General Chat

tell

LOL - don't tempt me Hoff!

lunatic! where ? who ?

life would be boring without a bit of scandal

And a lunatic! I will add that to my list - maybe I'll find one of those too!

That's the best bit for me Bambino. I love finding out about all of them but a bit of scandal ... the icing on the cake for me. You can keep the mega-huge trees - just give me the detail on those I do have.

you'll be surprised at what you find out i have a bonafied lunatic, also a couple of suicides and illegitimacy, but don't you find it makes it more interesting jill

Well, found the usual crowd of illegitimates, have two (maybe three) trollopes of gr grandmothers, have a suicide and a bigamist. All I want now is a murderer.

Agree with Foggy's comment, and I do my best to document everything as I go - or at least backtrack and document it then! Also find it fascinating to work out how they lived - and do a lot of background reading. One branch were East End gunsmiths so reading lots about the East End and lots about gunsmiths - all gives me an idea of what their lives were like.

I would love to be able to link into a well documented tree somewhere along the line on at least one of the branches though - that would be fun. My ex-husband was a Clinton but I think that his family had Irish roots ...

Furthest back is 1640 on my partner's tree - all seems very well documented but I still need to track down the evidence for the earlier parts.

My tree and my research is like a patchwork quilt!

Jill in Tinsel Town.

Hiya Hoff, xxx
Seems to me Running Bears been watching too much LIFE OF BRIAN!!!! pmsl
He does have Italian ancestry though that is true.
Tricia xx

Hi Hoff,

Done quite well on my tree thanks to help and links on GR, have got in contact with relatives i never knew i had. desparately need to start updating my tree now.

morning nudge

thanks for adding

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

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

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.

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.

I got back to 910 but have hit a brick wall

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

back later have a gr8 day all

well do June keep up the good work never give up