Ancestry

[taylorkaye1992]

I never could've imagined how difficult it truly is to map out a family tree. I'm getting increasingly frustrated....

I mean, what am I supposed to do with this?

Comments

[saskiiaa]

I love doing this kinda stuff, but I have to agree with you, the US census records are very strange o_o I'm lucky, my family didn't leave Europe until ... my generation... XDD and were very mainstream white protestant people, so their records are really easy to find.
My boyfriend on the other hand is Jewish, and his grandparents came from Poland and surroundings. -__-

[taylorkaye1992]

It's pretty fun to find all that kind of stuff out, but it can also be frustrating. Since most of my ancestors emigrated from Germany in the 1700s and 1800s, it hasn't been too difficult to trace, but the occasional person (like the one above) just stumps me. And all the deaths, re-marriages, mixed families, and conflicting birth dates/locations make some records impossible to verify. Information is different from census to census and it makes me wonder how exactly they collected data back then....

[saskiiaa]

Hahaa it does make you wonder, I agree... I have some family that's hard to figure out simply because they kept naming their children exactly the same names. -__- on my mom's side there's a Johannes Jacobus for 4 generations straight, and then several dead infants with that same name too. All same last name too.

[taylorkaye1992]

I forgot about that one. There are three people on my mom's side with the name "Michael Nicolaus Baltus" and two of them married women named "Margareta." And then on my dad's side there are three people named "James Staples." It can get quite confusing.

[saskiiaa]

Aren't those so weird? I can't imagine naming people exactly the same name... Oh yours sound complicated, since Staples is probably a very common name.

[taylorkaye1992]

Yeah, I've run into a lot of dead ends, either because there are no records or because the names are too common and I can't figure out if a record is for the right person or not. For now I guess I'm satisfied with what I've found, but the only two countries I was able to trace anyone back to were Germany and England (though I'm certain there should be more). It's all so convoluted....