more boring genealogy stuff

[arethinn]

So the final score on my pure maternal bloodline ancestors (mother of my mother of my mother...) is:

Lorraine Lucille Montijo (this last name is not the last name of her father; my mother is, in short, a bastard) 1944-
Marion Lou Willcoxon 1925-
Evalyn Sarah Norfleet 1895-1984 (what a shame, she even died in San Jose, if only my mother had found this out sooner I might have met the only known great-grandparent who didn't die before I was born!)
Louella Belle Mayfield 1871-1909
Sarah Amanda Davis 1839-1909 (hi the_misha! not likely, actually, this is a patronymic name and there are a kajillion "Davids" out there who could have generated this name for their children)
Elizabeth Isobel Watt 1821-1883
Elizabeth Lowden 1788-1862
??? Shannon (haven't been able to track down which of several possible female Shannon children it could be, as I can't find one with a record of marrying a person named Lowden. damn people tended to have large families then)
Jean Reid 1725-1806/07
Lady Jane Stuart 1699?-1752 (one cite as "of the house of Stuart" but I figure they must just mean "household" as this person was born in Delaware and I really don't see any way they could even be the most minor English nobility. I couldn't find any upline information, which makes any kind of noble lineage extremely suspect if not near impossible.)

So there you have it. It is basically all English, except for Shannon which is of course Irish. The name of my mother's actual father is not known, although her notes say that the person taking the birth information noted him as being Irish. There are  several other places Irish pops up (including, of course, my paternal line) as well as Scottish (including a good amount of "Scots-Irish", that is, Scots living in Ireland) and more Welsh than I thought, but all in all I'm just your basic Anglo-Saxon/Norman kind of thing. Plus that weird blop of Bohemia from my paternal grandmother, whose own mother was born in Germany and immigrated at a quite late date (1891). Haven't found any evidence of anything odd yet (the most interesting thing was the bit about the Campbells). I still have no idea where I would start looking if I wanted to find out about family legends of, ahem, unusual ancestry.

Last amusing thing - at the top of my pure maternal line is Stuart, that is, "steward". If you branch off to a female one step before the top of the pure paternal line, you find "Butler", which is just what it sounds like. I'm descended from servants! (granted, high-ranking ones, but still.)

Comments

[ankharet-iseult.livejournal.com]

Don't forget though, that being of english decent doesn't make you absolutely 100% anglo saxon/norman - Britain was a celtic country too. People tend to think of just Ireland/Scotland/Wales being celt (and at a push, Cornwall) but that isn't the case. In fact, where I was born (west yorkshire) was the last Celtic area to become Christianised, waaaay after everyone else.
Also, genes in the UK are a hell of a lot more mixed than people think so it is pretty much impossible to be of one pure decent unless you go back several hundred years. People moved around a lot more than you'd have thought...
Besides, you're more than likely to have norse/germanic blood in you somewhere along the line, and both cultures have plenty of faerie myth too.

*takes off archaeologist hat*

Genealogy is fascinating though. Apparently I've got viking, celt, british and who knows what else in me, and one ancestor was a Privateer (or in other words a pirate), and another was a 'famous weather prophet and poet'. Admittedly, most were rather unexciting publicans or brewers though!

[starlightforest.livejournal.com]

I don't think brewing is at all unexciting. :)

[halyn.livejournal.com]

I've been reading all this with great interest, enough that I'd like to start researching my own roots. Can you recommend any particularly good sources on where to start? What kind of tools did you use to find all this out, or did it come from asking your family members?

Have you, or are you going to do, your paternal side?

[starlightforest.livejournal.com]

I only have my paternal side back to five generations (some of this maternal stuff goes back 20), and I was more interested in the "distaff" side since that's what's important magically speaking.

Rootsweb.com, a few of the free things on ancestry.com, familysearch.org (I think - if not, go to lds.org and click on "family history" on the left). But really I just copied out my direct lines from my mother's files - she's the one who's been doing all the work for years.

[halyn.livejournal.com]

Rats! I was hoping you'd had fantastic results like this from scratch :P

I've heard the rumor about the maternal side being more important in terms of inheritance of any "strange" family quirks, but I was under the impression that it was more important, not exclusive.

[starlightforest.livejournal.com]

Mumble mitochondria lore I dunno. Something. My brain isn't putting it together. You're right that it's not exclusive, but I think the value of "more" may be higher than you're thinking. I could be wrong tho.