Furthest You've Traced Your Family History

my lineage is somewhat murky due to various episodes of bastardy

Early 19th century, distant relative on my mother's side moved from Edinburgh to Dublin and set up an engineering shop in Bridgefoot Street.

A cousin traced my mother's side back to the 1770's. Though she is English, it wound up in Derry in the 1700s. My father's side just as far back as great great grandparents, mostly from word of mouth and an ancestry website.

My parents spent almost 30 years researching my dad's family history. It's easier to do this in England than it is in Ireland as many parish churches and county council offices have paperwork going back centuries. It's still long, hard work to put everything together and join up all the dots.

Believe it or not, they managed to get back to the early 1500s - and we are just a normal working class family, not some sort of aristocrats. In almost 500 years, the family moved from Ashbourne in Derbyshire to Swanwick in Derbyshire, via Heage in Derbyshire - a distance of a mere 18 miles! I came to live in Cork in 1990 and have stayed here ever since (why would anyone want to leave the best city in the world? ) so have completely bucked that trend.

My direct ancestors were farm labourers originally, and then around the early 1700s became coal miners. Coal mining was the major source of employment in much of Derbyshire for centuries until Thatcher ruined that. My dad spent several years "down t'pit" until he became a steel foundry worker. Fortunately for me, I didn't ever work in such dirty and dangerous jobs!

A few years ago I put all their information onto large pieces of card (I have a passion for calligraphy) and had it laminated. It covers one and a half walls in their second bedroom, and is already out of date due to new children being born.

My mother's family date back to the time of Brian Boru, as they were the King's bards.

To just past the Famine.

Family have been living on the same plot of land since 1850.

Ipso wrote: »

How so?

By not requiring evidence.

Ipso wrote: »

The thing is when people start creating stories about themselves they always tend to link themselves to big events and never play down.
Anyway lets just say the McGillycuddys were there around 2,000 years ago (they weren't alone), Mr Mcg has a daughter, she is no longer a Mcg but maybe a Mch and any subsequent daughters of the Mcg's stop carrying the name so everyone in the area is descendant from the people at the time.

Most Irish people will have 2,000 year old McGillicuddy as an ancestor.

Ipso wrote: »

There was a paper a few years ago on the topic, from memory the conclusions were that the scenario above holds true until about 10 generations and after that only about 100 ancestors get added to your tree. Pedigree collapse is the nice way of describing inbreeding.

There's a good article on that subject here.

Not past great grandparents on one side, who moved out to Philadelphia in the early part of the last century to make a new life for themselves. My great grandfather fell ill and they had to move back to Ireland when my grandmother was around 8 months old. He died shortly after they landed back in Ireland, leaving my great grandmother to raise 3 small girls with the help of her family. All very tragic, and my grandmother never opened up to anyone about the exact details.

As I live in the US now, I was very interested in finding out more about their time here. This culminated in spending a morning in the archives office in Philly last year with my parents where we managed to track down the exact house where she was born. Also found out about a grand uncle that the family was only vaguely aware of, who died at 8 years of age. Sad history, but also fascinating and I can't imagine what the trip across the Atlantic was like back then