What family info did you have before you started genealogy?

[kooky]

I began after my father died in 1996. My mother gave me an envelope with certificates in it. She said they were my fathers. When I looked properly there were many BMD certificates. I began a tentative tree and asked my mum where her certs were. She told me she only had her own birth cert. and her marriage .
So I decided to find them for her
Thus it began!
Kooky

[Kay99]

I only knew one grandparent (my mother's mother) and by the time I was in my mid twenties she, my parents and their siblings had died.   Then amazingly I started to work for a County Council with an attached Record Office which gave me access to some records well before computers were is common usage and started me off!

The grandmother I did know never referred to any relations other than her father who was a baker from the Isle of Man.    She always said she was from there as well.   However many years after starting found her birth in Liverpool and via another family a photograph of one of her brothers with an amazing resemblance.   Wonderful - granny would have been thrilled.

[andrewalston]

My mum was, and still is, full of stories about the events of her childhood and the things she was told when young. I'm still trying to write them down!

Some of the tales have been proven true, such as the story that when her grandfather remarried in 1910 following the death of his first wife, his eldest two girls took offence and walked out. At the 1911 census, they are elsewhere in town.

The "we are descended from George Marsh (St. George the Martyr)" story is still very unlikely ever to bear fruit. The right parish, but Marsh is an extremely common surname, and the related claim - George in every generation - falls down very quickly. However, this was the story that my mum was convinced could be proven, and started me on my research.

My dad never seemed to have any stories to pass on, but I wish I'd listened more carefully to his mother. When I took her for a drive around the village where she was born, would be relating which relation had lived in each house. Those links I do remember have turned out to be spot-on. She would have been surprised by some of my findings - she was proud that her mother came from that now upmarket village, but did not know that her father's father was born there too. Her parents turn out to have been 5th cousins. 

[Gillg]

Although both my maternal grandparents died young (45 and 50) and I never knew them, my mother and her sister had a fund of family tales to recall, so I learned a great deal about my musical chapel-going ancestors and the "family" red hair (which I didn't inherit, much to my father's regret - it had been the thing that first attracted him to my mother).  There were no certificates, but the trail has been fairly easy to follow up to the early 1700s.

I knew that my paternal grandfather had been born in a small Huntingdonshire village and had moved with his widowed mother and siblings to Lancashire, where he met my grandmother.  More than this I didn't know, apart from a few names of his relatives.  I did hear that there was a family "black sheep", but was never told who that was.  It took me quite a while to work out that this was most probably my gt-grandfather, who became a policeman in London but mysteriously returned to his village occupation of cordwainer after a couple of years.  Later correspondence with the police historians revealed that he had been dismissed "for stealing strawberries"".

I had just started putting together a fairly basic family tree when my mother died and my adopted older brother decided that it was now time to find out about his birth family.  He was given, after counselling, a copy of his birth certificate and learned for the first time his birth mother's name and his original forenames.  With a great deal of help from Rootsweb and RootsChat we put together his family history and he was able to make contact with his mother's younger brother and his cousins.  They had known of his birth and were delighted to hear from him and to know that things had turned out so well for him with his adoptive family.  His uncle was also a family history fan and was able to supply lots of information and family photos.   

   

[Kiltpin]

"What family info did you have before you started genealogy?"

Well, to be honest - a load of old cobbled together nonsense, wishful thinking and lies.

Just some of the highlights -

We are not directly descended from Florence Nightingale (the famous nurse who produced no children). To his dying day, my uncle maintained "Just because you can't find a link, doesn't mean there isn't one there".

We are not directly descended from the American General, Andrew 'Stonewall' Jackson. Same surname, different trees, different forests.

Georgiana Selina Henrietta is one woman and not three sisters.

Charles William Eaton was in fact three men, an uncle and his two nephews and not one man.

We were not all (each and every one) murdered in our beds by the Campbells at Glencoe.

I think that I spent the best part of five years disproving all the fantasy. What was left, was little more than my own name and date of birth.

Regards

Chas

[patty38]

My mother had a big Victorian photo album which we used to look through and she could name all the people in the photos and she told me many stories about her mother's family, I knew she was an orphan and brought up by her mother's two unmarried sisters, I found out her father died the day after she was born and her mother 3 days later, her birth was registered by an aunt on the same day as her mother was buried.

She also told me her mother's brother was drowned as a child. It was actually the son of another aunt, and he committed suicide age 14, there was a brother though who died young he had physical and mental disabilities, so maybe my mum just got them mixed up.

My father's family were from Waterford, Ireland, I was told by my father but now I'm not so sure and I knew those grandparents and the names of some of their siblings although they never talked about the past.

It's been a journey of discovery in more ways than one and I'm so glad I started.....but will I ever get finished, that's doubtful 
 

[3sillydogs]

Not very much, I had paternal grandad's name and the fact that he was born in Wales.  Grandma's fathers surname and the fact that he was here during the Anglo Boer War.

Then there were grandma's stories that we were connected to an important leader of the Great Trek.

My maternal side apparently we are related via grandpa to some minor royalty, who was somewhat of a blacksheep (what else ) who was banished to the colonies. Grandma's line remains a total mystery and a huge brickwall. All I know is that she and her sisters were in an orphanage during WWI.

What have I found?
Well we are really related to the Trek leader  so grandma was right.  But the minor royalty, still can't find the link.  And OH and I are 6th cousins once removed

[ThrelfallYorky]

I had a tree, originally drawn up by my grandfather, of his side - but with no dates or locations! I later found a few errors there. On my maternal side, precious little. I started hunting about, records offices, etc. and then online, then joined "Ancestry", and got a bit more serious.
Never really managed to solve any of the main mysteries ... why a great grandfather Andrew Keating ( a baker) died in 1933 in Fleetwood, rather than Southport, where I'd expected him to be - or where in Ireland he'd come from in the first place! Where exactly earliest known paternal ancestor was born... where in Ireland Thomas Cummins came from ... in fact most of my "stickers" relate to Ireland!!
That tree did stimulate my interest. Sadly only started after both parents dead, and not many older relatives to ask. One person, cousin to my father, was wonderful, allowing me access to her research - and in return I was able to do some research online for her maternal ancestry, and her husbands.
I wish I'd had the family papers, albums, letters so many people seem to have had and been able to access, or the large mass of relatives ... only children seem to have run in our family, so there have been very few to ask or to confirm findings.
My advice to you all: Get the info whilst oldies are still present, both in mind and body!

[Erato]

I had a lot of information  -  a ~25 page document on her family history from my paternal grandmother, a ~70 page document from my paternal grandfather about his boyhood on a Wisconsin farm with a few genealogical notes, and a basic tree of my maternal grandfather's family produced by a distant relative.  All of these proved to be mostly accurate.  There were some interesting omissions, though.