Ancestry Tests

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  • MiffyMiffy Shipmate
    My maiden name is a very common one, I’ve realised. As is my christian name. It seems I was named after not only my great-grandmother, but every flipping female going back to the year dot.
  • It reads like a human geography lesson - generations born in shit on a farm in one small village in the sticks in Essex, leave for East London over two generations around 1850, mostly live in the same road until the 1960s, dissipate all over the place since.

    Which bit of Essex, asketh an Essex boy?
    (you are welcome to message me if you don't want to out yourself too much)

  • edited March 16
    Now I can't remember. I _think_ it was somewhere near Colchester, Manningtree comes to mind but it might not be, and they all ended up in Ilford. Mum and Dad took a ride up there to look at graves - I should like to go too, I'll ask next time we speak. Funny enough I just went to my Auntie's funeral - her bit of the family (including most of the cousins) retired to Suffolk / Norfolk borders, so back out into the sticks. Norwich is quite a place to get to from here.

    (LC - as for making it up, I was a poor boy at a rich school. If I was going there, I'd have gone there long ago - instead it turned me into a terrible inverted snob, which is just as silly really!).
  • Bit far from my lot - mostly from the corner nearest to Cambridge.
  • ZappaZappa Ecclesiantics Host
    "Killed" is a very distinctive surname, CK.
  • I think I'm the cause of my family's interest in genealogy - we were assigned a "draw your family tree" project at school when I was 11 or so. Most people had their parents, grandparents, and maybe great-grandparents on a sheet of paper. I started making phonecalls and went completely OTT, including third cousins and so on, and ending up visiting little 100-year-old ladies who were my great-grandfather's youngest cousin, and coping out the lists in the front of the family bible.

    I think it's mildly interesting, but I don't think it means anything. From time to time I'll talk to my mother, and she'll have spoken to her cousin, and I'll discover that the little girl that I remember playing with 30 years ago is now a doctor in a hospital and is busy with Covid, or something. It's nice to hear she's done well for herself, but she's my second cousin's youngest daughter that I've met precisely once. I suppose if she was doing something really unusual, and one of my kids was interested, I might try to blag a visit on the basis of our family connection, but I think I'd be better calling up a more local complete stranger.
  • I think I'm the cause of my family's interest in genealogy - we were assigned a "draw your family tree" project at school when I was 11 or so. Most people had their parents, grandparents, and maybe great-grandparents on a sheet of paper. I started making phonecalls and went completely OTT, including third cousins and so on, and ending up visiting little 100-year-old ladies who were my great-grandfather's youngest cousin, and coping out the lists in the front of the family bible.

    I think it's mildly interesting, but I don't think it means anything. From time to time I'll talk to my mother, and she'll have spoken to her cousin, and I'll discover that the little girl that I remember playing with 30 years ago is now a doctor in a hospital and is busy with Covid, or something. It's nice to hear she's done well for herself, but she's my second cousin's youngest daughter that I've met precisely once. I suppose if she was doing something really unusual, and one of my kids was interested, I might try to blag a visit on the basis of our family connection, but I think I'd be better calling up a more local complete stranger.

    An acquaintance of mine tells me that her sister, a nurse who has been working many many shifts in a Montréal hospital near-overwhelmed by covid victims, received a thank-you note from a very distant cousin who, as far as she figures out, last saw her at her baptism. As my old boss told me, a card never hurt anyone.
  • Ah, inverted snobbery! How well I know it (saith the descendant of horse thieves, cattle rustlers, and one bastard of a duke of York--or so they tell me). Oh, and apparently a nice young Catholic man who pissed off his aristocratic father by turning Lutheran--and then lived, ministered and died within 30 miles of Martin Luther himself, all apparently without ever having met the man at all. :lol:

    The one thing I would like to do is to trace a second cousin who I met only once but who appeared to be my identical twin.
  • Ah, inverted snobbery! How well I know it (saith the descendant of horse thieves, cattle rustlers, and one bastard of a duke of York--or so they tell me). Oh, and apparently a nice young Catholic man who pissed off his aristocratic father by turning Lutheran--and then lived, ministered and died within 30 miles of Martin Luther himself, all apparently without ever having met the man at all. :lol:

    The one thing I would like to do is to trace a second cousin who I met only once but who appeared to be my identical twin.

    I recall being at a conference in Cambridge many years ago and encountering my doppelganger. We were both shocked and spent the next three days ensuring that we were never in the same room at the same time.
  • Heh. If I could convince her, we'd pull all KINDS of crap. Mostly to do with tormenting our nearest and dearest.
  • churchgeekchurchgeek Shipmate
    edited March 17
    I decline to take any such tests, as it could jeopardize any future life insurance applications I make. You have a duty to disclose what you know, diabetes is enough for them to chew on.

    This is my main concern. That, and, since I'm US American, health insurance.

    [Edited to cut out bits that are better suited for the Heaven thread.]

    As to the OP's other question about identity - I can't imagine that for me, it would make any difference. Maybe because I was told these stories about my grandma's grandmother, but I feel like whatever ethnicity my ancestors were, if there's been no organic connection to that culture, it's rather artificial for me to identify with it in any way. Ethnically, I'm a white midwestern American, as far as I'm concerned. I draw my identity from other things. But that might be part of skin privilege, being white and all.
    Make some up!

    Detroit's founder, Antoine Laumet, did just that! He dubbed himself Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, and made up a crest to go with it. Now he's called Antoine Cadillac more often than any other parts of that name. And upscale luxury cars all over have (now a simplified version of) his family crest on them, since Cadillac (the brand owned by GM) uses it as their logo.
  • LydaLyda Shipmate
    churchgeek wrote: »
    I decline to take any such tests, as it could jeopardize any future life insurance applications I make. You have a duty to disclose what you know, diabetes is enough for them to chew on.

    This is my main concern. That, and, since I'm US American, health insurance.

    [Edited to cut out bits that are better suited for the Heaven thread.]

    As to the OP's other question about identity - I can't imagine that for me, it would make any difference. Maybe because I was told these stories about my grandma's grandmother, but I feel like whatever ethnicity my ancestors were, if there's been no organic connection to that culture, it's rather artificial for me to identify with it in any way. Ethnically, I'm a white midwestern American, as far as I'm concerned. I draw my identity from other things. But that might be part of skin privilege, being white and all.
    Make some up!

    Detroit's founder, Antoine Laumet, did just that! He dubbed himself Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, and made up a crest to go with it. Now he's called Antoine Cadillac more often than any other parts of that name. And upscale luxury cars all over have (now a simplified version of) his family crest on them, since Cadillac (the brand owned by GM) uses it as their logo.

    I rather wondered about the Cadillac coat of arms. Back in the day the arms had "ducks" actually Merlettes and a lot more, uh, horizontal stripes which I know have a heraldic name, a wreath, and a coronet. Old Laumet must be rolling in his grave. :anguished:
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