I mentioned on Friday that I’ve been digging into my family tree via ancestry.com after Jose used them to analyze his DNA. I decided to go ahead and send off my own DNA sample too, even though mine is unlikely to be as interesting as Jose’s. I suspect that my ethnicity is as much as 75% British — perhaps even more (although possibly less depending on where my ancestors even further back might have lived before ending up in Britain).
On my mom’s side, one set of great-grandparents (my mom’s mom’s parents) immigrated from Britain via Canada in the early 1900s — I even found my great-grandfather’s naturalization record! On the other side, I’ve made it as far back as the early 1800s and guess what? It’s North Carolina the whole way.
On my dad’s side, I was able to recreate most of a family tree my cousin Lisa put together in 1991. It showed that both sides can be traced within the US as far back as the 1700s — so I’ve always been fairly confident that there’s heavy influence there. Lisa’s tree even shows that I’m a 1st cousin (many times removed) of George Washington! I haven’t been able to recreate the specific relation yet, but I’ve gotten back to the Ball family (maiden name of George’s mother) so it does seem likely that it’s there somewhere.
My free 2-week free trial is almost up and I’m not sure whether I’ll pay to continue it — but not because it hasn’t been very cool and fun and useful! There just doesn’t seem to be a lot of need for a continued membership once you’ve filled out a lot of your tree. (And it’s not like a family tree changes on a monthly basis.) I was also able to save some of the records I found offline, so I won’t lose them.
It’ll be interesting to see what my DNA results say when they come back in a month or two!
If you visit an LDS family history center they will have a lot of information you can pull from Ancestry as well as any microfiche and films. I did this about 12 years ago for my family tree and found a lot of information. I was also lucky to find distant cousins who had filled in a lot of gaps, but I also found a few people that had put in the wrong people for folks that I knew and thus messed up the line, so you have to be careful.
My family too has a lot of roots in NC.
I’d heard the LDS church does a lot with this — and actually I’m wondering if ancestry.com has some sort of affiliation with them since their headquarters is in Provo, Utah.
There are definitely a couple mistakes on the tree my cousin did — places where the years don’t match up quite right, someone would have had to have a baby at 8 years old, etc. I’m hoping to figure those out. I’ve found other people who have made trees, and am definitely taking those with a grain of salt vs. the more accurate stuff like census records!
Really cool! My maiden name is Abbas, and even though my dad’s side claims to be German (or possibly Dutch, because it was a border town), we’re always wondered why we have a Arab name. It was REAL fun for me travel after 9/11 when I was “randomly selected” to be searched each and every time I flew. And since I became a de Jong, I haven’t been searched once. Hmmm.