General Chat

How far back are you with your family tree ?

Have you had any shocks ?

Do other family members help you to do your tree ?

morning Mo

its use to be like that here
But now my family from over the water what to know everything which is nice
they have been sending some good stuff and pics to help with the tree ,So Thats a good start

morning keith,

only got back to late 1700... on my own searching but there is a lot i can get of trees if i want it, i have found a couple of skeletons, my two brothers are interested.
also my half brother son, i found out the name of his mom, and the marriage date.... my bro brought up so old photos of late aunts yesterday.

morning joan its great to get some old pics

trying to get info from my half brothers children now.. they might come up with some info worth a try ...

you can always ask for help there are some good members on here who will help if you need it

Morning back to 1740 so far. No skeletons but GGrandfather was on ship that escorted Queen Victoria's body back from Isle of Wight to Gosport and went on to head the Coastguard in Lowestoft and saved the lives of several Dutch sailors when their ship was wrecked. He got letter of thanks from Government and Dutch Ambassador....all found thanks to some news cuttings found in relatives effects after she died

Well done Col you have done very well ,Keep up the good work mate

wow

you are doing very well Mo

Morning hoff.

Back to 1652 on husbands side..
1704 on mine
mind you of probably met some of them lol

well do June keep up the good work never give up

back later have a gr8 day all

Mo I'm stuck up here , please get me down lol .

I got back to 910 but have hit a brick wall

It's not about how far one has got back with their tree, it's whether the information they have is or has been confirmed by certificates and other documentation.
Anyone can add names to their tree, but unless they are confirmed they mean nothing.

well i got back to Italy BC, yes i know, you may laugh, but his name was 'Naughtius Maximus'. and i know that cause i watched the film. how much more proof can one get.

very true Foggy (morning :)...)

I have been given a tree of my dad's side going back to 1525 , and think it has been fairly well researched but do want to check some things...one of the surprises was that my gt grandmother on that side was Canadian ... there is also a second marriage that I have to look into a bit more .

On the other side I am back to about 1780 or so with certainty :)

xx

I started doing my tree seriously about 12 years ago and to begin with concentrated on my mother's side of the family. They came from Somerset so I could research in the Records Office in Taunton myself.

I spent hundreds of hours in there researching and also joined the Somerset and Dorset Family History Society so could share information with some fellow members.

I felt really pleased to get back to an ancestor who was born around 1500. I found a copy of his will in the Records Office mentioning grandchildren and I was able to roughly work out when he must have been born even though that was before parish records.

I'd have been satisfied with that till I felt guilty and decided to work on my father's Lincolnshire ancestry. Not so easy from over here but lots more had got onto the Internet since I started and I contacted various people on GR.

My father's great grandmother was called Sarah Ann Fines and she was very ordinary. I knew who her parents and grandparents were but hadn't gone further. Then a GR contact I made told me things got a bit more interesting a few generations back. He didn't then contact me again for about a week so I assumed we'd got some scandal or other.

Anyway to cut a long story short........it turned out that earlier generations (since checked and double checked to make sure) were spelled Fynes or Fienes or even earlier as Fiennes. On that branch my 9x great grandfather was Henry Clinton-Fiennes the 2nd Earl of Lincoln. My lot had ended up impoverished because from then onwards it was always by younger sons and usually by second wives.

The Clintons and the Fiennes always tended to marry well to aristocratic women and in earlier generations to descendants of royalty. The lines back from the wives went all over Europe and way back all over the British Isles too. My most recent monarch is Edward III but I have royal ancestors from all sorts of countries.

Just about everyone of English ancestry probably has descent from people like William the Conqueror but it isn't so usual to be able to prove it. I can do that numerous times over in a variety of directions. Even if the odd one turns out to be a false father there are all sorts of ways back via siblings of various royals too. It gets amazingly complicated.

In answer to the original question.........I am going along with the majority view of the most likely D of A (ie Descent from Antiquity). I've done a lot of reading about it and the most likely to stand up to scrutiny is one of the ancestors of the Emperor Charlemagne. There is a route back from him to someone called Afranius Syragrius who was a Gallo-Roman consul alive in 381 AD. If that line is correct as a lot of medievalists say then Afranius is my 48x great grandfather.

He's also the ancestor of all of you.

I've got tentative ways back to two 52x great grandfathers as well but they were a century later than Afranius.

I have ignored all online trees going back via Da Vinci Code routes or heading off into mythological realms. The ones I look at are those being properly considered by medieval experts.

Sue

thanks for adding

morning nudge