Tracing family tree..omg!!

Since grandpa passed away 4 years ago i have been trying to research his side of the family from England, then trying to delve deeper into my Scottish heritage, and only ever found our coat of arms on houseofnames.com, but nothing else. Now there's website dedicated to his surname and all spelling variations from it. They're trying to find all descendants who branched out to the US, Aus, NZ etc. I'm just so excited because i didn't know this site existed, it says it's only a year old!!! *bounces*


Anyone here hit a jackpot tracing their family tree??

Mine's partially right and partially wrong. They have it right that the name predates the Celtic people in Scotland, but the motto is just plain wrong, and leaves out a lot of the history about being a mutt-clan that would take in anybody cast out of their own No wonder I like strays...

Cool site, though. My aunt has traced a lot of ours back pretty far, I think she's made it to northern Wales in the late 1700s.

I wouldn't know where to begin to trace our family tree! My maiden name is Prendergast, and there is supposed to be a Castle in Ireland that is the Prendergast Castle (anyone every hear of it?) On my grandmother's side, we are supposed to be related to the piano composer Scarlatti (grandma's name was Scaletta but they apparently changed the name). These are problably just family myths, but who knows?

I got my family tree back to like the early 1600's a few months ago. It was quite interesting. And my great gramma has us related to quite a few famous people. Its really neat!

John traced his back in high school- and he has relation to Al Capone!

One of my cousins has a friend who is big into family trees and she traced my Father's side back to the 16th century.

My great great great, etc. etc. grandfather is Peter Fiddler and he was responsible for scoutting and mapping most of Western Canada from Ontario to the West Coast.

http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read...-06/1088032982

http://www.ourheritage.net/index_pag..._Bolsover.html

http://www.movingimages.bc.ca/catalo...ddlersmap.html

http://www.ourheritage.net/index_pag...r/Fidler1.html

I have been very lucky in the fact my paternal grandmother was our family historian. She had a keen interest in here family tree, and when she married my grandfathers as well. Unfortunately she passed away in 1998 at the age of 98 but all her research has been keep in various homes in the family and everyone I think has read most of it at some point. It is pretty interesting stuff, my family at least that side is Scottish throw and throw, we have a coat of arms, a tartan, and quite a colorful history. The spelling of the our surname started as Cragge and can be traced back to the 13th century.

A few years ago I worked on mine. I went to ellisisland.org and I was able to get a few items from them; My great grandmother coming to America etc.
I have Scottish roots via New Brunswick on my mothers side with a good measure of German/Norwegian from my father.

Sometime last year I found a site dedicated to a ggg grandparents on Mom's side. They have a reunion on the 4th weekend of June. (Which is part of daylily peak season and we've been busy with the daylily clubs. )

It also linked to another site where a distant cousin has pics of the family cemetery and a copy of my gg grandfather's Civil War enilistment paper. (Gg grandpa and oldest son enlisted at the same time but both died soon after from measles they contracted from another recruit. )

Oh, there is a pic of a younger brother and I wonder if my gg grandpa looked like him - very handsome!

Rootsweb is a SUPERIOR website for tracing things.....all you have to do is put in family members' names and it will bring up various other trees that may have that EXACT person in them that other people have in THEIRS. And many times you can trace it right from that. Hey...so it is cheating copying off of someone else, but SO WHAT!!!!!

On my paternal side, I am related to Ameila Earhart and US Grant. On both sides, they all go back to Canada (French/Canadian). My maternal grandfather's side I got all the way back to the year 1630. It is TRULY TRULY fascinating to see things like that.

The Mormon website has a TON of things, too, for research.

www.usgenweb.org is great for US searchers as you can go to state and county genealogy websites. My county has a very good site.

I've been working on family trees for over 30 years; it wasn't until a couple of years ago that I FINALLY found my paternal gggrandparents' immigration record (at 'castlegarden.com). Unfortunatley, there are about a dozen ways to spell my maiden name, so branching out is fairly difficult.
My husband's family, on the other hand, has been relatively simple. While there are numerous spelling options for his last name, once you find it you know you're related (very unusual last name, obviously). Luckily, almost all of his ancestors settled in the county where we live, so finding records and, best of all, cemeteries has been easy.
I drag DH to the county cemeteries every so often to put flowers on the graves. He's not really into genealogy, but I figure heck, it's his family--it's the least he can do. Some of those graves probably hadn't been visited in over 100 years, which I find so sad.
My Mom's family is from the south; most of the records in her home town were destroyed when the courthouse was burned during the Civil War, then the new one was destroyed in the early 1900s. Thankfully, her ancestors kept incredible records, and there are numerous web sites about them now.

My father has researched both sides of our family his whole adult life, and we've learned quite a bit. On my mother's side, we came from British who came to the U.S. by way of Canada, and also a little bit of German -- a young woman named Gleich who came over all by herself on a ship in the early 1800s. We have the hand-built trunk her father made for her, beautifully painted with designs and her name in heavy Germanic script! We have mostly Pendletons and Kuhns on Mom's side.

On my father's side, we go all the way back to the 10th century in Ireland, which I believe was then called Scotia. We're descended from a "king of kings" who was known as Niall of the Nine Hostages. "Niall" is an early spelling of Neal, a name that occurs often in our family, and the "Nine Hostages" nickname comes from an incident early in his career. According to the stories, Niall was a good, fairminded king, as kings went in those days. We like to think of him as the first liberal in our very liberal family.

Our ancestors migrated to Scotland at some point and stayed there for several generations before coming to America in the 1700s. Somewhere in Virginia, we have some half-American-Indian relatives, because my father's great-great-great-great grandfather had a family there... but shamefully, he abandoned them, went to Kentucky, remarried, and never told anyone about his first family.

The ancestor I'm most proud of is Stephen Neal of Illinois and Indiana, an attorney and state legislator who became involved in the reintegration of former Confederate states into the Union. He drafted a proposed amendment to the Constitution that, among other things, made it clear that no state had the right to enslave anyone. He sent it to a friend of his who served in Congress, and it was ultimately approved and established as the 14th Amendment to the Constitution!

We're pretty proud of ol' Uncle Steve.

There is a lot of information on my family that my mother and other relatives researched, but I've been having trouble getting it. The only person that stood out in my family line that I remembered was Warren G. Harding, and I was able to trace some of my family history through that. I've found out that I am also related to John Wesley Hardin and Doc Holliday.