Ancestry.co.uk

[rynnor]

alot of sour graped people in this thread

Lol - it just suprises me that people dont realise its a scam.

Realistically most peoples ancestors before the industrial revolution spent thousands of years farming.

Yet incredibly everyone who researches their family history produces some link to the tiny percentage who didnt.

I guess I shouldn't be suprised considering how well other scams do.

 

[Aoami]

You find it surprising that when people trace their family back for 15 odd generations, they find a tenuous link to someone famous? That's thousands of people, and going back to a time when the population was a fraction of what it is now. How is it so completely implausible to you?

 

[Raven]

Because he is a bit of a tool.

 

[rynnor]

You find it surprising that when people trace their family back for 15 odd generations, they find a tenuous link to someone famous?

15 generations is stretching it tbh but the reality is that there was basically no social mobility for serfs so no matter how far back you go they arent going to be famous.

Yet everyone who goes looking finds stuff - and you still think its reasonable?

 

[rynnor]

Because he is a bit of a tool.

And you are frankly boring

 

[Zenith.UK]

15 generations is stretching it tbh but the reality is that there was basically no social mobility for serfs so no matter how far back you go they arent going to be famous.

Yet everyone who goes looking finds stuff - and you still think its reasonable?

You had a point with the agricultural workers. A number of my family before 1820 or so were farm workers.
Aoami though is pretty much spot on with his interpretation. Yes, the rich famous people are the ones that have a lot of documentation about them so once you have a record that ties in with one of them, you've got a free ride.

Without wanting to bore you, I've found:
a stonemason who helped build the houses of colliery workers in South Wales,
a gamekeeper who looked after estates all over Wales,
an immigrant boy from "the East Indies" who was sponsored to come to Britain,
a worker who died being scalded to death in a boiler,
a builder who died falling off a scaffold onto his head,

There are plenty more, but they're of no real interest to anyone outside of my family.

 

[Mabs]

and you find it surprising that people are related why ?
2 parents, 2 each for them, 2 each for them, and on, and on, and their brothers and sisters, so oddly enough there quite a lot of people the further back you go

and depends entirely on what you class as "famous" anyway
having a handful of notable people out of possibly 100 odd isnt that far fetched, some people are clearly bitter that their entire lineage was pig farmers

 

[Mabs]

case in point, having just looked him up, this is one of mine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Nicolls

note he had NINE children... work out how many descendants that is in ~200 years

 

[SilverHood]

Someone who shares my family name reached out to my dad 10 years ago.... Some Canadian chap who was doing research into our ancestry full time, while retired. He got as far back as 1066... A man-at-arms in William of Normandy's invading army. Some of his descendants were the earls of Lincoln.... they were a little too close to Silken Thomas so they all got sent to Ireland penniless in the 1500's, where they lived ordinary lives until about 1800, when lots of them moved to Northern England and the United States. An offshoot branch that didn't go to Ireland changed its name and was speaker of Parliament in the 1800's. I thought it was interesting anyway.

 

[Fweddy]

Yet everyone who goes looking finds stuff - and you still think its reasonable?

“If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately one million trillion, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived!.” ― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

That number is way off because of people appearing in your family tree more than once but basically you're related to an awful lot of people if you go back far enough. Chances are some of them are going to be interesting.

 

[DaGaffer]

We've done my Dad's side back to about 1650, a long line of soldiers, seemingly one or two from almost every generation (lots of brothers) and the ones who stayed behind are all from around Bethesda, which means they were probably slate miners or farm labourers (or sheep stealers - there's at least one transportee in there); no wonder so many went for soldier.

My Mums side looks a bit more exotic; French Hugenot, but we haven't really started it yet.

As for the famous ancestor thing; well there's always the Ghengis Khan effect; some historic figures used their powers for heroic shagging, which is why one in 200 men globally can genuinely claim him as a direct ancestor.

 

[opticle]

Each generation = 2^ number of ancestors, innit? Unless I've lost the plot as I'm shattered.

So 15 generations = 2^15 = 32768 ancestors.. And that's only parents, not mentioning their other children.

Six degrees of separation - can put you in touch with pretty much anyone alive today through people you know, similar thing with ancestors.

(Half) My family relocated from Germany at the turn of the 19th century, so it'd be a bugger to track them down We were probably all Kaisers and badasses tbfh, and our crest is a giant schlong, rampant on a field of mauve.

 

[Gray]

I was watching some unrelated Youtube stuff when i seen this.


View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3sTzLXtojo


Ah Stephen, how i do learn things from you!

 

[Raven]

Also, as with anyone's family tree it is kind of shaped, you know, kind of like a tree, lots of dead ends but lot's of lines that can be followed. Unless you go purely father, grandfather, great grandfather etc

 

[Jeros]

Its worth paying to get the info.

Amazing learning that the sweet old man who took me to see the trains and played snap with me as kid once laid communications cable in Germany as the Nazis shot at him.

 

[DaGaffer]

Its worth paying to get the info.

Amazing learning that the sweet old man who took me to see the trains and played snap with me as kid once laid communications cable in Germany as the Nazis shot at him.

Both my (paternal) Grandfather and my Great Uncle had an "interesting" war. My Granddad was career military (he'd been in India and China before the war), and was actually stationed with the military attache in Warsaw when war broke out, and had to escape by car via Romania. He then joined the Paras (he was recruit number 8 - we have his paybook), went on the Bruneval raid (he was in 1 Para but temporarily transferred to 2 Para because of a lack of NCOs - my Granny used to have this great photo on the wall of him actually heading back to the landing craft on the raid and some fucking scumbags burgled her and stole it) then fought in North Africa, Sicily and finally got wounded at Monte Cassino, in true Holllywood style, the day before he was supposed to come back to the UK to take on a training role... My Great Uncle fought on D-Day and was one of the first British troops into Belsen. It affected him so much he did loads of work after the war with Jewish refugee and orphan groups and was awarded the BEM, which he kept secret from the whole family until he died. We ended up finding out about a lot of this literally at his funeral, which led us to investigations via his regiment etc.

I don't really care that there's no-one famous I can see in the family tree, these two alone gave us a book's worth of history (my Uncle Dick was a lovely bloke but my Granddad died when I was two, and was by all accounts a bit of an arsehole despite his war record, or maybe because of it; my Dad and Grandmother always maintained he was probably suffering from PTSD from Warsaw onwards); of course with this genealogy stuff, it gets a lot harder to discover anything about their actual lives the further back you go.

 

[Gwadien]

Firstly, I'd like to point out that Zenith.UK is an absolute legend for giving me a hand with this, he found this out about one of my Great-Great-Great Uncles;

He returned to France on 5 Jul 1916, a month after Roland was born. Sydney was killed in action on the field of battle just over a month later on 11 Aug 1916. This was one of the actions of the Battle of the Somme.

As he said before to you lot, this may mean nothing, but because I'm quite into history, and looking into the Battle of the Somme, you can really put people there now, knowing someone in your blood-line was once in this battle that claimed so many lives.

 

[DaGaffer]

Somme not Sommes

 

[Gwadien]

Somme not Sommes

You know, I thought that, but I didn't want to edit it, copied and pasted it from a message

 

[Raven]

I think most people have a relative that was killed in world war 1. My great grandfathers brother died at Ypres.

 

[DaGaffer]

I think most people have a relative that was killed in world war 1. My great grandfathers brother died at Ypres.

My great-grandfather was one of seven brothers and the only one to come through WWI unscathed; four were killed and two injured (including a particularly horrific gassing which eventually..ulp...made his jaw drop off).

 

[Zenith.UK]

I always get Somme and Sommes mixed up. It was an honest mistake in spelling.

I pay for the full access subscription for Ancestry and unlike quite a few people, I have no problem with taking a ball and running with it. Some people are really possessive of their information, when its there but for the searching. Gwadien asked if I could help with his ggg-uncles in WW1, so he invited me to his tree as an editor and I used my records access to find people's info. The outcome is that I've not only padded out some branches of the tree but managed to find specific military records for the people in question. WW1 records are hit and miss, but if you get lucky then your ancestor's signing up papers and record are searchable, as in the case of Tom and Sydney.

The nice upside is once I attach records to people in his tree, they should be available for him to view, even though he's not got full records access.

 

[Aoami]

Signed up for the trial out of interest and I've traced the family name back to 1831 so far but not found much interesting other than it comes from Somerset which I didn't know. Can't find anything on my fathers mothers side though

 

[Zenith]

Quite recently been doing some research into my mums family. Apparently they are Waloons immigrating to Sweden due to the need of steelworkers in the 1600's.

 

[ECA]

Your mothers a whore!

Spoiler

Sorry I saw the thread topic and just wanted to say it

 

[sayward]

Because of this thread I went and had a play on ancestry.co.uk. Have just messed around on there before, not seriously. Put in my grandparents names and I presume someone had beaten me to it. Came across a photgraph of their gravestones and one of their wedding day which I had never seen before. Also one of my grandfather in uniform on his horse which I had no idea existed. Really weird, quite spooky.

I assume that people who are paying can scan in relevant photographs?

 

[Gwadien]

Because of this thread I went and had a play on ancestry.co.uk. Have just messed around on there before, not seriously. Put in my grandparents names and I presume someone had beaten me to it. Came across a photgraph of their gravestones and one of their wedding day which I had never seen before. Also one of my grandfather in uniform on his horse which I had no idea existed. Really weird, quite spooky.

I assume that people who are paying can scan in relevant photographs?

Well, I believe anyone can scan in a photo, or there's records at the war office for instance and you may be lucky to have a photo attached, Zenith actually posted a picture of my Great-Great-Great-Great Grandfather, or something like that, from the 1800s, I thought yes, to get a photo then you must be wealthy, and cool, but no, he wasn't, he was uggllayy! ;P

 

[Zenith.UK]

The way it works is you can upload your own media and attach them to particular events for particular people.
For example, I have images attached to my great-grandmother when she was 16, when she was mid-20's and of her headstone. The 2 images were scanned from photographs and the headstone was taken by myself with my phone.
The main thing to keep in mind is that if you set your tree to public, *anyone* can link to your image and use it in their own tree. That's part of the community spirit of Ancestry.
I also use Family Tree Maker 2012 on my PC to maintain on offline copy of my tree. The nice thing is you can attach images to individuals and set them as private so they don't get uploaded when syncing.

 

[Bahumat]

I found Gwadien's family!

Spoiler

 

[mooSe_]

I can't see the picture but fat-men.jpg lulz