Family History Suprises

[seanliddelow]

Today I did some quick research regarding my family tree and I was amazed at the things that I found. For example I managed to trace my last name, Liddelow (Of uncertain origin and very unusual), back to 1650 when Grime Liddalow/Ludloe was a Deputy Constable in Welborne, Norfolk.

Do any other IIS users research their family tree? I so please let me know of some interesting and useful websites (Preferably ones that are free).

Thanks, Sean

[renormalised]

Yes, I've been doing genealogy for about 10 years, now. There are plenty of sites on the net, unfortunately not very many are free.

What sites do you know about now?? Let me know and I'll see what others will be handy for yourself.

How far back have you actually traced your family?

[veejo]

My cousin who I've never met put our family tree on the internet (all 120 of us).

I later informed her to remove the birth dates, just leave the years. From a security perspective .... very weak .... banks and other agencies always ask "what is your date of birth, and often ask your mothers maiden name, etc" and then let you do all sorts of things eg cancel credit card. I informed her I was concerned about identity theft.

So we now have the family tree on the internet, but my son and my birthdates only have our birth years :-)

It's great to have the family tree, but if you put it on the internet .... it's there for all to see. Grandparents dates are all there, banks don't ask about those.

And yes, there was an ancestor who swandered the family fortune.

[seanliddelow]

I have traced most of my English ancestors who came to Western Australia back to the 1800s.

One website I go on to look up Scottish ancestry is called Electric Scotland (About highland clans-very useful)

Another family I descend from were called Wunderlich and they came from a musical background in Austria/Germany. they now reside in NSW and in Grafton NSW.

[renormalised]

Have you tried Familysearch.org, FreeBMD.com, GENUKI.org, Cyndi's List, Genealogy.com.

Have you managed to trace your family back to the U.K and Germany??.

[Jen]

Sounds interesting i might give it a try :thumbsup:

[seanliddelow]

With the Germany and UK ones I had some help from family publications.
Thanks for the websites

[renormalised]

Once you start, you won't be able to stop:)

[Jen]

:eyepop: oh no i dont need another addiction :lol: IIS and Dougs chat room and facebook keeps me busy enough :rofl::screwy:
:rolleyes:

[renormalised]

Addiction...it can be more like an obsession, especially when you're hunting down a particularly troublesome rellie:):)

[GrahamL]

My mothers side goes back a fair way, my grandfather used to often point out the direct descendents running to him from a Flora Macdonald who did something notable in Scotland.

My fathers side just appears in the early 1800's, best guess there was after he finished his sentence he changed his name which convicts often did to start over .

[SkyViking]

I'm using Ancestry.com which I find very good. I'm only using the free features as they are more than enough for me. Managed to trace the family back to 1500's, though all links are not with 100% certainty. Another branch allegedly goes back to Louis XIV of France (another family member researched this) - who knows, maybe the Palace of Versailles is the old family estate... :D I will let the French keep it though, the light pollution from nearby Paris would ruin my observing! :P

[renormalised]

You have no clue who Flora McDonald is??

She's famous!!!!

When the Jacobite Revolution went all pear shaped, she was the one who took in Bonnie Prince Charlie and hid him from the English until he could get away back to France, where he'd been before the revolution.

[renormalised]

If that's the case, you're related to Brooke Shields:):)

Your mutual Great Grandfather is Henry IV:):)

Henry's 10th great grandfather was Louis IX, or Louis the Pious (St Louis). His grandmother was Leonora Plantagenet....Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine's eldest daughter. So, you will have Plantagenet blood and you will also be a great grandson of William the Conqueror:):) Through William's wife, Matilda Aethling, you are a direct descendant of Kenneth McAlpin, who in about 800AD united Scotland into one (rather feuding) nation. You're also related to King Duncan I, of "that" Scottish play:) You will also be related to Byzantine emperors, through Phillipe IV's mother...Isabella de Aragon. This is only the start:):)

Providing your connection to Louis XIV is accurate and verifiable.

[erick]

I learnt that my Grandfather was the town drunk. :sadeyes:

[renormalised]

Might be the case, but who were his ancestors??

One wayward soul doesn't make a family.

[renormalised]

You should have a go and find out:)

[erick]

Yes, I have - am back to around the 1840s in London. I think I am back to one generation prior to Australia, on both my father's and mother's side. That will do. Each step back goes up by a factor of two - a great way to go exponentially mad! I know many enjoy the challenge.

(On my wife's side, we have ancestors banished by the Stalin regime to Siberia where most of them vanished! Bit tougher tracing the family there!)

[renormalised]

I've gone back a wee bit further than that:)

On quite a number of lines:)

Ick...Gulags...You'd have to go searching through the forests there to find most of your wife's relatives, unfortunately.

[JimmyH155]

Fascinating stuff, all you guys:D
Reminds me of that Tommy Steel song in "The Duke wore jeans"

"Our family tree, is a bit of a mystery.
The roots are pretty shakey and the leaves are turning brown....
But nobody ever had the nerve ...to chop it down!!!:lol:

My great great grandfather, whose picture hangs on the wall in the family hall,
He's looking down with a shocking frown as if to say
Nothing out of the way ever - happened - at - all!!

My great great great great grandfather, shot Harold in the eye on Hastings Hill.
In the eye, on Hastings Hill, what a guy
If looks could kill......;)"
etc., etc

[renormalised]

They always seem to sing songs about family feuds, don't they:):)

[Octane]

Watching that show on SBS must inspire people.

My family's ancestry is spread everywhere (I've never looked, though), I think it goes back to Persia or something.

I wonder if they kept records...

H

[renormalised]

Depends on how far back you want to go. There maybe records in Iran for relatively modern ancestors (back to the 19th Century, possibly a little earlier), but if you want to go back further, you'll need to look elsewhere.

You should have a look H. Start with your Mum and Dad and your grandparents, then work back from there. Best to have a talk with your rellies, if you can. They'll know some things, for sure.

[erick]

Iran - fairly poor records. My wife's father only had an estimated date of birth.

[renormalised]

I wouldn't have thought there'd be good records...most of those countries never kept much of anything except for those records to do with those in charge. Even then, things were sketchy.

[Louwai]

My father was born in a little village called Tysoe in the UK. Just west of Banbury.
The family was obviously very "stable" & didn't like moving.

I've found forebares IN THE SAME VILLAGE as far back as 1382.
Through the 1400's onwards there are very detailed records.
Pre 1400 gets pretty sketchy.

Dad has original pig skin scrolls giving our family several acres of land around the village. Scrolls are signed by the king & still have the original royal wax seal.

Mum & Dad have a painting on the wall at home. It's a commissioned painting of the king & 2 knights painted around the early 1800's by one of Dad's family (a known artist of the time). There are only 2 of this painting. 1 is at Mum & Dad's place, the other is hanging in the London Art gallery. Both are hand painted. 1 is a copy of the original. No one knows which painting was done first.

[renormalised]

I remember you telling me about this, Bryan, about a year or so ago. They'd be priceless...especially the scroll. Look after them both very carefully. They're a great family legacy:)

[seanliddelow]

Many people dont realise that they probably almost certainly have royal ancestry. Infact, 99% of the people on Iceinspace can probably trace their lineage to emperors of ancient China, the Kings of Ireland, the Khans and so on. It is fought that everyone on earth today descends directly from Confucius, because since any human alive today would have had 1.5 sextillion ancestors alive at the time of Confucius, over a quadrillion times more than the population of the earth at the time, making descent from Confucius a mathematical certainty.

Another interesting story from my family tree occurs in Italy during the 2nd World War. As the Germans were occupying Italy they introduced rations for items like fruit. This led my Grandfather and his brothers or friends to steal fruit. They were soon caputured by the Gestapo and were lined up by a firing squad, when around the corner came their uncle, Julack (Prounounced something like that), who was a prominent policeman. He convinced the Germans to let my grandfather and his friends go, probably saving my life as then I would never have been born :P

[Liz]

Very interesting stuff, and some wonderful stories!! What heritage some of you have.
I got into it about 14 years ago, but yes, cost a few $$. I had exhausted the free resources. :sadeyes:
Have rellies who came out from Tipperary, and from Roscommon in Ireland. Grandmother came from Kent in England, and got birth certificates from her parents. $$$$
Tried to follow up on my GGgrandfather Gleeson in Tipperary and had paid $$ for info, but there wernt many records. The guy doing the research said that the info they found was not 100% accurate anyway.
Things may have changed and improved over the years.
Good fun, and yes, a wee bit addictive. ;)

[renormalised]

Think it might make the top of the charts??!!:):P

[AdrianF]

Be very careful with Family History it makes your money evaporate quicker than astronomy :eyepop:.


Adrian

[renormalised]

I can attest to that!!!:)

[mswhin63]

I have got about 1000 source and primarily use ancestry.com.au for my research and with all the records available I have managed to go back as far as 1583, before Henry VIII started census record keeping. From this time backwaeds I expect I will need to carry out research in the UK. There are also libraries in the UK you can pay to carry out more extensive research if needed.

(As a eighth generation Australian) It was also easy for me to trace my Australian decendents as on one side there is special information available that got me started. On the other side we are related to the inventor of shorthand (Pitman) and there is already some fairly extensive information available.

I believe one of my cousins before he died was able to research to year 1013ad (Spanish decendents).

Once you get into it it is quite enjoyable but unless you have a pre-disposition to carry out this type of research dont do too much in one time it can be addictive and when things dont go as well as I had then you can easily lose interest. I have too many other commitments ATM so my project is on hold.

[renormalised]

If you go back to 1013, Malcolm, you most likely have noble or royal blood in the family.

Regardless of your disposition towards doing the research, you should take a break from it every now and then. What is the most frustrating thing is knowing where to look but not having the financial resources to get what you need.

If you've gotten back to 1583, you should be able to go further, if you've stumbled onto nobility or landed gentry, as there are plenty of online resources to take you back further. It's a matter of knowing where to look, but also a matter of money as well. It usually costs to go back further, but you can find resources that are free which will get you back further (especially in the UK).

[marc4darkskies]

I recently started and have gotten back to 1716 in Scotland - for one ancestor. Only 63 ancestors to go to get back to the same generation!!! Cost me about $60 to do that online.

Here's an interesting tid bit. The number of people who have ever been born (in all of human history) is estimated at 106 billion! That means around 6% of that number are currently alive today - quite a large percentage!

Cheers, Marcus

[seanliddelow]

I also had rellies from Tipperary. They were the Stack family and they were a police family.

[DavidU]

My wife's side traced back to Oliver Cromwell.Also the fellow who started the census in the UK (I would ask her but she is asleep). Her mother's mother was a very well off Pommy with butlers & the whole 9 yards, it was all lost during WW2.
My wife's mother and grandma moved to Aust in the early late 50's. Just as well or there would be no Mrs DavidU !

[renormalised]

Cromwell....my family were in the opposite camp:):P

[GraemeT]

Definitely addictive AND expensive. Astronomy has caused the ancestry search to be put on hold. I've been researching for over 20 years, and have got back to 1600, when apparently that branch of the family became journeymen and eligible to be included in the census. A varied bunch of trades - Whipmaker, combmaker and felmonger. Two branches came to the colony (Sydney) in the 1820s and 30s as free settlers, only to have a dust-up with the MacArthurs in Camden.
Cheers
Graeme