I'm glad they have this group, hope we can keep it going.

[CanonRay]

[Cooley Hurd]

1. Me too!

[Rhiannon12866]

15. K&R!

[csziggy]

2. Hi! We certainly could use it!

I'm currently working on the branch of my Dad's family that came over to the US really early. Not Mayflower so far, though one guy brought his family over in a ship that accompanied the Mayflower on its third voyage!

One thing with those early guys - there is a lot of info about them. A lot is wrong but a lot is verified. And how much research do I need to personally do on a guy with a number of books written about him?

The guy I was just looking at is Walter Palmer - arrived in Salem, Massachusetts in 1629, helped found Rehoboth, Massachusetts, then moved to Stonington, Connecticut. I'm done with him - just put in his essentials and have records on the various references to go to for more details.

[CanonRay]

5. I just got my wife's side approved by the Mayflower society

through the Stephen Hopkins line. I'm Sicilian, so I hit a dead end about 1830. I need to learn to speak Italian and get in good with some priest there!

[csziggy]

6. Cool! Hubby goes back to one of the lines, but he's not into approval.

I expect I connect to one somewhere - grandmother and Mom were into DAR and once they had their Revolutionary linkage, they really didn't care.

Since Walter Palmer was hanging around with the Mayflower crowd, probably more than one of his sons' wives was a daughter of the original group.

Ancestry is adding more European sources - and you don't have to know the language unless you want to translate the original documents. I found some about my brother in laws family from (at various times) Austria-Hungary, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc. And I certainly don't speak either of the languages his ancestors spoke!

My dead end are the Welsh members - and I may have to learn Welsh to trace them! Trying to find which Mary Morgan married my great-great-grandfather and who her parents were is pretty much impossible from here. I think there were several hundred Mary Morgans born in the time period she might have been in Cardiganshire - and a good number of them were born in the village she claimed to have been born in.

I've found the marriage in 1838 and I guess the next step is ordering the wedding certificate to see if it has parents listed. But the chances are that it will be in Welsh and won't do me any good.

[CanonRay]

10. For me, I wanted to see if I could really document it successfully

It took me almost a year, start to finish. It was a pretty good feeling.

[csziggy]

11. The documentation is the hard part - congratulations on that!

Going back that far is really difficult, too.

[Spider Jerusalem]

14. Actually...

the certificate and so on will be in English, not Welsh; Welsh records were in English since at least the time of Henry VIII with the Laws in Wales act of 1536. The General Record Office has an index of births, marriages, and deaths that begins in 1837, searchable here: http://www.freebmd.org.uk/ (a quick search shows three Mary Morgans married in Cardiganshire that year, one in June, two in December). Another useful resource for tracing 19th century British ancestry is the census (you may find her parents' birthplaces recorded in the 1841 census if you manage to get their names from a marriage certificate, for instance); there are also parish registers, but those are for the Church of England, and may not necessarily record the births of someone baptised in, say, a Methodist church. The LDS has searchable records in their International Genealogical Index collection; if you manage to nail down this Mary Morgan's birthdate at least from the marriage record then that would be a useful place to look as well.

[csziggy]

16. FreeBMD.org.uk is where I found the marriage information

But since apparently I have to order it from Cardiganshire, for some reason I thought it would be in Welsh.

My sister was in England and may have ordered it. I need to check with her before I do.

I tried looking for Morgans in the village where she lived - Llanfihangel y Creuddyn - but there are too many. On some census she lists her place of birth as Llanbadarn Fawr and I've tried looking there, too. Her age changed, too. 1841 she would have been born in 1816, 1851 - 1814, same in 1861.

I end up with as possibilities:
Mary Morgan, christened 18 Jul 1813, Llanfihangel y Creuddyn, parents David Morgan and Chatherine
Mary Morgan, christened 10 Dec 1815, Llanbadarn Odwyn, parents David Morgan and Eleanor
Mary Morgan, christened 3 Mar 1815, Llanbadarn Fawr, parents Richard Morgan and Anne
Mary Morgan, christened 6 Mar 1815, Llanbadarn Fawr, parents David Morgan and Catherine

I like one of the Davids as her father because David Morgan became a family name. There are no Richards in the family so I doubt that is her father, though there are Annes - but no Catherines.

I've been over and over the records and until I order a birth certificate, I can't go any farther. And even if I verify the parents, tracing a David Morgan in Wales would be no easier than tracing a Mary Morgan there!

[Spider Jerusalem]

18. You should be able to order it from the General Records Office, I think

the FreeBMD should have a GRO reference number. And yeah, tracing someone called Morgan in Wales is a bit needle in a haystack (I have Morgan ancestors, bit further back though, 17th century...and I've pretty much given up on tracing back further than my ancestor Henry Morgan who showed up in Maryland in the 1630's).

It's not certain but there's a chance the David Morgan and Catherine who were parents of Mary Morgan christened in 1815 in Llanbadarn Fawr are the same as the David Morgan and Catherine who were parents to the Mary Morgan christened two years earlier in Llanfihangel y Creuddyn; something I've noticed in doing my own genealogy is a tendency for parents to reuse names if a child died in infancy (and I have at least one ancestor who named two of his sons John, one being called "Johannes" to distinguish him from the other).

[csziggy]

19. Oh, I know I can order it - and how to set up the account to order

But right now ordering hard copies is not a priority in my research. And, as I said, my sister who spends half the year in England with her British husband may have ordered a copy. I suggested to her that she might save us money by doing that.

So far as I have been able to figure out, the GRO does not have a way to order multiple documents to be sent together. Their order process seems to be for one document at a time to be sent separately. Once I get started ordering documents those separate mailing costs will add up fast. If I can get my sister to order them sent to her husband's English address it will cost a lot less. Then she can either hand carry the documents to the US when she comes over or she can ship bundles of documents at once.

We've got at least one New England Morgan ancestor - I don't remember the details right now. I've just started working on that branch of the family so will come to her fairly soon.

I'm doing a "first pass" through all the branches to see what I can find online without ordering stuff or even leaving the house. I've spent money on memberships to some online places - Ancestry, Footnote (now Fold3), and The Genealogist (UK) - so I can access major databases. With those and free online sites like FamilySearch.org and GenWeb.org, I have found an amazing amount of material and extended some branches back quite a ways.

Once I finish all the branches with this pass, I will start ordering stuff from the LDS libraries, documents from places that do not have things online, and see how far that takes me.

I did think the two Mary Morgans who were daughters of David and Catherine could be sisters. I've seen that soooo many times, I can't count them! Heck, my German ancestors named all their sons and daughters with the same first name and different middle names - which got confusing with one piece of software that only listed first names!

[Spider Jerusalem]

20. I was personally a bit surprised to discover how much you can find online now...

my personal interest in genealogy started more or less accidentally; I followed a link to the LDS Familysearch site, years ago now, and out of curiosity searched for my surname in the Washington DC area and found my great-grandfather...and now several years later I've managed to trace most of my ancestry back at least to the earliest immigrant to America, and in some cases several generations further in Britain (I seem to be somewhat unusual in that about 90% of my ancestry traces back to the British Isles, and most of my ancestors, as far as I can tell, arrived in America before the Revolution)...and I've gotten somewhat lucky in finding that many other distant cousins have traced family lines well before I have (although a lot of erroneous information seems to get perpetuated nonetheless; my general rule is "trust, but verify" ).

[csziggy]

21. It is so much easier than it was years ago to do research!

My grandmother researched her family so she could join groups like DAR and Colonial Dames in the early 1900s. Much of her research was done by interviewing and writing living family members who remembered stories about their grandparents. Some was done from family histories that were written in the late 1800s, though many of those have since been proven unreliable.

We have a letter written in 1892 by a distant cousin telling what that elderly relative remembered of the family history going back to her grandfather who died in 1811! Notes written by my great-great-grandfather of the genealogical charts. And short biographies that my grandmother wrote about all her ancestors from what she remembered and what she had gathered from her relatives.

When my mother began tracing her family history in the 1950s and 1960s, she mostly used correspondence, looking up wills and deeds in the county courthouse, and going through graveyards looking for tombstones and tracing the inscriptions to get dates. She also found a lot with census indexes, though not the original census pages we can now find online. Fortunately all her ancestors lived in the same county in Alabama from 1818 on so finding her relatives back that far was pretty easy.

I spent a lot of my childhood going to the graveyards with her and learned to type by transcribing the old wills and deeds. That is where I learned to enjoy genealogy and the insight into history it provides.

Were any of your ancestors Quakers? If so there is a ton of information on them available though The Genealogist. PM me if so and I can look them up.

[Spider Jerusalem]

22. Several of my ancestors were Quakers, actually

a Henry Child who received a land grant of 500 acres in Bucks County, Pennsylvania from William Penn in 1681 (I was fortunate enough to find that the Child family's genealogy for several generations was covered in a scholarly work called "The World of Rural Dissenters&quot ; a Thomas Marsh, who emigrated to Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and was killed in the so-called "last battle of the English Civil War", the Battle of the Severn, and a Thomas Taylor who married Thomas Marsh's daughter and seems to frequently be confused with another man of the same name.

[whathehell]

8. Wow....Sounds a lot like my husband and me...He had an ancestor in the Civil War and is

distantly related to Ethan Allen through his sister, Rebecca Allen.

Me, on the other hand, is Irish on the Dad's side and a complicated Croatian mix

on the Mom's. When you mentioned "Italian" I thought of it, because my grandparents

came here from the Dalmatian Coast off Croatia (Then part of the Austrian-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire)

They spoke Italian, but in a slavic accent...They also had slavic-sounding Croatian last names (ending in "ich&quot but spoke Italian and

considered themselves Austrian...It was certainly confusing!

When I checked it all out, I came to understand it in the complicated history of the Dalmatian coast.

[Maccagirl]

3. Geneaolgy is a fun hobby

Sometimes when you hit that brick wall, someone out of the blue helps you to go in a conpletely differant direction. I've met 2 3rd cousins through research and they are gold. I'm hoping DU has a place for this as well.

[PatSeg]

17. I've found numerous relatives over the years

and all of them had something of value to contribute. Genealogists tend to be very generous people. A very distant relative actually made a special side trip to a cemetery in PA to take photos of my great grandparents graves for me. Encountering him opened up a whole new branch of my tree.

[The Genealogist]

4. I do too

Yay genealogy!

[DearHeart]

7. Like this group!

Anyone interested in European genealogy should check out Family Search.org. Found my Slovak relatives there, but none past early 1900s on Ancestry. It's been a wonderful find!

[whathehell]

9. Thanks for the information!

I have Croatian family I've been trying to track on Ancestry.com without much luck...I'll

try Family Search.org.

[DearHeart]

12. I wish you luck!

I know that some country's records are still being scanned. Some countries are just missing from the list-Greece, for instance. My brother's wife is trying to research her history and has hit a brick wall.

Hope you find what you're looking for!

[whathehell]

13. Thanks, DearHeart. n/t