Can I say I’m officially Thunderstruck?
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When I was in my teens, my mother became seriously interested in genealogy research. Mostly, I wasn’t interested.
One day, I happened to glance at the charts spread out on her desk, and noticed a reference to a John Brown in the 19th century. I was excited for a moment, thinking of John Brown the abolitionist, then realized that the dates were wrong, that John Brown and his sons were executed together, and that “John Brown” was a common name and must have been quite common in the 19th century.
My mother walked in, and I told her about what I’d just been thinking about, and she said, “Well, you are a descendant of General John Brown Gordon. He led the last Confederate cavalry charge at Appomattox!”
I just stared at her, mutely.
“Why would you want to be related to that John Brown, anyway? He was a terrorist,” she said.
“Really? I have to explain why to the woman who was disowned by her parents for joining SNCC?”, I said.
“It was just one day.”
A few years later, I was watching the movie, Glory, and I was cheering at the scene when the 54th Regiment begins its charge on the walls of Fort Wagner. I paused, and thought, hey, some of those Confederate soldiers might have been my ancestors. If that assault had been more successful, I might never have been born.
Then I thought, oh, $%&! it. I’m prone to suicidal ideation anyway. KILL THEM ALL!
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Our ancestry goes back to the 1780s because our family was for some reason a pet project of a wealthy families genealogist (we’re no even sure why). We can find our names as employees of famous merchants, on Civil War monuments, a number of county histories, and mentioned a couple times as “oldest person in the county” because of our ability to live to be 90 years old on the frontier. But no wikipedia.
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You might want to check your clone privilegegratitude.
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Meta pwn!!
Spaceballs
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Heh… that’s one of my favorite things he does.
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One of the things that you learn in genealogy is that some groups of people are more represented in history, and that includes basic things like actual records of births, deaths, marriages, etc.
If someone tells me they’ve got their family tree built out for X generations – with X any number more than 4 – I know there’s only a couple of ancestral populations they could possibly be from.
Everyone’s family tree doesn’t look like those of U.S. citizens whose ancestors came from northern Europe 5-10 generations ago. That population…well, ultimately, they all have SOME (in)famous ancestor, because family trees are massive when you go back that far. Someone in that 5,000 name list is going to be known for something.
The names of all my 4th great grandparents are all recorded, save one couple. Who am I?
It would help to know where you grew up. Without knowing that, I’ve got a short list:
- French Canadian (British Canadian is also possible, but less so);
- northern European heritage with ancestors in the States since colonial times;
- Mennonite;
- Italian;
- Maltese.
Not that you can’t be from some other group, but those are the biggest ancestral groups with hundreds of years of documentation.
California…
Oh, interesting. That really throws a spanner in the works! I’ve got a line in my family that moved from central Asia to California in the early 1900s…Jewish, having spent a number of generations in China. (That’s one of the few Jewish lines I know of with decent records.) And of course there are lots of families now thought of as Mexicans and/or Natives who have been there for many generations. Then there are the Euro and Chinese descendants of those who were there for the railroads or the Gold Rush, and of course it could just be your parents or grandparents moved there as adults from anywhere.
Yeah, California is a true melting pot. If you’d said Maine or Louisiana or Tennessee or a country other than the U.S. the odds would have been better!
Sorry to be so boring, but
english since colonial period, welsh. irish, Swabian, norwegian, swedish, polish.
So when did your ancestors move west? And was it for the Gold Rush or the railroads, or some other reason?
Nothing so romantic-- I think on my Dad’s side, they all wanted to settle Riverside and get in on the orange tree business. On my Mom’s side, well, not sure. Maybe Boeing was hiring, and that prompted a young engineer to get out of Ohio?
The funny thing is, despite the speed bump of California, you sort of proved my point: Early Colonials are one of the main groups with hundreds of years of documentation to work with.
The most interesting part of my ancestry, I’m afraid, is that my paternal most great-great grandafther spent some time in Meiji era Japan, setting up an oil company. Now, if I had serious gumption I would try to learn Japanese and track down any records of that company.
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I hear ya, bruv. And I’m not even adopted, it’s just that many of my family are apparently deluded! For example, when trying to figure out if alcoholism and violence were a thing on my father’s side, the response I got was ‘oh no, of course not. But (slightly later in the convo) so-and-so drank himself to death, blah-blah was put into hospital for a long time because he couldn’t stop drinking, and your father only got hit if he deserved it’… *I roll eyes, sarcastically think ‘right, clearly no problem whatsoever then’. *
And on mother’s side, again with the ‘no problem’ mindset… except for the alcoholism, violence etc etc. And my sisters with kids have found out stuff like (sorry if too much info) backward uteruses which caused problems with labour and birth. Which are evidently hereditary but mother talked about only after my sisters had given birth. And as they said, would’ve been handy to know before they had to undergo emergency caesar’s.
Anyway, on a marginally brighter note: a convict ancestor got sentenced to 75 lashes for inciting a riot. Which I love the idea of (the inciting, not the lashes, which I imagine would have been a death sentence if delivered with a cat-o’nine-tails)! Although it would probably turn out that the poor bastard just looked wrongly at someone or said the wrong thing at the wrong time or something minor like that, rather than being a fledgling anarchist!
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