O! Horror!

[Paul]

Are you using a site like Ancestory.com et al? A lot of the good stuff is not free. You can also try the LDS records databases.

I just re-registered on ancestory. I remember spending about 2 weeks looking into every single:
grandparent
great grandparent
uncle, aunt
great uncle, great aunt
and even one known great great grandparent

I'm using the birth and death certificates on each grandparent and I have almost exact information on great uncles and aunts. I'm estimating all great grandparents from family's knowledge... they can't be more than 5 years off though.
I have exact names of people and everything - including my gran's 4 middle names! I've tried to go more general too but nothing is relevant

[lethearen]

You didn"t say how many generations it was back to 1634, but in my case it is 11 back to that time.

Since the number of ancestors double every generation back, you probably are at least to the generation which had 512 or 1024 ancestors - in the same generation.

If you could trace all of them, I bet a whole bunch of them would be Scottish. And Irish, and probably several others.

Eleven here, too. I'm not putting too much faith in it at this point. Along another line I can theoretically trace to 1500 in Yorkshire, England. It is fun, though

Sorry to hear you're stuck, Paul Something's there, just hiding out of sight from you!

Rex, 1/512 Scottish beats 0/512 Irish But who know at this point. First step of a journey

[BroosterB1]

Very interesting. My elder brother is LDS and did a lot of the actual work from LDS data. He used information that my aunt had compiled by tally (getting actual copies of public data and scouring them).

One would think that "recent" ( last 120 years) information would be accessible in the UK. I know I can pull up my grandfather from the 1930 census, his father from the 1910 census, and his father from the 1890 census. Heck, we can pull up a land plate showing my Great Great Great grandfather's homestead claim for Steadyrun Township, Iowa Circa 1847.

This should not be that hard, especially if you have the names and locations of the people you are looking for. Try getting some help from a local genealogical society. See if a Local LDS church can give you pointers.

You might be overlooking something obvious, like Johnson instead of Johnston or Brown instead of Browne. Some really common names can be hard to trace, and you might find that the "family" history is bogus. Like your not Scottish at all, the family history was made up to cover the fact your family is Jewish, Russian, or Martian (JK, although that would explain lots!).

There are whole communities here in the Southwest that are call Sephardic Jews; they were refugees from the Spanish Inquisition who fled to the new world but kept some of the Jewish traditions going for over 350 years. Only the eldest women of the families knew the truth and would pass it on to her daughter before she died. The "truth" came to light when they started suffering from a genetic disorder that only effects people of Hebrew decent.

When you start digging around in the past don't be surprised at what you find, or don't find. My aunt found out that some of our immediate ancestors were shall you say, not Boy Scouts..... ok they were horse theives and moon shiners...seems as though one great great grandfather spent a lot of his time trying to catch another stealing other peoples cattle. She was mortified.

Good luck and Good hunting.

[Stratherrick]

Beware, guys and gals!

My wife and I have been doing our family histories for years now. Although much work done by others is good, much also is just somebody going for a link that is not proven, i.e. no real proof of records is attached to their work.

We used to have some contact with a bloke who said he had 50,000 names on his family tree. When we corresponded with him over a few months, it turned out he just collected family trees from other folks, even if the connection was just a similar sounding name with no dates or places in common with his supposed ancestor. Their was no paper trail at all on vast swathes of his tree.

So, yes, researching your family tree is fun, but you'd be doing a disservice to both your family and others if you can't locate 100% guaranteed connections. Some folks' trees are no more real than some of the fake degrees you can buy off the net! It takes a lot of work to pin down certificates or copies of other records but, when you get them, you'll know for sure that you're looking at the right person on your tree.

Happy hunting!

Bruce

[Coinneach]

Family history can be fun, but such a headache sometimes. My maternal grandmother is one such headache we're sure we've cured. Her name was uncommon, still is, but when she passed, the two newspaper obituaries and her gravestone couldn't agree on the spelling; all three were different.

It also turns out that this was most likely her middle name. In some records she is known by her first name, in other records we have just her first and middle initials with her last name. She was orphaned during the Civil War here in the U. S. and ended up with her aunt's family (different surname) several states away, on the other side of the state from where she married her husband, whose last name was Silver. Imagine trying to look up that surname info in a mining state.

Still, we have enough evidence to support us all the way back that this past summer I was able to stop in Atlanta and visit the grave of my Confederate great great grandfather.

(It gives me great joy to remind my other half that I have better southern credentials than he does!)

[cessna152towser]

There was a lot of migration from Scotland to Ireland in the late sixteen hundreds. I am 75% Scottish and 25% Irish. My Irish branch (maternal grandfather) went by the surname Mewhort. It is known that an ancestor was granted land in Lurgan in 1691 under the British Government scheme of distribution, as his reward for supporting the Williamite campaign. He built a cottage on the land which remained in the family until the twentieth century. It is also known that there was a migration of McWhirters from Girvan, Ayrshire to Northern Ireland during the late sixteen hundreds. The Scottish settlers are said to have been unpopular as they occupied land which the government had confiscated from native Irish catholics and are believed to have modified their Scottish names to blend in better with the natives, hence McWhirter would have become Mewhirter, Mewhorter or Mewhort.
So yes, although your ancestors in 1634 could have been Scottish, they may have migrated to Ireland, inter-married there, and then moved to the New World so you may very well have both Scottish and Irish blood.

[Paul]

There was a lot of migration from Scotland to Ireland in the late sixteen hundreds. I am 75% Scottish and 25% Irish. My Irish branch (maternal grandfather) went by the surname Mewhort. It is known that an ancestor was granted land in Lurgan in 1691 under the British Government scheme of distribution, as his reward for supporting the Williamite campaign. He built a cottage on the land which remained in the family until the twentieth century. It is also known that there was a migration of McWhirters from Girvan, Ayrshire to Northern Ireland during the late sixteen hundreds. The Scottish settlers are said to have been unpopular as they occupied land which the government had confiscated from native Irish catholics and are believed to have modified their Scottish names to blend in better with the natives, hence McWhirter would have become Mewhirter, Mewhorter or Mewhort.
So yes, although your ancestors in 1634 could have been Scottish, they may have migrated to Ireland, inter-married there, and then moved to the New World so you may very well have both Scottish and Irish blood.

It's great that you know stories from so far back in time!
I'm positive a few of my Cummings would have been Williamites - as I am equally sure my Irish Campbells were on James' side at the Boyne - being strong Catholics in Dublin county.
I don't know if I'll ever know though!

[The Monk]

Ancestry.com has improved a lot since I started using it several years ago. They have source document collections that I could never access any other way due to travel, money or even knowing they exist. I have lots of question marks on my tree, but using someone elses tree as a starting point is not a bad thing. My grandfather (mother's side) and his sister, in the 60's and 70's, researched his family back to England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the early 1600's. I have a stack of paper about a foot thick of all their notes.

But on my father's side I got almost nothing. It's like he never existed. All I've really got is my mother's word for it. :-)

But since we're all descended from one woman in Africa and I'm not trying to claim that I'm next in line to be Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, I don't know that it all matters very much. It is good fun though.

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

It's great that you know stories from so far back in time!
I'm positive a few of my Cummings would have been Williamites - as I am equally sure my Irish Campbells were on James' side at the Boyne - being strong Catholics in Dublin county.
I don't know if I'll ever know though!

It is equally as likely that your Campbell ancestor was a Protestant, married a Catholic girl and, as was the custom until quite recently, their children were raised as Catholics.

As Major Yeates said in The Irish RM, "Things are different in Ireland."

[McFarkus]

I agree with what has been said above. My Gordons migrated from Scotland to County Down, Ireland about 1645 and then two Gordon brothers emmigrated from Down to Virginia in 1738 (I'm descended from both of them). This was a typical pattern for the so-called Scots-Irish.