Did our ancestors know their ancestry?

[JAKnighton]

I've been pondering over certain instances in my tree where distant cousins who share the same surname are living in close proximity to each other, and their families always have done since they originally branched off.

It made me wonder if these individuals knew their family connections, or just vaguely understood that they must be related.

Perhaps there were oral histories passed down about who their mutual ancestors were?

It would be interesting to know if my 4x great grandfather who was born in 1820, if I were to meet him via time travel, would be able to tell me the names of his great-great grandparents born in the late 1600s.

Is there any historical literature on this?

[Erato]

No doubt some people were interested in their forebears and some weren't, just like today.  To take a historical figure [not an ancestor of mine], Benjamin Franklin [b. 1706] wrote quite a bit about his ancestors and, when he went to England, he went to the ancestral village [Ecton, Northamptonshire] to research his paternal family and made contact with relatives still living there.

My own grandmother [b. 1881] was interested and I have found her information to be accurate.

[ThrelfallYorky]

I have - or rather, have NOT evidence that some families simply are not interested in their ancestry!

My OH simply didn't know anything about his ancestry, despite most of them being in the town he was brought up in. Until I started digging, he knew his mother's maiden name, and her father's name, the name of his grandmother on the paternal side, and that that side of the family had come from another town.... and that was it! None of them seemed to have been close, or to meet up at family events.
I set off armed with only the casual comment from my mother in Law, some years ago, that her mother was called Tabitha, and had the same birthday as I had! No certificates, photos or family documents survived after said M in L had a good clear-out a few years before she died, not even pics of my OH as a child or youngster. The only one we had was one I'd borrowed from her, years before, and forgotten to return.
I found the marriage of his maternal grandparents from that, and set off. On the other side I did pretty much the same, but it was harder because that'd been an R.C. marriage
From that, amazingly, I managed to dig most of them up, so it's not impossible!

[Rena]

I had plenty of handed down family stories and when I eventually started tracing my ancestors I knew one set of grandparents were Scottish but thought I'd find the stories relating to earlier generations of my maternal grandmother would be living in the same Yorkshire town that I was born and bred in.  How wrong can one be?

I would phone my mother's sister for clues and also to tell her my latest findings.  I phoned her one day to inform her I'd found one of her ancestors in the 1851 Norfolk census and he made shoes. To which she  excitedly responded by saying "We knew there was a shoemaker somewhere in the family".
As her parents weren't affluent I thought they never travelled afar, but my Aunt was able to describe the Norfolk family because her parents had taken them to visit their grandparents and other members of the family when they were young.   I wish I'd asked how they travelled such a long distance - road, rail, boat?

My OH was born in Yorkshire, his mother was a fervent Methodist and his father was not a known churchgoer..  On OH's paternal side, he had a Scottish grandmother and a Welsh g/father living up in Newcastle that he never knew because they had died before he was born.  One of OH's stories was that one ancestor had been a preacher and when his twin daughters died he turned away from the church.  I couldn't find a qualified preacher but I did find a Scottish Catholic ancestor whose twin daughters died. I can only think that OH's ancestor had had a "proper" week day job and was a Lay Preacher on Sundays and any other time he felt the need.

[lydiaann]

From that, amazingly, I managed to dig most of them up, so it's not impossible!

I hope that's not in the literal sense...

[ThrelfallYorky]

Fortunately no! Don't think I'd have liked doing that at all.

[BillyF]

My gt grandfather told my mother that his family had lived in the same village for 200 years ( he was right ). My mother also said there was a family bible at his house, but she thought that my great aunt took it when my gt grandmother died, I would have loved to have seen it.

[roopat]

In both my family & my OH's, people fell out with each other - my OH was amazed when I was able to very easily find his father's origins as his grandmother had looked down on the paternal side & Father grew up knowing nothing about uncles, cousins etc. So sad as they lived very close by.


OH's uncle always thought his grandfather was 'the black sheep' & again knew nothing of the huge network of family who all lived in the same small country parish for generations till we traced them - even gravestones.


When I was about 8 I went to a new school & a girl came up to me one day & told me she was my cousin. I told my Mum who said 'she's not your cousin, we don't talk to them.' Since I've been doing my research I've found she was in fact a 2nd cousin from a whole branch of the family I grew up knowing nothing about.


Still it makes the research even more interesting 

[Pheno]

I'm sure my Mum didn't know about her forebears - she had a very real dislike of people from Yorkshire ( I think she worked once with a Yorkshireman and really didn't get on with him).

Well I married a Yorkshireman, my sister married a Yorkshireman and when I did the family ancestry discovered that her paternal grandfather had been born in Yorkshire and various members of the family had been given the Freedom of the City of Hull.

She was not happy.

Pheno