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General => The Common Room => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: coombs on Sunday 07 June 20 19:43 BST (UK)
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As more and more records go online, it is getting easier to trace ancestors but also to remain vigilant and check, check and check again. The last thread asking the question in this thread title was from 2011, and lots more records have come online since then. And new Rootschatters have joined, and ones on the site in 2011 will still be researching.
My ancestor Martha Luxford born 1644 in Sussex has got me back a very long way. Her family were gentry, as her maternal grandfather was a knight, and Martha's family are listed in visitations, and her ancestors had land in Somerset, Hampshire and Essex. I found a Sussex visitation pedigree going way back to the 1100s with the Naldrett's of Rudgwick, Sussex. So the 1100s is as far back as I have gone now so far.
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I found an online tree showing lineage back to the Norse Gods, but I haven't proved this line yet. ;D ;D
Heralds' Visitation lineages suggest one of my lines goes back to the 11th century, but in my opinion these amount to "what the family believed" and may not be accurate.
My earliest proven ancestor (confirmed by BMDs, PRs, and wills) left a will dated 1493.
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My mother's family (Sims) were ag-labs from Wiltshire; so I feel incredibly lucky to have got back to the mid-1500's!
Helped because they stayed at 2 or 3 villages around Steeple Ashton for most of that time.
Parish records were incredibly helpful.
Father's family (Garrad) were rather better off, although not landed gentry!
Latest 5 generations are/were West Country based, but before that they were from Essex & Suffolk, with a slight sojourn to Jersey.
Oldest (confirmed) relation was born 1550 in Bures St Mary, Suffolk.
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I found an online tree showing lineage back to the Norse Gods, but I haven't proved this line yet. ;D ;D
Heralds' Visitation lineages suggest one of my lines goes back to the 11th century, but in my opinion these amount to "what the family believed" and may not be accurate.
My earliest proven ancestor (confirmed by BMDs, PRs, and wills) left a will dated 1493.
It does make you wonder how accurate those visitations were. You may get excited at finding your rellies in the visitations but then wonder if it is all too good to be true.
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I have more than one tree that I have collated information for.
This one is the one with 80 percents in... * by that I mean with as much verification as is poss from this laptop and this chair... Not wandering the real archives and not able to ask them now.... :) of course it includes illegitimate offspring and side step offspring.. but I found it interesting..
and the furthest back on that tree is:
Thomas Hamilton 1373-1434
15th great-grandfather
Dalkeith Midlothian Scotland
Now this is as far as I go on one line
Then on another line on my really real researched tree with hopefully a higher percentage of verification I go back to
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John Sir Wright
1450–1509
BIRTH 27 OCT 1450 • Upminster, Essex
DEATH 9 MAY 1509 • Dagenham, Essex
You know what
Tomorrow I will be working them all out to see which branch I can take the furthest RELIABLY
Xin
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I just thi k every generation back is another opportunity for a NPE to creep in.
Zaph
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In the what is now UK
771 and Ecgberht of Wessex
In Europe
582 Arnulf of Metz
We gave up adding people at these points.
But if you remember seeing Who Do You Think You Are when they opened up the Family Tree of the Kings of England and the tree went all the way back to God, well we are part of that tree from King Edward III.
Once you find a Gateway the flood gates open.
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so what the heck is an NPE
NullPointerException (Java)
NPE Needle Passion Embroidery
NPE Network Processing Engine
NPE Neurogenic Pulmonary Edema (clinical syndrome)
NPE New Player Experience
NPE Network Processor Engine
NPE Null Pointer Exception
NPE National Policy on Education
NPE New Pantai Expressway (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
NPE National Plastics Exposition
NPE Nonlinear Polarization Evolution
NPE National Pavement Expo (trade show)
NPE Natural Penis Enlargement
NPE Non-Practicing Entity (patent law)
NPE Non-Paternity Event (genealogy)
NPE Nutrition Program for the Elderly (now Nutrition Services Incentive Program)
NPE Nonyl Phenol Ethoxylate
NPE Non-Public Education (North Carolina)
NPE Network Planning and Engineering
NPE Non-Permanent Employee
NPE Non-Paternity Event (genetic genealogy)
NPE Network Protection Equipment
NPE Nonlinear Parabolic Equation (sound propagation)
NPE Natural Power and Energy, LLC (Scottsdale, AZ)
NPE New Products Engineering
NPE North Peace Energy (Canada)
NPE Navy Preliminary Evaluation
NPE Nanoparticle Ensemble (electrodes)
NPE Net Premium Earned
NPE Non-Permissive Environment (security)
NPE Network Provider Edge
NPE Negative Play Experience (games)
NPE Non-Production Environment
NPE Non-Person Entity (computer security)
NPE Non-Polar Extractives
NPE Nikon Precision Europe GmbH (Langen, Germany)
xin
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That would be:
so what the heck is an NPE
NullPointerException (Java)
NPE Needle Passion Embroidery
NPE Network Processing Engine
NPE Neurogenic Pulmonary Edema (clinical syndrome)
NPE New Player Experience
NPE Network Processor Engine
NPE Null Pointer Exception
NPE National Policy on Education
NPE New Pantai Expressway (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
NPE National Plastics Exposition
NPE Nonlinear Polarization Evolution
NPE National Pavement Expo (trade show)
NPE Natural Penis Enlargement
NPE Non-Practicing Entity (patent law)
NPE Non-Paternity Event (genealogy)
NPE Nutrition Program for the Elderly (now Nutrition Services Incentive Program)
NPE Nonyl Phenol Ethoxylate
NPE Non-Public Education (North Carolina)
NPE Network Planning and Engineering
NPE Non-Permanent Employee
NPE Non-Paternity Event (genetic genealogy)
NPE Network Protection Equipment
NPE Nonlinear Parabolic Equation (sound propagation)
NPE Natural Power and Energy, LLC (Scottsdale, AZ)
NPE New Products Engineering
NPE North Peace Energy (Canada)
NPE Navy Preliminary Evaluation
NPE Nanoparticle Ensemble (electrodes)
NPE Net Premium Earned
NPE Non-Permissive Environment (security)
NPE Network Provider Edge
NPE Negative Play Experience (games)
NPE Non-Production Environment
NPE Non-Person Entity (computer security)
NPE Non-Polar Extractives
NPE Nikon Precision Europe GmbH (Langen, Germany)
xin
;D Not as interesting as some of the others on your list Xin. ;D
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;D ;D ;D
You see the simplest answer is always the best..... :) I have loads of NPE's then...
its the conflaburation's imparted into this old head :) :) cannot take it...
xin
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771 and Ecgberht of Wessex
Linus Roache was brilliant as him in Vikings. :)
As for how far back have I got - no further than early 1600s on any line.
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In the what is now UK
771 and Ecgberht of Wessex
In Europe
582 Arnulf of Metz
We gave up adding people at these points.
But if you remember seeing Who Do You Think You Are when they opened up the Family Tree of the Kings of England and the tree went all the way back to God, well we are part of that tree from King Edward III.
Once you find a Gateway the flood gates open.
Gateway ancestors can be hard to find though, it is a case of persevering. Although some people prefer the hard working mud pluggers as opposed to gentry and royals.
Although landed gentry can be considered gateway ancestors, surely the term is not limited to royalty.
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Yes can comprehend all satisfactions in the discoveries of rich or poor - titled or not.
Bless them all for being part of what made me.......... (I wonder how they feel :) :) :)
What I am so so grateful for at the moment that I have not found anything horrific... eeeek.. just one or two slightly naughty -- and one or two very naughty wife and children neglections etc..
but thankfully nothing too awful so thats xxxxxx
I had one go to Prison for Marching against Coal miners Strike in Fife :)
xin
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In the what is now UK
771 and Ecgberht of Wessex
In Europe
582 Arnulf of Metz
We gave up adding people at these points.
But if you remember seeing Who Do You Think You Are when they opened up the Family Tree of the Kings of England and the tree went all the way back to God, well we are part of that tree from King Edward III.
Once you find a Gateway the flood gates open.
Gateway ancestors can be hard to find though, it is a case of persevering. Although some people prefer the hard working mud pluggers as opposed to gentry and royals.
Although landed gentry can be considered gateway ancestors, surely the term is not limited to royalty.
My own Gateway was a farmers wife, it was just her surname that rang a bell.
My Wife’s Gateway ancestor was a silk weaver from a small village outside Blackburn.
You never know who could open up the tree.
For the most part, farm labourers and weaving related skills do seem the norm for the vast majority ancestors that are in our trees.
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I found an online tree showing lineage back to the Norse Gods, but I haven't proved this line yet. ;D ;D
Heralds' Visitation lineages suggest one of my lines goes back to the 11th century, but in my opinion these amount to "what the family believed" and may not be accurate.
My earliest proven ancestor (confirmed by BMDs, PRs, and wills) left a will dated 1493.
I would totally agree with your comment. My maternal ancestial line remained in the same village for centuries, so the villages local records were very useful ( including the parish record books) as there was/is a manor house and many worked for the manor and lived in rental properties owned by the manor and the family in the manor were RC so the Manor also held parish records/diary for those. I was given permission by todays Manor owners to visit and research their records and there are many instances that do not give the same details as the Heralds Visitation records..... so my thoughts changed about the Heralds Visitations records the Heralds seemed to want to join the titled families in the area when there was no evidence at all and in fact record evidence against it...so the unresearched/unproved 'internet family trees' of the past
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You may think you have hit the jackpot with those visitations which mention an ancestor and it goes back several generations and they travelled all over the country, but then get a huge disappointment when you research further and find evidence to the contrary, hence why you should always be prepared beforehand for the fact that a lot of those visitations are based on guesswork and family memory which can be hazy, and even fraudulent entries given by our sly wily ancestors.
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My 3x great-grandmother was Mary Harmer of Heathfield, Sussex. Thanks to the work of the Harmer Family Association, this takes me back to Miles de Haremere of Etchingham, Sussex who lived at the end of the 12th century.
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I have one line back to a Simon Longcraft whose will went to probate in 1569. According to the age given on his son's burial record Simon's son was born about 1545. On the other hand I have a line ending with Catherine Parkes born c1858
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If your ancestors were vicars, aldermen, MP's, local Mayors then that can help as it leaves a good paper trail on the individual. My ancestor Robert Lambert moved from Walberswick Suffolk to Colchester and became an Alderman in the 1500s.
Wills are probably the best source for pre 1600 research. Even if many did not leave a will, many were named in one.
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I have spent decades believing it was impossible for me to find a trail for my multi country European extraction, so despite this is small beer to many of you, I am absolutely thrilled to have German record transcripts suggesting a pair of 6 x great grandparents in one of my lines.
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Also you may find likely ancestors with the same uncommon surname, but it is 3 or 4 generations back from your earliest known ancestor with the same surname, and you are not sure how they connect to your ancestor born 100 or so years later.
My ancestor John Coggeshall was born c1582, son of Roger of Fornham St Martin, Suffolk, and there was a Roger Coggeshall who died in 1541 in Fornham. His 1541 will does not mention a son or grandson Roger as far as I know but if I was to connect them, it would take me a long way back.
I have a John Larwood of Combs, Suffolk, born c1610 and it is believed the Larwood's descend from a single family way back in the 1200s in Horstead, Norfolk.
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The earliest record I have -
Roger Challice married Joan Predham on 5 February 1555 at the village of Newton St Cyres, Devon.
I am also descended from the Havelock family of Guisborough, and there are trees that have that family going back to the 1400's, but I'm yet to prove that.
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Knight, so lucky the records are good there.
Newton St Cyres is a nice place...... some of my grandaughters went to primary school there. :D
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The Glemsford area of Suffolk also has good records. Lots of wealthy clothiers and merchants lived in that area, some are my ancestors. And a number of the clothiers/merchants, or their siblings and children went to America in the early to mid 1600s.
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I am going to buck the trend here and say 1740s, despite researching on and off for 20 years :: I am absolutely sure that it is possible to go back further on some lines but I have found plenty to do just focussing on more recent events. I think it will be a post lockdown resolution to concentrate on getting back to the 17th century on at least one of my lines though!
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Going sideways can also be very rewarding.
I did the Ancestry DNA test years ago and currently I am working through the matches that have been reported.
It can also help to confirm or otherwise the dubious person you have in the tree, the one where you have made a guess through lack of supportive info.
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Going sideways can also be very rewarding.
I did the Ancestry DNA test years ago and currently I am working through the matches that have been reported.
It can also help to confirm or otherwise the dubious person you have in the tree, the one where you have made a guess through lack of supportive info.
It certainly has for me. It has lead me to finding out more for my direct ancestors, investigating mining and industrial accidents, and many fascinating people. Fascinating for all sorts of different reasons. I find it especially fascinating how diverse the descendants of just one couple can become over the space of a few generations.
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Going sideways can definitely be interesting.
I think really the thing I like most is putting my ancestors within historical context: Understanding what was going on at that point politically and socially and how that affected them; researching the area they were living in - what could they smell and see from their front door? finding old photos or illustrations of that area, looking at the family they had near by that they might have seen regularly; what their occupation entailed; what tragedies and successes befell them. Trying to get the merest hint of the rich tapestry that makes up human lives.
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Always good to go sideways, it can name direct ancestors in wills, and siblings you never knew of. It can confirm or deny a likely ancestor. I am sure many of us have taken a leap of faith from time to time based on strong circumstantial evidence, but always remain cautious at the same time, and add a note. I think WDYTYA did that with Danny Dyer's Charles Gosnold, they found no obvious evidence that he was the son of Tendring, but Charles was apprenticed as a weaver in 1752, son of Ann Gosnold, (Tendring's wife was Ann, and he must have died by 1752) and Charles had a son with Tendring as a middle name. I think it is good enough.
There will often be a record somewhere, many of the wills are indexed by testator but have no beneficiary indexes. Essex wills has a Beneficiary index but only back to 1675, and a different surname to the testator. The fabulous PCC wills databases have no beneficiary indexes, but imagine how long it would take to create one. Although a google book search can reveal beneficiaries in transcribed wills.
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The furthest I've gone back on a confirmed paper trail is the 1718 marriage of my 8x great grandparents Richard Harding and Alice Hyatt in Great Packington, Warwickshire.
Given the date of their marriage I estimate that they were born sometime in the 1690s, but have no hard evidence. No part of my tree has been confirmed back to the 17th century, at least not on paper.
I have a hunch that the Smallman branch of my tree from Shropshire could potentially be taken back to the 17th century, as there's a mid-century will from a Richard Smallman, yeoman farmer of Monkhopton. Given that my confirmed Smallman ancestors were also yeoman farmers of Monkhopton a mere generation or so later, I suspect a link - but don't know how to confirm it.
This is of course all in the English quarter of my tree. The other three are Irish, so obviously the branches are far more curtailed!
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As I state in my last post I am currently going sideways, but what I am doing is generation by generation.
It started with me trying to assign names to an image that is in an inherited family album. my GGGrandparents are in the image and we have other images of other people so know it is a family gathering, in Great Horton, Bradford c1890. So I have more names for this generation than there are people in the image but alas only three that I know who is who.
Its good to also set a target and work towards it, so these are primarily the Collins and Thompson family
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My farthest is a 1669 marriage in Sicily, but this line is unique because of the records available digitally. The rest of my tree hovers around people born in the mid-to-late 1700s. With half my tree being made of Irish famine immigrants to America, the possibility of getting back to a townland is quite daunting. Then once you can get there you have to deal with poor record availability :(
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You can get back a long way through gateway ancestors which are royalty and gentry but also you can still get back a long way without a gateway ancestor, if they were well to do clothiers, merchants, mayors, Alderman, vicars etc, and left wills.
Land disputes, inheritances etc can be handy, and sometimes the plaintiff in the dispute is said to be the grandson of the person who bought the land. Also a group of family members can inherit land.
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Well, clearly my posting in this thread has appeased the genealogy gods. Today I looked at a somewhat neglected part of my family tree and got hold of a thread that absolutely rocketed through the generations to some ancestors on the cusp of the 17th century and with good prospects to trace back.
I have no idea how I missed the thread before. It may simply be that when I was last in that part of the tree I was too focused on an adjoining branch! ;D
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Well done.
It all depends on luck, some lines you can get back a long, long way, others you can barely get further back then the early 1800s. I think we all are sadly related to Danny Dyer have gateway ancestors, it is a case of finding them.
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Should I now be worried that I link to Henry Dundass?
xin
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I am distantly related to the Kray twins and Patsy Kensit through her father, also Patsy's dad was an associate of them. Blimey, all these distant cousins as villains.
They say as you go back further genealogy gets harder, but that can depend. If your ancestors get richer the further back you go, it can be quite straightforward. Keep goggling as well, always great websites with histories of individual parishes which can name residents, especially local merchants and other pillars of the community.
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Knight, so lucky the records are good there.
Newton St Cyres is a nice place...... some of my grandaughters went to primary school there. :D
That village looks lovely.
I hope one day to go on a road trip of places and villages my ancestors lived, staying in hotels and B&Bs along the way. It will take me from Dundee to Devon!
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I have quite a few Norfolk lines, some of my London ancestors were originally from Norfolk (as well as France, Dorset and Sussex), and quite a few of my Suffolk ancestors came from Norfolk or spent time there. Somehow I love finding Norfolk lines. I was born there but parents born in Essex. Both have Norfolk ancestry via their London/Suffolk lot. I was also pleased to find a Sussex ancestor who was quite rich, owned land in Somerset, not far from Cheddar.
You never know where your family tree will take you.