Who Do You Think You Are?

[Ockeghem's Razor]

Or does the link to your family make it so much more significant?

I agree with FF that it does make it more significant. Long before I embarked on family history research I had read T. C. Smout's 'A History of the Scottish People 1560-1830' and 'A Century of the Scottish People 1830-1950' and had a good grounding in the general history of the Scottish working class. Finding out about my family gave some of his points a local habitation and a name. For example, concerning collier serfdom he states that Scottish miners between ca 1609 and 1799 were 'a race apart', no-one wishing to marry into a mining family and thus make themselves serfs. My study of the parish registers for Clackmannan, where my mother's ancestors, the Allans, worked in the Westfield pit from 1620 to 1799, showed three consecutive generations of Allans marrying Sharps. Further research showed a high number of intermarriages between the two surnames.

[Pabmusic]

I suspected something of the sort......

I am much taken by Dawkins assertion (in Rivers out of Eden) that everyone alive today can be traced back to a single female, 'a mitochondrial Eve'. This does not support the Biblical narrative, of course, because .....well, Wiki explains it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

This is true, but the identity of Mitocondrial Eve (and Y-Chromozone Adam) changes from time to time. The question is, "Who was the earliest being who was the ancestor of everyone alive today?" Invariably this will be one female, and one male who lived more recently (males 'distribute' more sperm than females do eggs). The individual will change most times that one line of descent goes extinct (because a modern individual - the last of a line - leaves no heirs).

[BBMmk2]

My wife and me, certainly have learnt an awful lot about our ancestors, especially on my father's side(his father's). and my father's mother. And certainly brought about some interesting facts, per se!

[Russ_H]

As I said, these are genuine questions, as I simply cannot have any sense of personal link with individuals beyond the people about whom I have heard from living members of my family. Still I see that this is one way of finding out about how people lived, which is always interesting.

However, as ardcarp says, I seem to hear people talk more about who their ancestors were and not so much about ‘history with personal interest’. I am intrigued by the interest in the former.

In my case, I was simply curious about my ancestors. My father's parents died before I was born, so I was keen
to find out more about them. I made a start twenty years ago, and I am still researching, but I have long since moved
on to the rest of the family.

History lessons at school were boring beyond belief, and I was put off history for many years. My current interest in general
history has been prompted by my family research.

But then can you not just learn these histories without connecting to your own family?

This morning, I received an email from a commercial company which is committing County Durham's family records
to a searchable database. I am a satisfied customer, and I enjoy receiving their occasional messages. I was most
intrigued by this morning's offering. Here is an extract from some burial records of Gateshead St. Mary:

• 21 Apr 1574 Raph Daye, was slane in a collepit at Whickam (sic)

I am not, as far as I am aware, related to the unfortunate Raph, but I would like to know more, and I might probe more deeply if I have time,
but investigating an alleged crime four hundred and forty years after its commission is unlikely to be easy.

[doversoul1]

Many thanks ff, OR and Russ for your very interesting posts. I was not aware that there were these wider historical aspects to family history research.

By the way, I apologise for derailing the thread.

[vinteuil]

... I still think doversoul is right. Why shd we think people far removed from our own acquaintance are more "interesting" than any others just bicoz they may share the same name or ancestry? If we wish to be interested in 19th century Scotch coal miners or 14th century poets - well, that's marvellous - interest in anything is a Good Thing - but wherein lies any "personal" connection? I'm interested in Samuel Johnson and Jean-Philippe Rameau and Pierre Bayle and Johann Georg Hamann and Horace Walpole - I have no known connection with any of 'em - why should I? - it is the individuals who are of interest, not any "personal" connection....







.

[mercia]

I have only recently turned to a bit of family research mainly because I have no relatives left who know anything about grandparents or great-grandparents and I had a few nagging questions in my mind about certain relations who I knew existed but didn't seem to be talked about much. I'm certainly not on the lookout for any famous or royal connections, though it would appear that one distant ancestor has been immortalised in the name of a mountain . I have only reached back to the end of the 18th century, by which stage, as has been previously said, one is sharing these ancestors with scores of other living people. Even with the limited amount I have researched it has shown what is probably common to thousands of families, that is the gradual gravitation of people from the countryside to the city in the 19th century for employment, and the increasing mobility enabled by the railways. It has been sad to see the amount of infant mortality e.g. one of my great-great-aunts losing three of her six children - and the size of families e.g. one of my great-great-grandfathers being the tenth of eleven children. Also I'm wondering just how people coped e.g. one of my great-great-grandmothers widowed at the age of 31 with seven children under the age of fourteen.

[Ferretfancy]

I have plenty of evidence of how people coped in my own family, since both my parents were born in the 19th century, my father in 1883 and my mother in 1892, one of six daughters. Her father died in 1900, leaving my grandmother to bring up six young girls in a London slum. Gran died in 1943, when I was a child during WWII, and I can remember hearing how they used to manage their lives.

A few years ago I transcribed some family letters dating back to 1810, they were very scrappy but had some fascinating nuggets of information. For example, nobody ever told me that as a child my grandmother had been in the workhouse. My niece has now done much more research and published a book in which she places the family in context with the historical background of the times, going back to about 1580. It seems that there are quite a few small publishers who cater for genealogists. I'm not sure if my niece will have a best seller, but I've never been in the acknowledgements before!

[doversoul1]

- and the size of families e.g. one of my great-great-grandfathers being the tenth of eleven children. Also I'm wondering just how people coped e.g. one of my great-great-grandmothers widowed at the age of 31 with seven children under the age of fourteen.

(apologies for further derailing)
The old lady (a widow) from whom we bought the house we live in now had six (or seven) children. The house was two up-two down (we added a room and a new kitchen for two adults and one child). The youngest of the ‘children’ who is in his 80s still lives in the village and often tells me what his parents did and what the village and the town (Dover) were like. I found this very interesting.

In your great-great-grandmother’s days (or even up to fairly recently), girls were considered to be old enough to look after their young siblings by the age of ten and boys at fourteen were most likely to be in employment of some kind. Not that life was easy for your great-great-grandmother but I don’t imagine she thought her life was exceptionally hard. I suppose you could say that people perceived life differently then.

[french frank]

Why shd we think people far removed from our own acquaintance are more "interesting" than any others just bicoz they may share the same name or ancestry?

With respect, doversoul is not 'right': it is just that you and ds have no interest in where you come from. It's not compulsory.

But I find it fascinating to discover in what ways I resemble my closer ancestors: sport, learning Welsh, furniture-making, country-loving. I'm me because of my immediate forebears. But I don't expect that to interest anyone else ... Or for anyone else to be interested in their own ancestors.

[vinteuil]

....to discover in what ways I resemble my closer ancestors ... I'm me because of my immediate forebears. ...

... I note your adjectives. Yes, I am interested, to a certain limited extent, in my parents' and grandparents' lives. But my 'ancestors' - those living, say, prior to the 20th century - well, not really. I happen to know a little about my mongrel roots, and something about Mme V's more exalted lineage - but I don't see it as having much relevance to who I am.

Of course I don't object to others' having such an interest. Some people are interested in brass-rubbing and Morris dancing....

[french frank]

Some people are interested in brass-rubbing and Morris dancing....

I nearly added a comment about collecting cheese-labels. I'm less interested in going further back than those either I remember or who were spoken about (i.e. gt-grdparents) by those I remember. And as for interest: listening to those who have every issue of every sub-sub-branch of their family BY NAME, going back seven generations ('That was George, grandson of that George who had the pub on the main road who married Emily and they had Fred, Ernest and Hannah ...'), that can wither curiosity

[Ockeghem's Razor]

Some people are interested in brass-rubbing and Morris dancing....

I am near completing the painting of division strength forces for the 1st Schleswig-Holstein War in 10 mm scale wargaming figures. Probably proves your point

[vinteuil]

Lord Palmerston said "Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business—the Prince Consort, who is dead—a German professor, who has gone mad—and I, who have forgotten all about it."

Is our Ockeghem going to be a fourth?

[Pabmusic]

... I note your adjectives. Yes, I am interested, to a certain limited extent, in my parents' and grandparents' lives. But my 'ancestors' - those living, say, prior to the 20th century - well, not really. I happen to know a little about my mongrel roots, and something about Mme V's more exalted lineage - but I don't see it as having much relevance to who I am.

Of course I don't object to others' having such an interest. Some people are interested in brass-rubbing and Morris dancing....

From a genetic point of view it is possible that you, I and everyone else carry no genes at all that came from - say - one of our four grandparents. It's quite likely that several of our eight great-grandparents are no longer represented. Go back earlier and the number of direct ancestors with whom we share genes becomes a smaller and smaller proportion of the whole. So in a very fundamental sense they were strangers to us.