Finding Your Roots on PBS
 

This is a fairly new series that I'm finding fascinating. They're taking public figures and doing genealogical family trees and DNA testing to tell them their roots. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the host. Well worth a look.

Yeah, I have seen it a couple times. It is pretty interesting stuff alright.


Carl

Even more fun doing it yourself, except for the DNA part. Got as far back as my 5X GreatGrandfather, even further back on his second wife.

I just pulled up the family tree, there are 10,050 individuals listed and I am not finished yet.:D

:D Betcha we're related! Might have to go back to William the Conquerer, though.;)

Isn't it amazing that all those generations were able to survive and procreate and multiply the size of your family, without a giant government handing them everything? Working for evil companies that weren't regulated nine ways to Sunday? Crappy to non-existent health coverage?
I mean, you'd think everyone would have died out long before we got this wonderful system we have today.:rolleyes:

More turd in the punchbowl rhetoric as usual. Why doncha go club a baby seal or sumpthin'?:rolleyes:

My mother caught the "roots" bug back in the '70s. Spent months tracing both her maternal and paternal ancestry and it's branches. Yielded some interesting stuff including presidents John and J.Q. Adams, actress Loni Anderson and two brothers who fought on opposite sides of the civil war. The name is Wyndham.

The Confederate brother was a north-western Virginia farmer/plantation owner, the other a Methodist Minister and outspoken abolishionist who fled with his family to Ohio when the war broke out and joined the Union Army as a commisioned officer. (Moms Great-Grandfather.) Both survived to meet again after the war. My brother has newspaper clippings from the late 1870s that feature that reunion. Including an image of the two men standing together on the steps of the church. And the sermon that the Pastor made about family, forgiveness and healing. Cool stuff. There is mention of several ancestors from Virginia who fought in the Revolutionary War but no details.

The family originally came from England although there is no official record of it. The records go back to a man that lived in Norfolk, Virginia in the 1670s and that's it. Nothing before that.

My Dads side came from Scotland in the 1880s and settled in Sackets Harbor, New York.
His grandfather owned a general store there, and there are still a number of Reads living in that area. My grandmother was Norwegian, (Lapplander). And after she and Granddad married they ended up in Washburn, Wisconsin where Pop was born. And that's really all we know about them.

Dave

Yes, this is why we need to bring hardship and crappy to non-existent health coverage back. Because if our ancestors could endure such suffering, by gum we sure can! (I can't, for the life of me, figure out why anybody would want too......But, then I never did get masochism anyways.:confused:)

Dave

I can't, clubbing baby seals is heavily regulated.

Shame too, such nice fur.

Pete

Well there is a side of the family with the surname "Auger" except it was always pronounced 'aww grr' and not 'oh jay'. I imagine if I could trace that branch back far enough I would end up in France.:)

True enough considering some were down the mines or in the mills by age 12 it IS a bloody wonder they survived. The women were doing fine birthing children (practically every year) as long as they had midwives. When the doctors started attending them during childbirth they were dropping like flies, but then I imagine you know of the work of Dr. Semmelweiss.

So you would have us return to that Golden Age, when life expectancy was about 48 or so? Which reminds me the FFHS National Burial Index just arrived.

It would solve SS's financial woes :)

Pete

And how did those seals survive all those thousands of years without government looking out for them?

No need for "death panels" when you can just cut off the money and pray the Good Lord gives them the strength to survive...........right?

Nope. No evil intent to be found there...........:rolleyes:

Dave

Congrats! I've talked to my friends at AARP and they're willin' to overlook your impetuous youth and let you in.;)

They were hard to get to. Why doncha blame it on Greenpeace? Evil treehuggers and defenders of those commie humpbacks ought to know better, doncha think? or the liberal media?:rolleyes:

Anyhow, no matter. Some will always take anything I say as an attack on their god given right to do whatever they want to the property of the whole country.
All in this myopic view of "local control" of public land. It's bad enough that given the history of local control of resources you end up with poisoned land ala Love Canal and flammable rivers ala the Cuyahoga. States have proven time and again that they can't be trusted with this control, they're just too easy to bribe and corrupt.

Well, they're just competing for jobs dontchyaknow?

Here I was being all conciliatory and shit an' you gotta spoil the moment Dave.;)