View Full Version : Do you reasearch you direct ancestor' siblings and their children?
Fi aka Wheelie Spice
04-04-10, 19:31
I have info on my Great Grandmother's brother's son. I admit some info was passed to me but I have found more info about him.
Fi
Yes, I research all blood relatives (where it's possible). Hence a tree of 7,000 people many of whom I've forgotten all about!!
Oh yes Gi you have to you find some interesting bit and pieces amd also som other lost rellies that turn up living with them
Olde Crone
04-04-10, 19:42
Yes, I research everyone related to me by blood.
And marriage.
And the next door neighbours.
And their cats and dogs.
And anyone with the same surname.
And anyone with the same unusual first name (that tuened up a relationship I never would have known about!)
And anyone who lived in the same village.
OC
maggie_4_7
04-04-10, 19:51
I'm with OC on this one :d
Fi aka Wheelie Spice
04-04-10, 19:52
cool, thank goodness for that. I am well nosey so anyone related however how gets a look in
When you get back to before 1837 you really can't research without doing the whole family - all branches, otherwise you won't become aware of having several couples with the same names all having children at the same time etc etc etc
Olde Crone
04-04-10, 20:18
Just an example of where nosiness takes you:
My great great grandfather James Holden died in 1898 at the home of strangers with whom he was boarding, fifty miles from his three sons. the informant and householder present at the death was one James Ellis.
James Holden married (2) Ellen Grimshaw.
Ellen Grimshaw's sister Jane married Daniel Jackson.
Daniel Jackson's mother was Mary Little.
Mary Little's first husband was John Parkes.
John Parkes had a sister Joanna.
Joanna Parkes married Edward Ellis.
Edward Ellis and Joanna had a son James Ellis, who was the informant at the death of my 2 x GGF and not a complete random stranger at all, but a family member, even though a very distant one!
OC
Thats brilliant isnt it OC thats how that odd name can throw up the nosyness to look into and make bits of jigsaws fit ;;
Uncle John
04-04-10, 20:50
It's only by going sideways that you discover nieces and nephews as domestic or farm servants in relatives' households. And the occasional widowed parent living with a widowed daughter-in-law. The sideways bits of my tree are often more interesting than the direct line.
Looking into OH's cousin's mother's family got me into the 19th. century Scottish oil industry.
Yes of course, doesn't everyone?!
Why?
Well, lots of reasons. Our ancestors didn't live in a vacuum. Their choice of job, spouse, place to live might all be influenced by what their sibling or cousin did.
And if you follow lots of people instead of just having a long line of ag labs you'll be more likely to uncover interesting court cases, scandals, shocks etc. Plus you get a big picture about changing social history.
For example, my Norfolk branch were all ag labs/fishermen until the late 1890s. A raft of brothers went and joined the Met Police. But if I'd only followed my direct line I wouldn't have found their records, I'd only have got my grandfather, who was too small to be a copper and ended up running a picture framer's. But at least 3 of the brothers were lodgers with my grandfather at one time and my father's childhood was coloured by them (especially the one who went mad).
Similarly, if I'd only traced my mother's side in the direct line I wouldn't have found the chap who ended up in Broadmoor.
Well I've now mentioned insanity on both sides of my family tree so perhaps I'd better stop.
But I can't. I got sidetracked into a wealthy family who are tenuously connected by marriage to my ex's tree. But because they were wealthy and made wills and were robbed I have info about them, whereas ex's side they are connected to remain shadowy. Maybe if I follow the wealthy lot enough I will find out more about ex's peeps.
Oh and I found a direct ancestor - gt gt gt granny who had been widowed and remarried. This was before the GRO indexes had been transcribed on Ancestry. I only found the marriage because she had a niece I'd followed who was a lodger on a census. If I hadn't traced the niece and wondered why she was lodging with a woman with an unfamiliar surname I wouldn't have found gt gt gt gran.
All my lot came to New Zealand very early on, by the time of the 1871 UK census there were at least 2 generations from each branch, here in NZ.
I have had a lot of fun following the distant family members who remained in the UK, and through that have made contact with some of their descendants. By pooling information we have managed to uncover some family secrets which help to explain the decisions to immigrate.
I have discovered who some of the names my mother remembers her grandmother talking about were and how they were relatives. Mum loves it, I tell her stories that I hear and it jogs her memory of what her grandmother said about them! They would have been cousins of my great-grandmother who she would never have met, but it shows that the families did keep in contact with each other from the other side of the world.
Olde Crone
04-04-10, 21:37
The other point in my family (and everyone else's, I'm sure) is that until WW2, no one in my family ever married a random stranger. All spouses were relations of some degree, anything from first cousins to fourth cousins twice removed, or siblings of someone else's spouse. doing just a straightline tree would have missed all this interesting information.
I do know that some people do only a "surname" tree but I cannot for the life of me see the point of that. We are all the total sum of all our ancestors, not just the ones with our surname! What a thin and boring tree it must make.
OC
chrissiebee
04-04-10, 21:44
When you get back to before 1837 you really can't research without doing the whole family - all branches, otherwise you won't become aware of having several couples with the same names all having children at the same time etc etc etc
Just like my Arthur Herbert Chenery's - only three of 'em as yet, but bet there are more lurking out there...........!
Chris
chrissiebee
04-04-10, 21:49
I also had a Hitchcock marry a Hitchcock (not related) - that certainly threw me for a bit...........
Chris
Ohh yes love all the ins and outs and it comers in handy when you take your son back to visit his Irish side in a small town in Ireland. ;)
Conversation on the plane last month...
"You might find a nice girl you like"
"But's that's incest" :eek:
"No you are far enough away from any one in the town to be that closely related"
next morning looking dewy eyed at a girl he shares great great grandparents with...
"George ... but you are related" :D
*gets coat*;)
......it also helps to answer questions about family traits.
We have a seafaring son..........now where did his love of the sea come from, no one else we knew in any of the families went to sea
We have since found two brothers - 5X great uncles on my OH's side - who spent their lives at sea. One taking part in the Battle of Camperdown in 1797. That gene must have jumped 5 generations to turn up again today......lol
ElizabethHerts
05-04-10, 08:06
I agree with Nell (and just about everybody else)! You can't just study one person of a large family, you have to look at the brothers and sisters and their offspring.
In many of my families, they were linked very closely to one another by emotional ties, which can be seen how much time they spent together - children with their aunts and uncles or grandparents on censuses. I wouldn't have got very far with some of my ancestors if I had ignored the indirect lines.
My grandparents married because a brother and sister in my grandfather's family married a brother and sister in my grandmother's family a generation back. Otherwise I doubt they would have met.
I can also see why people acquired their names. A lot of the children are named after favourite aunts or uncles or great-aunts or great-uncles.
I have a close contact who only researches the main line - i.e. one surname. He doesn't realise what he is missing!
Lynn the Forest Fan
05-04-10, 08:10
I certainly reseach siblings, that is often how you make contacts & they always seem to have done more interesting things than the direct line! :d
This conversation reminds me of a bit on that TV show 'My big fat gypsy wedding' where the hairdresser (not a gypsy) and her client (a gypsy) were discussing cousin weddings. The hairdresser commented that "'we' have never married our cousins so that's why we find it odd that you do" at which point I spat my tea across the room!!
maggie_4_7
05-04-10, 08:21
Ohh yes love all the ins and outs and it comers in handy when you take your son back to visit his Irish side in a small town in Ireland. ;)
Conversation on the plane last month...
"You might find a nice girl you like"
"But's that's incest" :eek:
"No you are far enough away from any one in the town to be that closely related"
next morning looking dewy eyed at a girl he shares great great grandparents with...
"George ... but you are related" :D
*gets coat*;)
:d :d
Poor George don't tantalise ans tease him like that.
I love finding out about the offshoots, siblings etc etc in fact I am doing it at the moment a cousin of my grandfather's called Thomas a man who up until a week ago I didn't know where he fitted in.
I have my grandmother's stuff and she had some documentation on this Thomas but his surname still meant nothing to me until a week ago I have spent years wondering who this man was. When the 1911 and LMA came online I tracked most people down and still he didn't appear to be connected.
I now know he was my great grandmother's older sisters son a sister I didn't know much about because she died very young. Thomas remained close it seems because his father went on to marry and have upteen more children with his second wife!
He was the Penultimate mystery in my grandmother's box there were a few but I have solved them all now except one. Mysteries I have wondered about since childhood when I use to go through it, the paperwork and photos. Just one man to go now a man called Joseph! I will find him and who he was to my grandmother.
:)
I never dreamed of not researching siblings etc. I was most surprised when I started joining forums and people said they only research the main line.
Margaret in Burton
05-04-10, 09:24
I think it's an insult to one parent if you only do one line, why is that name more important? Because it's your surname? I don't have the same surname I was born with, I took my husbands when I married him.
We'd be right up the creek if we only did his surname. We can't get back further than his grandfather.
*long story - investigated many times on these boards*
I search all lines and all their siblings. You have 4 grandparents etc and this doubles each generation. Every time I had a new female line I investigated it as much as I good including all siblings and their offspring. The offspring are cousins of some kind to you.
Like everyone else, I research anything and anyone. I love seeing how that family is linked to this family, and then through their link to that other one link back into this one.
I've had great fun researching and collating information about a town and village in Leicestershire which is still ongoing. It is amazing how they do all link to each other and makes it worthwhile when you can solve mysteries and resolve problems.
Certain family members of mine cannot understand why I am interested in everyone and they think the only important ones are the ones with your name. They don't seem to understand that if your mother's mother's grandfather's grandmother's great granny hadn't survived childhood then we wouldn't be here.
:D
I have had a contact with a descendant indirectly of my gr gr grandmother - who has photos of my grandfather and eldest 4 children (we haven't got any photos).
Fi aka Wheelie Spice
05-04-10, 09:33
ok well seems I have a lot to catch up on. Mind you I have to say that my family or at least a number of them were not boring.
I may be gone some time.
We are going to Kew (National Archives) on Saturday if anyone wants to join us.
Three further points
a) it enriches your picture of your great-grannie's life if you discover that she had sisters and cousins etc who like her didn't stay in Cambridge but came down to London and lived nearby. I can't prove it, but my gt gran Emma's 2nd husband worked on the railway and she may have met him through her brother-in-law who was a railway inspector. If I hadn't traced Emma's sisters I wouldn't have known that and would have thought of Emma all alone in the big city.
b) I found a descendant of one of Emma's other sisters, Eliza Moore, who happened to be staying with Emma in 1871 census, who was able to give me more info about the family. The transcription gave Emma's married name as Marthers instead of Matthews and Eliza as Thorne instead of Moore If I hadn't altered the mistranscription, enabling her sister's descendant to find her, he wouldn't have found me! If I'd just done the correction for gt grandparents that would have been a connection not made. [actually I just corrected - a v. kind person on GR found the Matthews household for me]
b) if you only follow one surname you are generally following a long list of men - and its entirely possible that they weren't biologically related to you. Whereas although there were granies and sisters who pretended a baby belonged to them, its a little more likely that you are on safe ground with matriachal lines.
Fourth - and final, I promise! - point
What if the surname is Smith? Much better to do all the lines in your family and then when you find uncommon names like Chowns or Higho or Spruce or Fosh you will be able to be more sure of your following the right lines!
.................and if you can research forward on any line at least as far as 1901 or 1911 and you put those relations on online databases then you are more likely to make contact with living relatives, such as the descendants of those cousins, who may well have additional info about their ancestors and yours too. This is how I got photos of my paternal great-grandparents - none of my immediate family had their pictures but I found other more distant relatives hadn't chucked everything in the skip like my aunts and uncles had!
Olde Crone
05-04-10, 12:34
Ditto on the photos!
My 3rd cousin has recently let me see a photo of my 2 x GGM, born in 1821! No one in my family had any of these photos.
What's more, no one in my family knew of the existence of this 3rd cousin as I was (wrongly) told that his line had died out in 1900.
OC
It is so refreshing to find that we family historians disregard the usual advice. Our methods clearly pay off!
reading all these posts has got me thinking
I did start to add siblings and the parents of the people my lot married but then decided, it was like name collecting ??? although it does help with contacts ,so now I only add their parents , now am wondering if I should add them again ?
Does make sense as their lives can be just as interesting.
Margaret in Burton
05-04-10, 14:18
reading all these posts has got me thinking
I did start to add siblings and the parents of the people my lot married but then decided, it was like name collecting ??? although it does help with contacts ,so now I only add their parents , now am wondering if I should add them again ?
Does make sense as their lives can be just as interesting.
If you are blood related then why not?
Helps to prove or disprove if possible contacts are barking up the wrong tree.
you know Margaret your right !! I have found lots of terrible errors like a brother marrying his sister ???
Shall start adding them again .
If I hadn't researched all the siblings I would have missed out on lots of information on the various family lines. I've received old photos as well and have been able to share ones that I have (including one of ggg grandparents who married in 1823).
I tend to wander sideways when I get stuck, and, as others have mentioned, it's surprising how often you find answers by coming at things the other way.
Currently I'm trying to work out why one set of ggg-grandparents suddenly moved from the east end of London to Peckham - to the very road where gg-grandparents on another branch of the family owned 3 houses, in spite of the fact that the marriage linking the two families was some years in the future.
There's no such thing as coincidence...
I'm never convinced that Ancestry & all the other online databases don't lead us into bad ways. You tap the name in, up come the image, you note the details & move onto the next search. When you had to use microfilm, your own ancestors were always at the end of the reel, so you had to look at everyone else. So you knew the names of all the neighbours, and that Aunty Kate was just round the corner. Plenty of the family have moved because Bill down the road got a job & was earning good money in Portsmouth or Bradford or Sunderland or whereever it might be. One neighbour's descendant was able to tell me the name of the hoy my ancestor probably travelled to Portsmouth on some 150 years ago.
My Mum always used to tell to reseaarch the direct (ie father's) line. But that was boring. As OC says, I'd even research the cat's family tree - but only if it's interesting.
The cat's family tree?
I can help you with that. Gt gt grandmother Tabitha Pussy married Felix Tom-Cat and their children were
1.Kitty Catt (she dropped the Tom) who married Samuel Whiskers and became Catt-Whiskers, which was later misrecorded as Catts-Whiskers. They ran the discussion/philosophy group Paws for Thought which Dr Johnson's cat Hodge attended
2. Kit E. Catt who founded the Kit-Kat club. He doesn't appear to have had any children which has led to rumours that he was gay. There's a big debate about what the E. stands for.
Tom-Cat left Tabitha and had a string of feline females - its been impossible to trace all of his progeny but one of them was known as Puss-in-Boots because he lived at the cobbler's.
I've yet to establish a connection with Pussy Galore but I am sure there is one.
Hope this helps.
anne fraser
06-04-10, 19:07
I once had a contact work out some of my family history from a dog stud book! (the mutual ancestor was master of fox hounds not a dog).
My greatgrandfather was left to run the family business in Moreton in Marsh as his father and grandfather had done. However his younger siblingsleft home, one emigrated to Oklahoma to become a missionary to native Americans, one went to New Zealand to become a pioneer farmer and one studied nursing with Florence Nightingale: now which would you rather research?
I think it helps to build up a picture of the local area. As well as family history I am interested in proper history and many years ago I got a B.A. in medieval and modern history. I also belong to our local history society. My grandmother's family were coalminers in Somerset and there has been a lot of work done on what happened to the miners when the Somerset pits closed. I recommend a rootsweb site Somerset coalfield connections. I find it realy interesting to follow the migrations of the mining families whether or not I am related.
kiterunner
06-04-10, 21:56
I started doing my tree because I wanted to find out about my grandfather's half-brothers and sisters who I knew nothing about until I saw a memoir he had written soon before his death, so the answer is absolutely!
Rosie Knees
07-04-10, 18:04
The cat's family tree?
I can help you with that. Gt gt grandmother Tabitha Pussy married Felix Tom-Cat and their children were
1.Kitty Catt (she dropped the Tom) who married Samuel Whiskers and became Catt-Whiskers, which was later misrecorded as Catts-Whiskers. They ran the discussion/philosophy group Paws for Thought which Dr Johnson's cat Hodge attended
2. Kit E. Catt who founded the Kit-Kat club. He doesn't appear to have had any children which has led to rumours that he was gay. There's a big debate about what the E. stands for.
Tom-Cat left Tabitha and had a string of feline females - its been impossible to trace all of his progeny but one of them was known as Puss-in-Boots because he lived at the cobbler's.
I've yet to establish a connection with Pussy Galore but I am sure there is one.
Hope this helps.
*sends for men in white coats*:D:D
I have a four generation pedigree chart for a cat I had as a child. However the maternal grandfather says 'unknown male' so I presume that means my cat's mother was illegitimate?!!! :eek:
maggie_4_7
07-04-10, 18:58
:D:D
I have a four generation pedigree chart for a cat I had as a child. However the maternal grandfather says 'unknown male' so I presume that means my cat's mother was illegitimate?!!! :eek:
Not necessarily, maybe her parents didn't approve of her choice of husband?
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