Wherefore art thou?

[author_by_night]

fernwithy discussed a show called Who Do You Think You Are?, a show about celebrities (the first one being Sarah Jessica Parker) seeking their ancestry. I gave it a try myself to see what she was talking about.

Comments

[kennytrent]

Well...theres always Ancestry.com. My wife and I used it and went back as far as it would let us. Ancestry.com does something interesting, it uses other trees to attempt to discover links 'cause in the long run, we're all related somewhere down the line. I however couldn't go any farther on my grandfathers side than his father because his father was from Ireland. The imigrant records were not very good when he came over. My wife however was able to go pretty far. It's a good first step if your curious.

[author_by_night]

I've been, but like you, I wasn't able to get too far. Part of the problem is that my family immigrated fairly recently for immigrants - I think the earliest came in the mid 1850s. I know that's hardly recent, but that was still not even 200 years ago. It was hard enough getting anything from my Canadian side - there's a separate site for Canada, ancestry.ca, but it still kept bringing up people in New York and Illinois. Trying to find anything not in North America was like pulling teeth, so I gave up. :/

[kennytrent]

Yeah, totally understand. We gave it a year. Since my wife's family was almost entirely American, she was easy. But mine being part native American and listed on teh census...awkwardly and as I said, Ireland for my great grandad and Scotland for my great grandma well...we cancelled it LOL

[author_by_night]

The thing with SJP is that she was lucky enough to have face to face contact with experts, as opposed to relying on an online database. You can't really ask ancestry.com specific questions. And when you're not an expert in genealogy, you also don't have the resources to look any further.

[kennytrent]

heh...yep. And of course as you said SJP has...well...SJP monies! LOL

[author_by_night]

Hey, I saw this... two years later, I've indeed gotten VERY far thanks to ancestry.com. I'm glad you encouraged me not to give up on it. :)

[chocolatepot]

My father's family came over really recently - probably the 1920s or 1930s - and although we know where they came from in Italy (our last name is very uncommon and restricted to a particular area) we probably wouldn't be able to find anything about them before their immigration. :( Still, I'm thinking of getting a trial subscription to Ancestry.com and seeing what it can do.