The devil is in the details

Alvan De Lecha

For those of you who were wondering, Alvan De Lecha is my relative. He was born in 1075 in Staunton Harold, Leicestershire, England.

Yesterday I heard about a website called www.ancestry.com. Right now they are having a 14 day free trial and I decided to play around with the site a little bit to see what I could do and whether I could find out anything interesting. The site gives you access to a huge amount of old public records and all US census records from the beginning-1930. As more people enter their own family trees, the trees link together thus allowing you to go back further than you could before. I didn't expect to find out much: my family has always been relatively good at keeping track of ancestors and I can (even before this adventure) name all of my great-grandparents, as can my parents. We have some idea of when people immigrated to the United States and from where. For two of the four "branches" of the family our knowledge goes quite far back. My great aunt has even put together a little book of geneology showing her ancestry going back to the late 1700s. To make a long story short, I assumed the site wouldn't tell me anything I didn't know.

In less than half an hour of casual browsing, I had mapped both of the branches on my dad's side to ~1820 in England and Ireland, one generation further than we knew in one case and three generations further than we knew in the other. I also showed that our relative who supposedly came over from Ireland was in fact born in the same small town that I was born in, while his father came from Ireland.

After all of that, I got really into searching. I've gone through and found a ton of information and annotated it as much as possible on my dad's side. I'm almost at a dead end now because I have run into some people with extremely common names or some people who seem not to appear in the census. (Note for the future: always fill out your census forms and don't name your Irish child Patrick or Mary.) Filling out most of the branches was pretty easy though, particularly since my family seemed quite diligent with census records post 1870 and since they have lived in the same county that I grew up in since that time. One surprising thing that I learned: the whole longevity thing (80-100 years old) goes back a looooong time, not just to the current generation. I guess I ought to think about putting away extra for retirement and think about what I want to do at 120.

I just entered in some info for my mom's side (while on the phone with her, actually) and quickly plugged our tree into someone else's tree that goes back to 1075. Some of the information looks a little questionable, but I'm sure that I can figure out a pretty good amount. I have decided that since I have records of people who lived in England from 1075-1640 and who were then among the orignial settlers of the Rhode Island colony, I will definitely be able to connect myself to someone famous or someone who did something extrordinarily important. ;)

My dad's mother's family has family reunions twice a year (the family reunion and the St. Patty's Day Party), so I am planning to put everything together in some large pretty wall hangable format in time for the family reunion in August. I also definitely know what my family members are getting for Christmas. I know that they will all (especially my grandparents and some extended family members) will really appreciate it. I think I might actually pay for a year membership to the damn website just so I can work all of this stuff out and make a nice record.

Yes, I know, I am a dork. But at least I am a well-documented ancestry having dork, right?

posted by Immunegirl @ 10:12 PM