand Father and Grand Mother, John Alden and Pricilla Mullins Alden. John was a crewman on the Mayflower. John was a Cooper by trade, which is what got him his job on the Mayflower. Pricilla was a passenger on the 1620 voyage to North America. Their first child, Elizabeth, is my 11th great grandmother.

John and Pricilla have enjoyed a certain level of fame over the past 400 years. They are characters in Longfellow's famous 1858 poem, "the Courtship of MIles Standish". And John was the last living signatory of the Mayflower compact when he died in 1687.

35 million Americans are decedents of Mayflower passengers. So I'm nothing special.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Alden

[MyOneAndOnly]

George Swindell was my 5th great grandfather. He fought in the war of 1812. And decades later was the recipient of 80 acres of land, granted by Congress to veterans of the war. The document giving him all that land is below. He died a few years after getting the land. When white people talk about how they earned everything they have in life, remember people like my 5th great grandfather, who was granted 80 acres by congress at a time in history when millions of people were slaves.

Also, here's a digitized copy of George's federal Census record fron 1840. There were 7 people in his household at the time. All white. One was "insane" and an "idiot".

I've looked at countless Census forms. Up until the Civil war they included numbers of slaves. But this is the first time I've seen "insane and idiot" on a census form