[SPLIT] How far back can family history be accurately traced

[stormlord]

This isn't aimed at anyone in particular, but why is it in these threads that some people, particularly Americans, seem to honestly believe the incredibly shoddy genealogical "research" they, or some dodgy company have done. Really, just because you share a surname like Smith with some guy from five hundred years ago, does not mean that you're a direct descendant of this that or the other earl duke, lord or assorted famous personages. It's like those moronic "family crests" that people think belong to them because they have a surname like McDonald.

I seriously doubt any layman could carry out remotely reliable pedigree research going back more than two or three hundred years.

Didn't mean to go off on one, but it irks me when all the hyperbole distracts from the authentic and interesting real ancestors that people talk about.

[Psychonaut]

This isn't aimed at anyone in particular, but why is it in these threads that some people, particularly Americans, seem to honestly believe the incredibly shoddy genealogical "research" they, or some dodgy company have done.

I can't speak for anyone else here, but some of our families (mine) have been engaging in genealogical research for upwards of three generations. I also can't speak for those whose ancestors were Protestants, but those of us whose ancestors were Catholics can easily contact the churches where our ancestors lived and obtain a wealth of information through them. People who engage in serious genealogical research are of course not making the mistake of equating our surname to that of some "famous" person back in the middle ages. Using combinations of birth, death and marriage certificates alongside census records we trace our ancestry back, one step at a time. As to more distant lineages, and I can't speak for non French Canadians here, a great many of New France's earliest settlers, although not title bearing nobles themselves, were descended from noble families. It is these ancestors whose lineages can be traced back to the fall of Rome by anyone with a library card, since the royal genealogies of Western Europe have been matters of public record for over a hundred years.

[Loyalist]

Why is it that people, particularly Europeans, feel the need to clutter threads with irrelevant, whiny rants when they see something they don't like?


This isn't aimed at anyone in particular, but why is it in these threads that some people, particularly Americans, seem to honestly believe the incredibly shoddy genealogical "research" they, or some dodgy company have done.

Where's the evidence that it's "shoddy"?


Really, just because you share a surname like Smith with some guy from five hundred years ago, does not mean that you're a direct descendant of this that or the other earl duke, lord or assorted famous personages.

I've never seen anyone on The Apricity do that. Can you highlight a specific case where this has been done?


It's like those moronic "family crests" that people think belong to them because they have a surname like McDonald.

No one has spoken for the validity of those crests which are peddled by some foreigner on a street corner. No here, not at Skadi, not at Stirpes, nor anywhere else I'm aware of.


I seriously doubt any layman could carry out remotely reliable pedigree research going back more than two or three hundred years.

You "seriously doubt"? :rolleyes: Fortunately, no one needs your approval for the validity of any genealogical research they've conducted. Maybe you stem from a family of unusually-low peasant class, but neither I nor many others have had any trouble tracing well beyond three centuries.


Didn't mean to go off on one, but it irks me when all the hyperbole distracts from the authentic and interesting real ancestors that people talk about.

It irks me when I see someone has hijacked an otherwise informative and on-topic thread with some baseless, ill-informed rant about something which doesn't concern them.

Can someone please split this topic from rivalin's post?

[Electronic God-Man]

I think anything beyond the late 1500's is pretty much ridiculous in most cases.

Americans do seem, however, to be able to trace their lineage further back than most Europeans. I think it is because many times in these sorts of cases the person's ancestry is tied to families that were here in colonial times and this time period in American history and these families have been studied extensively. Also, these families tended to keep great records of births, marriages and deaths as well as things like court records and land deeds. As well as the fact that a great deal of early American families, specifically in the North, were quite literate, which goes along with writing down on all this information which has been preserved to this day in many cases.

Once historians and family researchers find all this information about a certain family going to around the 1620's or 1630's many naturally want to make the jump back over to the mother country. Sometimes it is sound, but more often than it should be it is just a bunch of huge leaps of faith. Most of the time this is centered around trying to make royal connections that simply do not exist.

There's no way I am going to believe that I can know with any certainty the names of some ancestor who fought in the Crusades or signed the Magna Carta.

[Loki]

I seriously doubt any layman could carry out remotely reliable pedigree research going back more than two or three hundred years.


That depends. Church birth and baptismal records are very useful and a reliable source of information. In this way, my paternal family line is accurately and uninterruptedly documented since the birth of my most distant known ancestor in Northern Germany, in 1596. That was 413 years ago and covers 13 generations. :eek: Not all family lines are that easy to trace though, it's true.

[Æmeric]

Many of the Puritans were middleclass. They had property & in many cases were descended from the younger sons of the gentry, aristocracy or royalty. Many settlers in Virginia (Cavaliers) were younger sons of wealthy landowning families in England. Having property was a prime reason for preserving family records to prove the right of inheritance. And of course those old wills are useful in tracing family lineages.

Just because someone can trace some of their ancestry beyond 1500 doesn't mean they can trace all of their lineage back that far. Some of my New England ancestors descended from landowning aristocrats & royals which is normally the case if you can trace your lineage back that far. But most of my ancestoral lines go blank between 1550-1650. Going back 500-years is around 15-20 generations. At 15 generations you have 32,768 potential 13xgreat-grandparents. If you're lucky maybe you can trace 1 out of a 1,000 ancestoral lines to that point & beyond. So just because someone has traced their pedigree back that far doesn't imply they've documented all of the lineage to that point.

[stormlord]

Why is it that people, particularly Europeans, feel the need to clutter threads with irrelevant, whiny rants when they see something they don't like?



Where's the evidence that it's "shoddy"?



I've never seen anyone on The Apricity do that. Can you highlight a specific case where this has been done?



No one has spoken for the validity of those crests which are peddled by some foreigner on a street corner. No here, not at Skadi, not at Stirpes, nor anywhere else I'm aware of.



You "seriously doubt"? :rolleyes: Fortunately, no one needs your approval for the validity of any genealogical research they've conducted. Maybe you stem from a family of unusually-low peasant class, but neither I nor many others have had any trouble tracing well beyond three centuries.



It irks me when I see someone has hijacked an otherwise informative and on-topic thread with some baseless, ill-informed rant about something which doesn't concern them.

Can someone please split this topic from rivalin's post?

What a pleasant rebuke, I made a point of not criticising anyone specifically and noting that it is something done by some people. I'm not sure why you felt the need to attack me and my ancestors personally. There are examples in every one of these threads, here and on Skadi of people making claims that are completely unverifiable. I simply noted a personal opinion on something that I found puzzling, I didn't tell anyone what they can or can't post, insult anyone's ancestry, or order the moderators to remove a forum members posts on my personal say so.

It just strikes me as somewhat bemusing that people with ancestries separated from their country of origin several times over (myself included amongst such groups, so this is not some arrogant European rant as you incorrectly concluded) mysteriously seem to be better able to trace their family trees than people whose ancestors have never moved outside a hundred mile radius. Do you really not think it odd that on every internet forum with a couple of hundred members that such a large number seem to be descended from a) Napoleon b) Charlemagne or c) an interesting if improbable combination of the crowned heads of Europe?


Many of the Puritans were middleclass. They had property & in many cases were descended from the younger sons of the gentry, aristocracy or royalty. Many settlers in Virginia (Cavaliers) were younger sons of wealthy landowning families in England. Having property was a prime reason for preserving family records to prove the right of inheritance. And of course those old wills are useful in tracing family lineages.

Just because someone can trace some of their ancestry beyond 1500 doesn't mean they can trace all of their lineage back that far. Some of my New England ancestors descended from landowning aristocrats & royals which is normally the case if you can trace your lineage back that far. But most of my ancestoral lines go blank between 1550-1650. Going back 500-years is around 15-20 generations. At 15 generations you have 32,768 potential 13xgreat-grandparents. If you're lucky maybe you can trace 1 out of a 1,000 ancestoral lines to that point & beyond. So just because someone has traced their pedigree back that far doesn't imply they've documented all of the lineage to that point.

Point taken, and it would be pointless to make any claim as to academic credentials on the internet. But if laypeople doing genealogy research saw the results of statistical analysis into error margins on pre-industrial record keeping they wouldn't be so sure of themselves. I'd love to see how many of those who are so sure of themselves have had the immeasurable pleasure of sorting through manor rolls and other mistake ridden primary sources by hand.

[Psychonaut]

Charlemagne

Seriously, I'd be willing to bet that half of all Westerners are descended from Charlemagne. He's in my family tree something like fifty generations back (I think I actually posted that lineage here). But remember, at fifty generations you've theoretically got 562,949,953,421,312 ancestors. Even though there's a great degree of pedigree collapse (something Æmeric has written about here before), the number of real ancestors you've got at that point is staggering. Given the fact that progenitors like Charlemagne had dozens of legitimate and illegitimate children and that this trend continued on until the Industrial Age, it's not only possible, but probably that most people would be related, albeit indirectly, to someone like Charlemagne. Also, remember this, it only takes one single person who has such a link to spread that link around in the beginnings of a community. This is exactly what happened with the French Canadians. There were a handful of nobles who were among the original Acadian settlers who had provable lineages going back to the Capetians (and thus to Charlemagne). Once things were democratized, the Acadian families all bred with each other and have since spread this link to Charlemagne amongst nearly all modern day Acadians.

[stormlord]

Seriously, I'd be willing to bet that half of all Westerners are descended from Charlemagne. He's in my family tree something like fifty generations back (I think I actually posted that lineage here). But remember, at fifty generations you've theoretically got 562,949,953,421,312 ancestors. Even though there's a great degree of pedigree collapse (something Æmeric has written about here before), the number of real ancestors you've got at that point is staggering. Given the fact that progenitors like Charlemagne had dozens of legitimate and illegitimate children and that this trend continued on until the Industrial Age, it's not only possible, but probably that most people would be related, albeit indirectly, to someone like Charlemagne. Also, remember this, it only takes one single person who has such a link to spread that link around in the beginnings of a community. This is exactly what happened with the French Canadians. There were a handful of nobles who were among the original Acadian settlers who had provable lineages going back to the Capetians (and thus to Charlemagne). Once things were democratized, the Acadian families all bred with each other and have since spread this link to Charlemagne amongst nearly all modern day Acadians.

Indeed, it's a statistical probablity that far back, but very few people, except in some groups, as you mentioned, are actually able to verify anything. Additionally, given the fact that approximately 10% of children are illegitimate, almost everyone's line of descent is almost 100% likely to simply fail within about ten generations, which almost no one takes account of.

[Psychonaut]

Indeed, it's a statistical probablity that far back, but very few people, except in some groups, as you mentioned, are actually able to verify anything.

Yep, which is why you'll never see me say anything about North American genealogy that's not specifically about the French. :D


Additionally, given the fact that approximately 10% of children are illegitimate, almost everyone's line of descent is almost 100% likely to simply fail within about ten generations

Now that's the kicker! One single instance of unfaithfulness can destroy a pedigree and we'd never know otherwise, particularly the further back we're talking about.

[Barreldriver]

I think anything beyond the late 1500's is pretty much ridiculous in most cases.

Americans do seem, however, to be able to trace their lineage further back than most Europeans. I think it is because many times in these sorts of cases the person's ancestry is tied to families that were here in colonial times and this time period in American history and these families have been studied extensively. Also, these families tended to keep great records of births, marriages and deaths as well as things like court records and land deeds. As well as the fact that a great deal of early American families, specifically in the North, were quite literate, which goes along with writing down on all this information which has been preserved to this day in many cases.

Once historians and family researchers find all this information about a certain family going to around the 1620's or 1630's many naturally want to make the jump back over to the mother country. Sometimes it is sound, but more often than it should be it is just a bunch of huge leaps of faith. Most of the time this is centered around trying to make royal connections that simply do not exist.

There's no way I am going to believe that I can know with any certainty the names of some ancestor who fought in the Crusades or signed the Magna Carta.

With my kin they've had published family books and came from notable Colonial families so their genealogy has been researched by universities, state departments, and has been preserved generation to generation. Anything that has been researched past the 1500's I still put a disclaimer for the fact that there may have been an adoption or unfaithfulness in a marriage, and the only reason any notable person from Europe has been remembered in my family was for something bad that they did or due to a loss of property, it helps when there are wills, parish records, criminal court records etc... to look into.


Also pertaining to those who have mentioned about the Europeans and their genealogical difficulties, honestly though, how many Europeans are that interested in genealogy? They still belong to their ancestral lands and would not need to research a connection unlike many Americans who still want to hold on to something from a past so distant and thousands of miles away. It's action of remembrance since we are no longer part of those lands thousands of miles away.

[Don Brick]

Old thread, but on my father´s side the family history can be trace back to the 11th century and on my mother´s side the 16th century. Not sure how accurately though.

[antonio]

Besides literacy levels, there's an even important fact to explain such historical persistence: America did not suffered foreign invasions, anarchism or plain anticleracy. At Spain, there are areas on which relevant Roman-Catholic archives and works of Art were ruthless destroyed -after surviving more or less justified menaces like the French Army occupation and the 18th liberal expropiation of many unused church buildings (called Desamortization) - by the nowadays "antifrancoist heroes" of the Anarquism, who, after killed some good people without fair trail, liked the most burn up the churches of conquered villages with all their precious contents inside. Needless to say that that kind of bastards have been object of many laudatory films after Franco's death (including, of course, one from Ken Loach). So, I am, on the side of my mother's family, condemned to the utterly ignorance about its probably relevant history, only more or less guessed by certain surnames and where their lands were located, and so linked to the ancient medieval time thru probabilistic science.

[Mikula]

In my country is possible to trace back family history until 17th century, generally - thanks to the catholic church registers. Also Land records could be helpfull.