Who Do You Think You Are?

snickerpuss · 30-09-2008 8:20pm

Loving these shows. I'm planning to look into my family history in the next while.
Having looked at the 1911 census I found all my Great-grandparents. I was pleased to see that all of them and their parents were born in Dublin.
Which makes me at least 5th generation Dublin. No wonder I get panicky out in the fresh air of the countryside.

It's so annoying that we're missing the census'. Nothing we can do of course. I'm planning to look into British Army records since most of my male relations seem to have joined.

sweet-rasmus · 02-10-2008 10:04am

I know we only have Dublin 1911 online so far, but soon... "Kerry, Antrim and Down will be available online in October 2008." I wonder if they has organised themselves yet...

Pgibson · 03-10-2008 12:36pm

Genealogy doesn’t really tell you much about a specific ancestor unless all your ancestors hung around the same village.

Then you would be inbred !

Every generation dilutes genes taken from any one person by half.

You are half your mother’s genes, one quarter your granddad’s genes then...one eighth...one sixteenth ...one 32nd ..one 64th etc. back through the generations.

You have just one 64th of the genes your great great great great great grandma gave to her daughter your great great great grandma (same for males.)

Assuming (for simplicity) that a generation is 33 years (3 per century) you have none,or almost none, of the genes of anybody who was your direct ancestor in the year 1600.

Just 4 centuries.

Strangely... you may possess only their NAME.

Your own genes will be similarly scattered across the population in the coming centuries.

No one has ever been the same as you,or ever will ever be the same as you again.

.

Snickers Man · 08-10-2008 9:45pm

pinkypinky wrote: »

Hawkeye,

The 1901 census isn't online yet.

Unless your ancestors hail from County Clare. The County Library there has already put its 1901 Census returns online.

Sadly they do not give you links to the photo scans of the original documents like the central project does but you can still see a lot of information. And calculate your ancestor's year of birth to within a year.

Snickers Man · 15-10-2008 11:40am

hivizman wrote: »

I've been watching the BBC's current Who Do You Think You Are? series. The programme a couple of weeks ago about Ainsley Harriott was an eye-opener, as it turned out that, while many of his ancestors in Jamaica were slaves (as you'd expect), his great great great grandfather in the direct male line had been a slave-owner.

The newsreader Moira Stewart found much the same thing. Or rather, evidence that one of her ancestors was probably the offspring of a liaison between a slave and a slave owner. Within a generation of being freed, he had done very well for himself and they reckoned that he must have had a start up in terms of education or seed capital from a wealthy slave-owning benefactor.

History is full of these ironies. Irish history in particular, if you look into it at all, is full of stories of families who were on different sides in various wars or who took political stances that set themselves apart from the rest of their family.

My own family is full of such variety. I have had ancestors in the IRB, the RIC, the British Army, the Irish Army, the Garda Special Branch, the anti-Treaty IRA. It makes you realise there is rarely historical purity in all our ancestors.

Even the lovely Pamela Flood discovered that her great great great whatever grandmother had probably murdered her husband.

It's fascinating. And you can learn some touching stories of how family ties transcended all that political BS.

WAGS · 19-10-2008 10:22am

Lizzykins wrote: »

When you see the Church of England registers in Who do You think You Are? it would make you mad that the church here couldn't have been arsed to keep proper records.

Hi,
Not all the Church of England records are like what you see on this show. Having spent the past 12 plus years tracing my Irish, Scottish and English roots I have found that for most ordinary people, the majority of us tracing ones true heritage (as opposed to pinching other people's family members) can be frustrating, exciting, challenging and expensive.
Having a line of Gentry in a family can be more easily traced especially if the old books that have been scanned by Google are searched. In my own family there was an Irish line of Gentry and I was able to trace them back to 1580, but for a part of the family from Sussex the records are non-existent, mainly because most of the children were not baptised and only burials within a church are recorded prior to 1837.
Don't get mixed up between the registration of births which only became mandatory in England and Wales in September 1837 and Church of England baptism records. Prior to 1837 only the Baptists maintained a birth register.
Army pension and discharge records can also prove very useful. The National Archives have a free online search function to access its records index. I have used this to find information on ancestors, but also to find the names of soldiers (including Irish) who served in certain regiments in specific conflicts all the way back to the late 18th century.
However, always keep in mind that finding a record of an ancestor relies heavily on spelling, both in the original records and the modern day transcriptions. Oppenheim transcribed as Openhaw makes life very difficult.
Ciao.

WAGS · 19-10-2008 11:03am

Pgibson wrote: »

Genealogy doesn’t really tell you much about a specific ancestor unless all your ancestors hung around the same village. Then you would be inbred !

Every generation dilutes genes taken from any one person by half.
You are half your mother’s genes, one quarter your granddad’s genes then...one eighth...one sixteenth ...one 32nd ..one 64th etc. back through the generations.

You have just one 64th of the genes your great great great great great grandma gave to her daughter your great great great grandma (same for males.)

Assuming (for simplicity) that a generation is 33 years (3 per century) you have none,or almost none, of the genes of anybody who was your direct ancestor in the year 1600.

Just 4 centuries.

Strangely... you may possess only their NAME.

Your own genes will be similarly scattered across the population in the coming centuries.

No one has ever been the same as you,or ever will ever be the same as you again.

I understand that many people believe in nothing and that's fine, but for those of us who believe that we are the sum of all of our parts, genealogy provides some of the information on the parts.
Yes many will argue that we are not shaped by our past and will reject everything as being pure coincidence, but my own research has shown that the families of two people who married in Australia 27 years ago rubbed shoulders and brushed past each other many times in the past 300 years across Ireland, England and even Austria.
My mother's family built the ships that my wife's family sailed off to war in. My gggg grandfather (Irish) was the Company Commander of my wife's gg grandfather (English) in 1819. Is it just coinicence that we follow certain professions? Certain diseases can be inherited, why not certain family traits from different lines? Is talent inherited? Do our genes carry all the DNA code memories from our ancestors? Our brains store everything that has happened in our entire lives. Why cannot genetic memories be stored as well? Maybe in a few hundred years when the scientists have worked out what each gene actually does there may be some answers.
I sincerely believe that we are in many ways bound to our own past and that knowing where we come from, provides some clues to what and why we are what we are today.
Yes we are also shaped by our environment as well, but are we all really that totally unique and different from what came before us?
Ciao.

eobphotography · 18-04-2010 7:20pm

Thought I would add to this forum as ye are interested in geneolgy...
I'm a third year photography (mature) student, at the moment I'm in the middle of my final project which was about Westmeath folk and their relationship with the land, anyway its not really working out and I'm changing direction slightly. What I am hoping to do now is bring it further and have it about a persons relationship with a place due to ancestory. it doesnt have to be westmeath anywhere in the midlands over to Dublin would be fine. So I want to take photos of you on the site of where an encestor lived, it can be the ruins of your great grand pa's place or in the kitchen of your still living grand ma's house, anything really as long as you have a relationship with the place. Ideally I would love an old photo of the place or house as it was when inhabited by your ancestor. The final image would be the current pic mounted beside the old image.

So people I am really really in need of volunteers for this, I'm getting near my deadline and starting to freak out! please say yes!!

All participant will recieve a lot of gratitude and a copy of the final print, and a photography favour, like a photo of your kid or something!

myluck! · 28-04-2010 11:51am

Best of luck with your photo endeavours - sounds interesting
Where I'd struggle is finding the old photo!

Alicat · 24-07-2013 12:54pm

It's back tonight! 9pm, BBC1, starting with Una Stubbs.

Edit: Actually can a mod move this into Genealogy please?

Citycap · 24-07-2013 1:11pm

When is Price Harry on it? That should be fun

Who Do You Think You Are?

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