It's funny you should say that - I was surprised to find out just how *few* of my ancestors sowed wild oats (that I could spot, of course). Though there were certainly some surprisingly short first pregnancies (dear Aunt Gladys arrived a fortnight after the wedding, the vicar must have wondered if he was going to have to do a simultaneous baptism) I can think of only one line that ends at G-G-g'father as his parentage is unprovable - though I have a good candidate. I don't know about in Scotland, but in Essex unmarried mothers seem to have been very keen on giving the child names that clearly identified the errant father and, if the Scots did the same, I think I know that GGgf's father but, as I said, unprovable (thought - Kirk Sessions?)...
It's a positive asset in my family research - when there's no sign of a marriage record, there's always a good chance that my ancestors will be found in the Kirk Session records, professing repentance for ante-nuptial fornication, giving a rough indication of when they married. Alternatively, professing repentance for fornication and acts of great uncleanness confirms that they weren't married at that point.
Something to do with those credits I bought and can't use! Might do that one evening on holiday - pity Fife is a bit of a schlepp from the Trossachs. Though I was amused when Mum's coach tour of Scotland overnighted at the Loch Achray Hotel... which is the opposite side of the loch to where we stay when we are up there!
I have a puzzle - there is something on my Ancestry tree which I am sure I didn't add.
It's the birth parents of an adopted relative - although I have a pen-and-paper note of this, there is no way that I would have uploaded this to Ancestry. I haven't even added them to my Family Tree Maker tree on my computer.
I have a puzzle - there is something on my Ancestry tree which I am sure I didn't add.
It's the birth parents of an adopted relative - although I have a pen-and-paper note of this, there is no way that I would have uploaded this to Ancestry. I haven't even added them to my Family Tree Maker tree on my computer.
How did this happen? I am appalled.
From Ancestry.com
Can other people edit my Ancestry tree?
On the Tree Settings page, click the Sharing tab. Under the Role column, see if invitees are listed as Guest, Contributor, or Editor. Guests can only view the tree, not make any changes. Contributors can add information, and editors can both add information to the tree and delete information from it.
Looks like someone is either a contributor or editor. It is a matter of changing privacy settings.
I've enjoyed reading all your stories. I have done a bit of searching previously, and my sister has taken over for now, but we have always come up with issues with my mother's family tree, as the surname we are tracing is very common in rural Dorset and practically every male is called Thomas or William, even the ones not related to us. There were dozens of people with the same name alive at the same time in nearby villages and the family trees online are often wrong. The family were originally poor rural workers and there was a lot of illegitimacy, long term unmarried relationships and step families among both the Dorset labourers and the later Lancashire mill workers - even my mother in the 1930s was illegitimate (and very embarrassed about it. My father's father pretended he was adopted as a child rather than admit he was illegitimate with no named father.)
Being Dorset, they probably were all interrelated. The village where I grew up, it was well known that the Foot and Legg families were so interrelated that it was usually bad news for any children if a Foot married a Legg as there was a significant chance that they would be born with one of the endemic congenital conditions. That village is a fair bit north of Tolpuddle but near the Piddle valley.
The same is true of Somerset - a village I worked in was well known to the local paediatrician because the families there had a relatively high incidence of certain congenital conditions due to intermarriage in a small area. (I was actually attending a session on Travellers, where again, small intermarried population, and the paediatrician started naming villages.)
Yes, it is Tolpuddle we're looking at. George Loveless is supposed to be my Great great great grandfather (my grandmother was very certain of it) but we have an unmarried Loveless mother who doesn't fit in, unless her unknown lover was also a Loveless (not so loveless ). She had several illegitimate children who were given her name of Loveless. I suspect we are another branch of the family to George as that is the obvious option but would like to know the father of her children!
I have a puzzle - there is something on my Ancestry tree which I am sure I didn't add.
It's the birth parents of an adopted relative - although I have a pen-and-paper note of this, there is no way that I would have uploaded this to Ancestry. I haven't even added them to my Family Tree Maker tree on my computer.
How did this happen? I am appalled.
From Ancestry.com
Can other people edit my Ancestry tree?
On the Tree Settings page, click the Sharing tab. Under the Role column, see if invitees are listed as Guest, Contributor, or Editor. Guests can only view the tree, not make any changes. Contributors can add information, and editors can both add information to the tree and delete information from it.
Looks like someone is either a contributor or editor. It is a matter of changing privacy settings.
This is weird. According to Ancestry I am a Guest on Tree A (true) and an Editor on Tree B (also true) but I don't have a tree of my own. It looks as though my current membership isn't linked to my tree.
I am not related to anyone on Tree B, and Tree A is the tree of someone I know - we have a distant DNA match but we haven't figured out the connection yet. So Tree A and Tree B are completely separate from my own tree.
I stopped actively adding anything to my Ancestry tree several years ago, because I was concerned about people cutting and pasting from it. I also put some form of privacy setting on then.
I can find my tree only by searching for someone I know to be on it.
Bit of a tangent here. The new American census has come out with some very interesting findings. One, the white population has shrunk for the first time since the beginning of census taking in the US while those indicating multi-racial or other minority races have jumped. One thing that seems to have driven this shift has been the use of DNA kits which have shown how different races have co-mingled over the centuries. Story here
If you have had a DNA test, did you also find you have a multi-racial background you were not aware of?
If you have had a DNA test, did you also find you have a multi-racial background you were not aware of?
If what is happening is that people of white appearance are reporting themselves as multi-racial, because a DNA test suggests an unknown ancestor of some other race, then that makes race an even more worthless concept than it currently is. So I'm not sure whether I should encourage that sort of nonsense or not. But then, the USA is full of people who are proud of being 1/16 Irish or something similar, and in most of those cases, "Irishness" has no bearing whatsoever on that person's daily life.
I'm white, and British. I have a whole load of ancestors and other relatives who are English, Welsh, and Scottish, plus a family rumor of an Irish woman a few generations ago, who is alleged to be the source of the red hair that pops up in my family from time to time. But counting the race, nationality, or whatever of my great-great-great-grandparents, and then claiming to be 1/32 of each one seems to be a singularly pointless exercise.
One thing that seems to have driven this shift has been the use of DNA kits which have shown how different races have co-mingled over the centuries.
That’s stating it a fair bit more definitively than the story you link to does. It says:
As experts look at the changing numbers, three main factors have emerged as drivers of this boom.
A growing share of children in the U.S. have been born to parents who identify with racial groups that are different from one another.
For the 2020 count, the Census Bureau changed how it asked about race and how it categorized the answers. (If you wrote in a response that federal standards consider to be "Hispanic or Latino," for example, that answer was sorted into the "Some Other Race" category.)
And more people may be rethinking what they tell the government about their identities. Some demographers are wondering how much a relatively new trend may have contributed to that growth—the rise of at-home DNA ancestry testing.
Regardless of the degree to which people change their self-classification, I think we expect this trend, right? Last time I looked, the average birth rate for US-born mothers was comfortably below replacement rates. Immigration to the US is dominated by Asian and Hispanic people; immigrants tend to skew heavily towards being of child-producing age.
So base demographics seems to say that the proportion of white people in the US should be going down, even if everyone is having racially segregated marriages.
Add to that the fact that the number of relationships between people of different races (and so the number of multi-racial kids) is rising rapidly, and you expect the share of "white" to decrease even faster.
Changing tack somewhat, one of the more assiduous family genealogists recently discovered, going back into my Scottish line, the missionary John Gibson Paton (1824 -1907), who wrote an autobiography about his work in the New Hebrides. I found it a moving account in places and very odd in others. He was quite free of self-doubt and had a seemingly invincible faith in the personal protection of God. This weekend I was reading the comment made about Paton's "charmed life" by William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience When things got tough or dangerous, missionary Paton stayed calm and rejoiced because he knew God would just rescue him in even more dramatic or miraculous ways.
The least likely ancestral connection I expected to find.
We recently had the Australian census. The similar question on our census asks for your ethnicity, but you can only add two different ethnicities and some ethnicities are not recognised considering the large number across the world and in a multicultural country. I know my choices don't make much difference to any forward planning on the government's part, but I still find I think a little before deciding. My ancestry is Scottish, English and Irish. I always put Scottish as my family most identifies with that ethnicity, my surname is Scottish and my grandmother was almost born there. But I have trouble deciding between English or Irish as my second ethnicity. Historically my family seemed to have pride in their Scottish and Cornish ancestry, were ashamed of and hid most of the Irish ancestry (especially the Catholics) which I discovered in my research, and ignored the rest of the English heritage. Although a few of my mother's side who were of non-Cornish English ancestry were proudly British in the first half of the twentieth century. So this year I put down Scottish and Irish and guiltily left off the English. I know I could solve the problem by putting Irish and British, but that seems wrong in a family who identifies as so Scottish.
If I went by DNA, Scottish and Irish are what my latest Ancestry results put as my highest DNA origins. As mentioned somewhere above I am somehow 66% Scottish despite having quite a lot of English and a bit of native Irish ancestry. I apparently am only 11% English, but I am not sure how that is possible, especially as Ancestry lists Devon and Cornwall region, and Cornwall specifically as areas my DNA shows I am linked to. I take all this with a grain of salt of course, though apart from percentages it is accurate.
Four of my cousins are Scottish, Irish and English on my side and various unknown African ethnicities, Indian, French and possibly other European heritages on their mother's side. She is from Mauritius and descended from African slaves, Indian indentured labourers and European colonists. I don't know which two they pick or if they just put something like British and Mauritian! Or Cornish to match their surname. There is discussion that they might allow more ethnicities to be listed on future censuses.
You can also just choose Australian which I'm guessing some white Australians who have been here for generations probably do as there are separate categories for Indigenous Australians.
There are some surnames or whole name combinations that you wonder how they came about or worse, why their parents named them that. There are two women called Mary Christmas in my tree. One became Mary Christmas when she got married, but then she and her husband named one of their daughters Mary!
You can also just choose Australian which I'm guessing some white Australians who have been here for generations probably do as there are separate categories for Indigenous Australians.
I chose Australian. FWIW, my Australian ancestors on my fathers side arrived in 1793 - he was a soldier, probably impressed, she a convict. His brother was with him and also married a convict woman. On my mother's side, the earliest traced arrived in 1825. A mate has spent a lot of his retirement going through the records of those convicts sent to Parramatta Gaol, and from there to work for free settlers in the area.
I have the surnames Hart and Sole closely connected in my family tree. My great grandmother cohabited with a Hart and took his name. They fostered two Sole brothers.
There are some surnames or whole name combinations that you wonder how they came about or worse, why their parents named them that. There are two women called Mary Christmas in my tree. One became Mary Christmas when she got married, but then she and her husband named one of their daughters Mary!
There are enough people in existence that even a small fraction of them thinking that this kind of thing is cute makes a lot of people with silly names. Bill Lear, designer of the Lear Jet, apparently thought naming his daughter "Shanda" was cute.
I'm glad my parents saved the cutsie names for the pets. Though the pets often had people names too. They regretted calling our cat Emma as they wished they had saved it for a daughter's name.
Ancestry has updated its ethnicity estimate again. I have lost my Scandinavian component, which has been reassessed as Northern isles / Orkney and Shetland.
I am now 83% Scottish, 12 % Irish and 5% English / North West European.
Ancestry has updated its ethnicity estimate again. I have lost my Scandinavian component, which has been reassessed as Northern isles / Orkney and Shetland.
I am now 83% Scottish, 12 % Irish and 5% English / North West European.
Well, my Scandinavian component increased substantially. However, it still does not show my Pilgrim or Puritan past in my American migration. It does show how the family that landed in Jamestown migrated West, though.
I find it easier to envisage having Scandinavian ancestry than Irish. An eighth of my ancestors came from East Sutherland, where many of the placenames indicate Viking history.
I am still mostly Scottish at 64% but they flipped my English and Irish to 22% English and NW Europe and only 12% Irish. I kept my 2% Welsh. I don't know of any Welsh ancestry, but there are Welsh surnames among my English ancestors.
My more precise locations stayed the same: Devon and Cornwall, specifying Devon; Ulster, Ireland, specifying Tyrone, Londonderry/Derry and Antrim as well as South Londonderry/Derry and East Antrim; and it picks up my connections to European and British settlers to NSW, specifically on the Greater North Coast of NSW.
Still doesn't pick up Glasgow or Western Scotland or Birmingham where two of my great grandparents are from.
I've often been tempted with some of mine - I collect postcards of the Essex villages my family are mostly from - and have come across a few sent by rellies I can identify, but this one is a bit special.
Also I just realised I had forgotten the personal message icon on the new ship and saw @North East Quine's message from a while back. I have sent you a reply and it seems we are probably long lost distant cousins through our Neilston, Scotland connections
I collect postcards of my village but I've never tried to identify the sender or sendee.
During lockdown I was phoning Dad every day, but we had no news to share with each other. I started buying postcards of Dad's home town off E-bay and posting them to him. He would then reminisce over the phone about the scene in the postcard - they provided a badly needed topic of conversation. To my surprise, Dad told me that one postcard included the house my grandfather was born in.
@Mili - we'd be long-lost cousins in-law, as the Neilston connection is on my husband's side. It's a beautiful area; it's hard to believe somewhere so green is so close to Glasgow.
Ancestry has updated its ethnicity estimate again. I have lost my Scandinavian component, which has been reassessed as Northern isles / Orkney and Shetland.
I am now 83% Scottish, 12 % Irish and 5% English / North West European.
Well, my Scandinavian component increased substantially. However, it still does not show my Pilgrim or Puritan past in my American migration. It does show how the family that landed in Jamestown migrated West, though.
@Gramps49, are you descended from any of the original Jamestown colonists, or from later arrivals?
@North East Quine thanks for the clarification. I have visited Glasgow where some of my maternal ancestors are from and Paisley where a couple who are from the family branch I probably share with your husband got married, but didn't know they were from Neilston and Barrhead as well so didn't visit those towns. If I ever go back to Scotland I have somewhere new to visit.
I've just caught up on this thread after some months. Talk about people's colorful ancestors reminds me of a story I haven't shared.
My great-great grandfather was born in western New York. His mother died early, and his father put his children into a lumber wagon and moved to Wisconsin. It must have been a group traveling together, because he later married a girl who was born in the same county.
They had a family, but ended up divorcing. (Unusual enough in about 1870.) He remarried a widow who had one daughter, and they had a daughter of their own. That marriage also ended. (I can't prove divorce in either case, but I know my g-g-grandmother survived him, and I've found records of wife #2's remarriage so I'm guessing divorce in that case too.
He married wife #3 when he was 68 and she was about 25, and lived to be about 98 years old. One child of that marriage as well. They married all the way across Iowa from his home in Wisconsin, and both fibbed about their ages on the marriage certificate.
I came to the conclusion that g-g-gramps was not a very nice man.
There's an additional twist to this one. Looking for info on #3's family, I came across a link to a website called Iowa Unsolved Murders. It's a story about a man who kept a mistress and lived with her and her sister, until his secret life blew up on him. The sisters also the sister of wife #3! The double-crosser ended up murdered and was fished out of the Des Moines river.
Now I don't really think that g-g-g had any hand in that, but it's a completely bizarre story in any case. Much the oddest bit of family history I have to offer.
A few of my male ancestors had 3 or even 4 wives, but they were unluckily widowed rather than divorced. Death certificates in early Australia don't provide info on cause of death, but many died young, so possibly in childbirth. One ancestor has a street named after his surname and a second street that he also named. As he had 3 wives and had loving relationships with them all he named the street Trinity Street rather than choosing only one of their names.
Most of my female ancestors seemed to stick with one husband, when they outlived them, though one of my great grandmothers had a step father and step brother. Her father was a plasterer who fell off his ladder and died when she was a year old. One of my great great grandmothers left her dodgy husband and trained as a midwife when she was 40. Her family helped raise her six children. She ran a small maternity hospital in Sydney while her husband continued farming in rural New South Wales and spent some time in jail for unsuccessfully trying to burn his house down for insurances purposes. He took most of the furniture out of the house and lit mattresses on fire in a few rooms, so it was clearly arson. It was pretty clear why his wife didn't stick around. They never divorced and he tried to claim there was no furniture in the house because he had sent it to her in Sydney!
I have been tidying up my family tree recently.
Whilst following through on the male side involves the one surname, there are so many repeated first names that it is tricky to distinguish between the various Johns and Williams over the generations. On the maternal side, the surnames change every generation, of course.
One set of church records I looked at from the seventeenth century showed all the baptisms and all the burials as being x , son or daughter of …( father’s name ). I guess this was the norm. It struck me most forcefully just what a patriarchal society we have lived in, as if women had no role, even in childbearing.
I came across a cousin I didn't know I had (this is easy - having never lived full-time "round these parts" since I was 10, I've not a clue who most of my cousins are - though the men are easy to pick out at funerals as they are all bald with big noses!) on Fartbook last night, annd we spent the evening exchanging messages and swapping old photos, it was rather lovely!
I must also look up how one couple turn up in two different generations of my family tree... every time I tell the tale, everybody immediately starts eyeing me up to check for webbed feet and the like... worse, it's in Suffolk!
There are some surnames or whole name combinations that you wonder how they came about or worse, why their parents named them that. There are two women called Mary Christmas in my tree. One became Mary Christmas when she got married, but then she and her husband named one of their daughters Mary!
There are enough people in existence that even a small fraction of them thinking that this kind of thing is cute makes a lot of people with silly names. Bill Lear, designer of the Lear Jet, apparently thought naming his daughter "Shanda" was cute.
The most famous case may be Ima Hogg. Of course, if you have that kind of money, people will call you whatever you tell them to, though I've always wondered how she really felt about her parents...
One set of church records I looked at from the seventeenth century showed all the baptisms and all the burials as being x , son or daughter of …( father’s name ). I guess this was the norm. It struck me most forcefully just what a patriarchal society we have lived in, as if women had no role, even in childbearing.
I always find it slightly odd that many 18th and 19th-century birth announcements are like: 'To the lady of Colonel Smith, a son.' It's almost as if the woman's identity was a secret, she was treated merely as a man's appendage. Sadly it is also very common in FTs to find that a woman's birth surname is not known, and in some cases, you can not find any name whatever. This applies even to gentry families - you would think they would want to know their heraldic history if nothing else.
Today I followed up a piece of information and found the cottage where my 6x great grandmother lived. Her oldest daughter is my ancestor, but her youngest son became a local Sheriff.
I had a phone call from Mum last night - someone in the village has approached her with a photo album full of interesting photos of relations. Of course, this being my mother, she has no way of copying the pics, so at some point (when I feel I can tolerate family next) I will have to schlepp over, having had Mum arrange contact as I don't think I have a number for them - even if they are still on a landline - assuming that they haven't fallen out with each other by then! Families... who needs 'em?
Meanwhile, going back to "What were they thinking?" I present you with Ophelia Fanny Hole, who you will have to google as FreeBMD won't let me copy a display URL, and someone has on ancestry in a tree that I suspect is wildly wrong.
I asked this questions in the general questions thread, and then thought it might be more appropriate here.
Anyone familiar with 17th Century parish registers and their terminology, especially in Yorkshire and Lancashire? Mrs BA has come across the term ffalshay in the context ffalshay wife of.... Google does not give us a definition, but turns up other uses in parish registers. Has anyone come across this in their family history research, and defined the meaning?
In this document it occurs after a man’s name, as if it were a middle name but uncapitalised. I wonder if could be a variant of something like fitz / Fitzroy, to mean born out of wedlock. I did try looking in an on Anglo-Saxon online dictionary in case it was a random surviving term - but I couldn’t find anything that looked similar.
(I also note Falsay is a surname, and I wonder if it could be a variant spelling of a family name.)
My Ancestry DNA ethnicity has been updated again.
I'm now 80% Scottish, 11% Irish, 5% English/ Northern Europe and 4% Norwegian.
They have also split my DNA to show the ethnicity of my parents.
Parent 1 gave me 37% Scottish , 4% Irish, 5% English / Northern Europe and 4% Norwegian.
Parent 2 gave me 43% Scottish, 7% Irish.
It's easy to figure out that Parent 1 would be my father and Parent 2 my mother. I have East Scottish Highland ancestry on Dad's side, which is where the Norwegian would have come from.
My Ancestry DNA ethnicity has been updated again.
I'm now 80% Scottish, 11% Irish, 5% English/ Northern Europe and 4% Norwegian...[snip]
Anyone else had an update?
I have managed to gain 9% Scottish and 1% 'Germanic Europe', both from the same side, making me now 41% Ireland, 35% England & NW Europe, 14% Wales, 9% Scotland and 1% 'Germanic'. None of my researches have found anyone from outside Wales, England and Ireland in direct lines and neither parent has any known connections beyond those nations, so I have no idea where the Scottish and German came from.
That said, I have always worried that my English score is too high for my sense of Celtic identity, so an element of Scots helps to redress the balance!
I didn't gain any new ethnicities or regional community links. I lost some Scottish and gained some English, Irish and Welsh ancestry. I'm now estimated to be 53% Scottish, 30% English, 13% Irish and 4% Welsh. One parent is more English and gave me all the Welsh DNA. The other gave more Scottish and Irish DNA. I have no known Welsh ancestry and both my parents have known Scottish, Irish and English ancestry so I am not sure which parent is which.
The information on ancestry says they use your matches to give approximate calculations of which ancestry came from which parent, so I don't know why they don't just label each parent as biological mother and father as they should be able to tell from my matches that I have labelled mother and father's side. I'm leaning towards the more English DNA giving parent being my dad, as his paternal grandmother was English and the other being my mum as my maternal grandmother has Irish and Scottish ancestry and only perhaps a small amount of English ancestry in the distant past.
Comments
It's the birth parents of an adopted relative - although I have a pen-and-paper note of this, there is no way that I would have uploaded this to Ancestry. I haven't even added them to my Family Tree Maker tree on my computer.
How did this happen? I am appalled.
From Ancestry.com
Can other people edit my Ancestry tree?
On the Tree Settings page, click the Sharing tab. Under the Role column, see if invitees are listed as Guest, Contributor, or Editor. Guests can only view the tree, not make any changes. Contributors can add information, and editors can both add information to the tree and delete information from it.
Looks like someone is either a contributor or editor. It is a matter of changing privacy settings.
The same is true of Somerset - a village I worked in was well known to the local paediatrician because the families there had a relatively high incidence of certain congenital conditions due to intermarriage in a small area. (I was actually attending a session on Travellers, where again, small intermarried population, and the paediatrician started naming villages.)
This is weird. According to Ancestry I am a Guest on Tree A (true) and an Editor on Tree B (also true) but I don't have a tree of my own. It looks as though my current membership isn't linked to my tree.
I am not related to anyone on Tree B, and Tree A is the tree of someone I know - we have a distant DNA match but we haven't figured out the connection yet. So Tree A and Tree B are completely separate from my own tree.
I stopped actively adding anything to my Ancestry tree several years ago, because I was concerned about people cutting and pasting from it. I also put some form of privacy setting on then.
I can find my tree only by searching for someone I know to be on it.
If you have had a DNA test, did you also find you have a multi-racial background you were not aware of?
If what is happening is that people of white appearance are reporting themselves as multi-racial, because a DNA test suggests an unknown ancestor of some other race, then that makes race an even more worthless concept than it currently is. So I'm not sure whether I should encourage that sort of nonsense or not. But then, the USA is full of people who are proud of being 1/16 Irish or something similar, and in most of those cases, "Irishness" has no bearing whatsoever on that person's daily life.
I'm white, and British. I have a whole load of ancestors and other relatives who are English, Welsh, and Scottish, plus a family rumor of an Irish woman a few generations ago, who is alleged to be the source of the red hair that pops up in my family from time to time. But counting the race, nationality, or whatever of my great-great-great-grandparents, and then claiming to be 1/32 of each one seems to be a singularly pointless exercise.
So base demographics seems to say that the proportion of white people in the US should be going down, even if everyone is having racially segregated marriages.
Add to that the fact that the number of relationships between people of different races (and so the number of multi-racial kids) is rising rapidly, and you expect the share of "white" to decrease even faster.
The least likely ancestral connection I expected to find.
If I went by DNA, Scottish and Irish are what my latest Ancestry results put as my highest DNA origins. As mentioned somewhere above I am somehow 66% Scottish despite having quite a lot of English and a bit of native Irish ancestry. I apparently am only 11% English, but I am not sure how that is possible, especially as Ancestry lists Devon and Cornwall region, and Cornwall specifically as areas my DNA shows I am linked to. I take all this with a grain of salt of course, though apart from percentages it is accurate.
Four of my cousins are Scottish, Irish and English on my side and various unknown African ethnicities, Indian, French and possibly other European heritages on their mother's side. She is from Mauritius and descended from African slaves, Indian indentured labourers and European colonists. I don't know which two they pick or if they just put something like British and Mauritian! Or Cornish to match their surname. There is discussion that they might allow more ethnicities to be listed on future censuses.
You can also just choose Australian which I'm guessing some white Australians who have been here for generations probably do as there are separate categories for Indigenous Australians.
I chose Australian. FWIW, my Australian ancestors on my fathers side arrived in 1793 - he was a soldier, probably impressed, she a convict. His brother was with him and also married a convict woman. On my mother's side, the earliest traced arrived in 1825. A mate has spent a lot of his retirement going through the records of those convicts sent to Parramatta Gaol, and from there to work for free settlers in the area.
There are enough people in existence that even a small fraction of them thinking that this kind of thing is cute makes a lot of people with silly names. Bill Lear, designer of the Lear Jet, apparently thought naming his daughter "Shanda" was cute.
I am now 83% Scottish, 12 % Irish and 5% English / North West European.
Well, my Scandinavian component increased substantially. However, it still does not show my Pilgrim or Puritan past in my American migration. It does show how the family that landed in Jamestown migrated West, though.
My more precise locations stayed the same: Devon and Cornwall, specifying Devon; Ulster, Ireland, specifying Tyrone, Londonderry/Derry and Antrim as well as South Londonderry/Derry and East Antrim; and it picks up my connections to European and British settlers to NSW, specifically on the Greater North Coast of NSW.
Still doesn't pick up Glasgow or Western Scotland or Birmingham where two of my great grandparents are from.
I've often been tempted with some of mine - I collect postcards of the Essex villages my family are mostly from - and have come across a few sent by rellies I can identify, but this one is a bit special.
I collect postcards of my village but I've never tried to identify the sender or sendee.
During lockdown I was phoning Dad every day, but we had no news to share with each other. I started buying postcards of Dad's home town off E-bay and posting them to him. He would then reminisce over the phone about the scene in the postcard - they provided a badly needed topic of conversation. To my surprise, Dad told me that one postcard included the house my grandfather was born in.
@Mili - we'd be long-lost cousins in-law, as the Neilston connection is on my husband's side. It's a beautiful area; it's hard to believe somewhere so green is so close to Glasgow.
My great-great grandfather was born in western New York. His mother died early, and his father put his children into a lumber wagon and moved to Wisconsin. It must have been a group traveling together, because he later married a girl who was born in the same county.
They had a family, but ended up divorcing. (Unusual enough in about 1870.) He remarried a widow who had one daughter, and they had a daughter of their own. That marriage also ended. (I can't prove divorce in either case, but I know my g-g-grandmother survived him, and I've found records of wife #2's remarriage so I'm guessing divorce in that case too.
He married wife #3 when he was 68 and she was about 25, and lived to be about 98 years old. One child of that marriage as well. They married all the way across Iowa from his home in Wisconsin, and both fibbed about their ages on the marriage certificate.
I came to the conclusion that g-g-gramps was not a very nice man.
There's an additional twist to this one. Looking for info on #3's family, I came across a link to a website called Iowa Unsolved Murders. It's a story about a man who kept a mistress and lived with her and her sister, until his secret life blew up on him. The sisters also the sister of wife #3! The double-crosser ended up murdered and was fished out of the Des Moines river.
Now I don't really think that g-g-g had any hand in that, but it's a completely bizarre story in any case. Much the oddest bit of family history I have to offer.
Most of my female ancestors seemed to stick with one husband, when they outlived them, though one of my great grandmothers had a step father and step brother. Her father was a plasterer who fell off his ladder and died when she was a year old. One of my great great grandmothers left her dodgy husband and trained as a midwife when she was 40. Her family helped raise her six children. She ran a small maternity hospital in Sydney while her husband continued farming in rural New South Wales and spent some time in jail for unsuccessfully trying to burn his house down for insurances purposes. He took most of the furniture out of the house and lit mattresses on fire in a few rooms, so it was clearly arson. It was pretty clear why his wife didn't stick around. They never divorced and he tried to claim there was no furniture in the house because he had sent it to her in Sydney!
Whilst following through on the male side involves the one surname, there are so many repeated first names that it is tricky to distinguish between the various Johns and Williams over the generations. On the maternal side, the surnames change every generation, of course.
One set of church records I looked at from the seventeenth century showed all the baptisms and all the burials as being x , son or daughter of …( father’s name ). I guess this was the norm. It struck me most forcefully just what a patriarchal society we have lived in, as if women had no role, even in childbearing.
I must also look up how one couple turn up in two different generations of my family tree... every time I tell the tale, everybody immediately starts eyeing me up to check for webbed feet and the like... worse, it's in Suffolk!
The most famous case may be Ima Hogg. Of course, if you have that kind of money, people will call you whatever you tell them to, though I've always wondered how she really felt about her parents...
I always find it slightly odd that many 18th and 19th-century birth announcements are like: 'To the lady of Colonel Smith, a son.' It's almost as if the woman's identity was a secret, she was treated merely as a man's appendage. Sadly it is also very common in FTs to find that a woman's birth surname is not known, and in some cases, you can not find any name whatever. This applies even to gentry families - you would think they would want to know their heraldic history if nothing else.
Meanwhile, going back to "What were they thinking?" I present you with Ophelia Fanny Hole, who you will have to google as FreeBMD won't let me copy a display URL, and someone has on ancestry in a tree that I suspect is wildly wrong.
Anyone familiar with 17th Century parish registers and their terminology, especially in Yorkshire and Lancashire? Mrs BA has come across the term ffalshay in the context ffalshay wife of.... Google does not give us a definition, but turns up other uses in parish registers. Has anyone come across this in their family history research, and defined the meaning?
(I also note Falsay is a surname, and I wonder if it could be a variant spelling of a family name.)
I'm now 80% Scottish, 11% Irish, 5% English/ Northern Europe and 4% Norwegian.
They have also split my DNA to show the ethnicity of my parents.
Parent 1 gave me 37% Scottish , 4% Irish, 5% English / Northern Europe and 4% Norwegian.
Parent 2 gave me 43% Scottish, 7% Irish.
It's easy to figure out that Parent 1 would be my father and Parent 2 my mother. I have East Scottish Highland ancestry on Dad's side, which is where the Norwegian would have come from.
Anyone else had an update?
I have managed to gain 9% Scottish and 1% 'Germanic Europe', both from the same side, making me now 41% Ireland, 35% England & NW Europe, 14% Wales, 9% Scotland and 1% 'Germanic'. None of my researches have found anyone from outside Wales, England and Ireland in direct lines and neither parent has any known connections beyond those nations, so I have no idea where the Scottish and German came from.
That said, I have always worried that my English score is too high for my sense of Celtic identity, so an element of Scots helps to redress the balance!
The information on ancestry says they use your matches to give approximate calculations of which ancestry came from which parent, so I don't know why they don't just label each parent as biological mother and father as they should be able to tell from my matches that I have labelled mother and father's side. I'm leaning towards the more English DNA giving parent being my dad, as his paternal grandmother was English and the other being my mum as my maternal grandmother has Irish and Scottish ancestry and only perhaps a small amount of English ancestry in the distant past.