Any of you do Ancestry DNA or many of the other DNA services out there?

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I found out my distant relatives were titmouse's 6 million BC.

---------- Post added at 08:24 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:24 AM ----------

Just imagine this folks most of us are related to Roger Goodell.
 
About 10-12 years ago, I started trying to track my family history on my Dad's side. It was an exercise in frustration. My background is Lithuanian. My Dad grew up in PA coal country, and is from a coal mining town. I know that my great grandfather probably came in via Philadelphia, as this was common in 1800's from Lithuania. The Lithuanian catholic churches in PA have a lot of extensive records and there were at that time and are now web sites you could search for marriage, birth, death info as well as cemetery plots. Also a great number of message boards for info seekers. I had posted on a number of these. What is frustrating is the immigrants often had their surnames Anglicized, since no one could pronounce or spell their names. So tracking data is a challenge, and what's more there are often multiple spellings of even the Lithuanian surnames. For instance, my last name is Rogers, but my ancestors were in immigration records as "Rosmozky, Rasmoski, Rozmoski . Rosmoski, and a few other variations.
So anyway here is an interesting tale.
10 or so years back I got an email one day from a Brit who was searching those PA message boards too. He introduced himself and was trying to track down his Dad's relatives. His mother had been knocked up by a US soldier during WW2, and he grew up with a single mom. She never told him this and he learned it after her death when he started tracking records. His homework led him to me, as he had zeroed in on a US soldier that turned out to be my Dad's cousin, an Army captain who was killed in Normandy on D-day. He had more information on my Dad's family than I did. I was astonished. My Dad never talked about the war or his relatives and I knew nothing. This Brit even had photos of my Dad's cousins, his aunt's and uncles, all the military records, everything. I couldn't believe it, this cousins resemblance to my Dad ( and me) was amazing. We had a lot of correspondence and a few phone calls over a period of weeks. Ultimately he wanted to know if I'd do a DNA test to establish the connection to him, and I agreed. I took the test and it took a good 8 weeks or so for the results. And the results were, that I was not a connection and all this guys homework had been in vain. Back to square one! I felt so bad for him and disappointed. But it was an interesting experience and piqued my interest quite a bit. The moral of the story is that this kind of detective work has lots of dead ends, I guess.

cool story, eh?
 
patswin said:
About 10-12 years ago, I started trying to track my family history on my Dad's side. It was an exercise in frustration. My background is Lithuanian. My Dad grew up in PA coal country, and is from a coal mining town. I know that my great grandfather probably came in via Philadelphia, as this was common in 1800's from Lithuania. The Lithuanian catholic churches in PA have a lot of extensive records and there were at that time and are now web sites you could search for marriage, birth, death info as well as cemetery plots. Also a great number of message boards for info seekers. I had posted on a number of these. What is frustrating is the immigrants often had their surnames Anglicized, since no one could pronounce or spell their names. So tracking data is a challenge, and what's more there are often multiple spellings of even the Lithuanian surnames. For instance, my last name is Rogers, but my ancestors were in immigration records as "Rosmozky, Rasmoski, Rozmoski . Rosmoski, and a few other variations.
So anyway here is an interesting tale.
10 or so years back I got an email one day from a Brit who was searching those PA message boards too. He introduced himself and was trying to track down his Dad's relatives. His mother had been knocked up by a US soldier during WW2, and he grew up with a single mom. She never told him this and he learned it after her death when he started tracking records. His homework led him to me, as he had zeroed in on a US soldier that turned out to be my Dad's cousin, an Army captain who was killed in Normandy on D-day. He had more information on my Dad's family than I did. I was astonished. My Dad never talked about the war or his relatives and I knew nothing. This Brit even had photos of my Dad's cousins, his aunt's and uncles, all the military records, everything. I couldn't believe it, this cousins resemblance to my Dad ( and me) was amazing. We had a lot of correspondence and a few phone calls over a period of weeks. Ultimately he wanted to know if I'd do a DNA test to establish the connection to him, and I agreed. I took the test and it took a good 8 weeks or so for the results. And the results were, that I was not a connection and all this guys homework had been in vain. Back to square one! I felt so bad for him and disappointed. But it was an interesting experience and piqued my interest quite a bit. The moral of the story is that this kind of detective work has lots of dead ends, I guess.

cool story, eh?
Click to expand...

Really cool.

I'll share a roadblock of my own. It has been a couple of years since I learned this. I have gone from really mad to just kinda shaking my head over it.

My parents divorced when I was 5 and I never had a relationship of any sort with my father. My paternal grandparents and his family basically disowned us when the divorce happened. No contact. Mom raised us herself. She is a remarkable woman that made life happen for her boys on her own without support.

As it happened, I was named after my father and I am in fact a 3rd. The middle name I inherited is quite unusual and caused a few schoolyard fights when it got out from school to school growing up. You would think that being a third and having a very unusual middle name would make things MUCH easier. Not so for me. You see, my father was out to sea when I was born and my mother, on her own across the country from her family, made a mistake spelling my middle name on the birth documents at the hospital soon after I was born.

Then, a couple of years ago I was spending a lot of time on Ancestry.com and had made a lot of progress tracing my mom's side of the family and even quite a large bit of my wife's family but I was getting no where with my father's side. I was extremely frustrated as I knew virtually nothing about that part of my heritage.

I mentioned my frustration to a cousin who casually stated that it should be the easiest branch to find since my middle name was "so F**ked" up. At first I didn't know what he meant. Then as I sat there thinking it dawned on me. I was dumbfounded. I had never been told about the misspelling. I always just assumed it was an unusual variant. I called my mom and she sheepishly verified that my name was indeed misspelled. Funny, my birth certificate says I am the third, and that is indeed my lawful name, but I am not the third. Neat thing to find out when you are 44 years old. Not.

Armed with this new knowledge (correct spelling of my father and grandfather's middle name) I quickly made progress and have unearthed some really cool stuff on my grandfather's family, although my grandfather is still a bit of a mystery himself. There just isn't much out there that I can find.

Thought I would share. It is amazing how much is out there and it is almost as amazing how many rabbit holes you can go down and how hard it is to even find the rabbit hole to explore sometimes.
 
I got my results back during the night, I was quite surprised 67% Great Britain 20% Ireland 6% Scandinavian 1% Asia. The funny part is I'm more British 67% then the native British at 60%
 
I’ve done extensive Y and X DNA testing coupled with a large amount of research on my family tree through ancestry.com . My earliest Y chromosome relatives were German. “The House of Wettin is a dynasty of German counts, dukes, prince-electors and kings that once ruled territories of present-day German states of Saxony and Thuringia for 953 years. The royal house is one of the oldest of Europe. Its origins can be traced back to the town of Wettin, Saxony-Anhalt. The Wettins gradually rose to power within the Holy Roman Empire. Members of the royal family became the monarchs of several medieval states, starting with Saxon Eastern March in 1030. Other states they gained were Meissen in 1089, Thuringia in 1263 and Saxony in 1423.”

Sometime around 900 AD one of these “Wettins” caught a boat to the UK and eventually settled in Scotland. In 1625 my 8th grandfather, David was born outside of Glasgow. In 1650 he joined the Royalist Army to fight against England in the English Civil Wars. Unfortunately, he was captured by Cromwell’s army at the Battle of Worcester in 1651 and was sold into slavery. He was put on a ship called the John and Sara with hundreds of other Scottish Prisoners of War and was shipped to the new world, eventually landing in Charlestown, where he was sold to a saw mill operator from New Hampshire.

After working for 8 years he was granted his freedom and 20 acres of land. He brought his childhood sweetheart over from Scotland (who was also the daughter of a fellow POW) and started our family with the birth of 8 sons.

David, his wife Annah, and one of his sons were ambushed and killed my Quebec Indians sent by the French to harass the “english settlements” ion 1691. So, as tribal as it sounds, I don’t care much for the English or French.

Also through my paternal great grandmother I’m a direct descendant of at least 5 passengers on the Mayflower. Having grown up in West Bridgewater, surrounded by Brewsters, Aldens, Bradfords, Dotys, Warrens, Howlands etc that came as no real surprise. I also tie into a number of first wave immigrants who arrived shortly after the Mayflower.
 
Shemp said:
I’ve done extensive Y and X DNA testing coupled with a large amount of research on my family tree through ancestry.com . My earliest Y chromosome relatives were German. “The House of Wettin is a dynasty of German counts, dukes, prince-electors and kings that once ruled territories of present-day German states of Saxony and Thuringia for 953 years. The royal house is one of the oldest of Europe. Its origins can be traced back to the town of Wettin, Saxony-Anhalt. The Wettins gradually rose to power within the Holy Roman Empire. Members of the royal family became the monarchs of several medieval states, starting with Saxon Eastern March in 1030. Other states they gained were Meissen in 1089, Thuringia in 1263 and Saxony in 1423.”

Sometime around 900 AD one of these “Wettins” caught a boat to the UK and eventually settled in Scotland. In 1625 my 8th grandfather, David was born outside of Glasgow. In 1650 he joined the Royalist Army to fight against England in the English Civil Wars. Unfortunately, he was captured by Cromwell’s army at the Battle of Worcester in 1651 and was sold into slavery. He was put on a ship called the John and Sara with hundreds of other Scottish Prisoners of War and was shipped to the new world, eventually landing in Charlestown, where he was sold to a saw mill operator from New Hampshire.

After working for 8 years he was granted his freedom and 20 acres of land. He brought his childhood sweetheart over from Scotland (who was also the daughter of a fellow POW) and started our family with the birth of 8 sons.

David, his wife Annah, and one of his sons were ambushed and killed my Quebec Indians sent by the French to harass the “english settlements” ion 1691. So, as tribal as it sounds, I don’t care much for the English or French.

Also through my paternal great grandmother I’m a direct descendant of at least 5 passengers on the Mayflower. Having grown up in West Bridgewater, surrounded by Brewsters, Aldens, Bradfords, Dotys, Warrens, Howlands etc that came as no real surprise. I also tie into a number of first wave immigrants who arrived shortly after the Mayflower.
Click to expand...

We are cousins of some sort. I have two direct ancestors who were captured Scottish soldiers sold to the Colonies as slave labor. Gilchrist Ross was captured at Worcester, transported on the John and Sara and sold into servitude.

James Adams was captured at Dunbar, survived the POW march and imprisonment at Dunham Cathedral, transported on the Unity sold to the Saugus Iron works where he drove coal wagons. Somehow he managed to avoid the mass grave at Dunham and eventually was granted his freedom and raised a family.

I'm guessing we are both direct decedents of Henry Howland who was John Howland's father. John was the Mayflower passenger who fell overboard and saved himself by grasping a dangling rope in the open ocean and I'm guessing your forebear. I'm descended from John's brother Arthur Howland who came over a few years later. Our family connections probably run far and wide based on our early New England connections.

Interesting stuff.
 
I've told the story before, but--- what the hell.

I have a brother, his wife and a cousin that started digging into our family history. I knew so little about what happened prior to my parents generation that there were times when I wondered if something terrible happened because nobody talked about anything.

Anyhow, to make a long story short, my cousin Tommy got in touch with a man from Ireland that had written a history of a gaelic football club (GAA) from the town of Kilconly not far from Galway and it turns out that the first game this team ever played was back in the 1890s and the purpose of it was as a pass-the-hat benefit for my great-Grandmother Bridget.

This gentleman provided Tommy with a copy of a long newspaper article that appeared just prior to the game and it told the tale of Bridget and her four kids being evicted from their home in the middle of a terrible sleet storm by a much-despised British land agent. She was seven pounds in arrears. The author of that article stated that he: "would have needed the pen of Dickens" in order to properly convey the misery and abject sadness of the scene as the children cried and the rain poured down, etc.

Bridget and the kids later emigrated to America and she had one more child who was my Grandfather and namesake.

I have to say that learning that story just blew me away and I've thought of it a hundred times since.
 
Shemp said:
I’ve done extensive Y and X DNA testing coupled with a large amount of research on my family tree through ancestry.com . My earliest Y chromosome relatives were German. “The House of Wettin is a dynasty of German counts, dukes, prince-electors and kings that once ruled territories of present-day German states of Saxony and Thuringia for 953 years. The royal house is one of the oldest of Europe. Its origins can be traced back to the town of Wettin, Saxony-Anhalt. The Wettins gradually rose to power within the Holy Roman Empire. Members of the royal family became the monarchs of several medieval states, starting with Saxon Eastern March in 1030. Other states they gained were Meissen in 1089, Thuringia in 1263 and Saxony in 1423.”

Sometime around 900 AD one of these “Wettins” caught a boat to the UK and eventually settled in Scotland. In 1625 my 8th grandfather, David was born outside of Glasgow. In 1650 he joined the Royalist Army to fight against England in the English Civil Wars. Unfortunately, he was captured by Cromwell’s army at the Battle of Worcester in 1651 and was sold into slavery. He was put on a ship called the John and Sara with hundreds of other Scottish Prisoners of War and was shipped to the new world, eventually landing in Charlestown, where he was sold to a saw mill operator from New Hampshire.

After working for 8 years he was granted his freedom and 20 acres of land. He brought his childhood sweetheart over from Scotland (who was also the daughter of a fellow POW) and started our family with the birth of 8 sons.

David, his wife Annah, and one of his sons were ambushed and killed my Quebec Indians sent by the French to harass the “english settlements” ion 1691. So, as tribal as it sounds, I don’t care much for the English or French.

Also through my paternal great grandmother I’m a direct descendant of at least 5 passengers on the Mayflower. Having grown up in West Bridgewater, surrounded by Brewsters, Aldens, Bradfords, Dotys, Warrens, Howlands etc that came as no real surprise. I also tie into a number of first wave immigrants who arrived shortly after the Mayflower.
Click to expand...

AllWorldTE said:
We are cousins of some sort. I have two direct ancestors who were captured Scottish soldiers sold to the Colonies as slave labor. Gilchrist Ross was captured at Worcester, transported on the John and Sara and sold into servitude.

James Adams was captured at Dunbar, survived the POW march and imprisonment at Dunham Cathedral, transported on the Unity sold to the Saugus Iron works where he drove coal wagons. Somehow he managed to avoid the mass grave at Dunham and eventually was granted his freedom and raised a family.

I'm guessing we are both direct decedents of Henry Howland who was John Howland's father. John was the Mayflower passenger who fell overboard and saved himself by grasping a dangling rope in the open ocean and I'm guessing your forebear. I'm descended from John's brother Arthur Howland who came over a few years later. Our family connections probably run far and wide based on our early New England connections.

Interesting stuff.
Click to expand...

WOW! I mean WOW!!!

That is some fantastic stuff. I am again, inspired to dig. Thanks.
 
My "scottish prisoner" ancestor is James Warren, an 8th great-grandfather.

Shemp, what is your y-haplotype. Mine is I-FGC10476, part of I-M253. Have you done big-Y?
 
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