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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (69834)	12/21/2010 11:35:41 AM
From: Cogito Ergo Sum	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217887

Recently, with the help of Google, I found a branch of family tree back to 1640 Same year my French ancestors landed in Quebec City... :O)

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (69834)	12/21/2010 9:18:19 PM
From: Ilaine	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217887

Good historical records for non-nobles, like me, seem to cluster around churches, births, marriages, deaths. The earliest one we have for ordinary people is a marriage in Murr, Germany, in 1590, a little more than 400 years ago. Fast forward only a generation. By the early 17th century, circa 1610, e.g., 400 years ago, we have hundreds of family history records. To which I attribute the jump in literacy due to Protestantism. Or maybe some unnoted improvement in the quality of paper? After that point, it doesn't seem to matter whether the church records are Protestant or Catholic. They were kept. As were land records, and military records. You can trace a family back through time via marriages, baptisms, and deaths, tax rolls, land rolls, service rolls, pension rolls, even before good censuses. But even so we're only talking about a few hundred years. Now, for non-ordinary people, in my case, George Washington's grandfather was one of my ancestors, so that tree goes back a little more in time, to 1455. A little more than 500 years but still not much in geological time. Mitochondrial DNA tells more, I can trace my maternal ancestry (D1) (Native American) back to Siberia. It appears to have split off at least 40,000 years ago. Not surprisingly, written records for my mother's mother's mother's mother's family (Ojibwe) peter out as we go back in time for the women were not Christian nor literate. When it comes to Y-chromosome DNA, my father is R1b1b2 (R-M269)("generic white guy"), which dominates in Western Europe. That seems to have split off at least 10,000 years ago, during the last glacial maximum. As I stated, their written records start about 500 years ago, and burgeon thereafter. We humans have been around for millions of years, as homo sapiens for hundreds of thousands of years, but you and I only for decades and when we are gone, well, I guess that depends on how well we did in discriminating among DNA vectors, and also blind luck. George Washington, for example, is not reported to have fathered even one child. He may have been rendered sterile by disease, or perhaps his wife was too old when he married her to have children. Nothing wrong with his genes. His siblings had children. I have no grandchildren yet but my sister has six. I have two sons, both young (25, 22). For me, family is a form of wealth. My family makes me feel rich.