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Scottish Mag
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I've been having another go at building a family tree on Ancestry.co.uk and I've got a lot further than last time.

 

Now back 4 or 5 generations on my Mam's side and it's interesting to see the interplay of names - like my Mam being named after her grandmother.

 

Had one dodgy moment when my Great Great Grandfather came up as born in Sunderland but a couple more checks put it down as Durham (probably a mispelt village near Bowburn). Apart from that my ancestors were very local - I think North Shields is the farthest away with the rest all S Shields/Jarra.

 

On my Dad's side it's a bit more evasive - My dad's Mam was born in Jarra but her parents/ancestors were from Cumberland on her mother's side and her Dad was from Berwick.

 

There's a bit of a dead end with my Dad's dad - I know his name and date of death and have their marriage record but I suspect he was Irish.

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My Grandda (90 yrs old on Christmas eve) has been doing our family tree recently and has managed to go back to the early 1800's. Unsurprisingly we're all originated from the west coast of Ireland and we found out that my great-great uncle was in WW1 and lost his life at Ypres aged 19. I've bought one of the poppies from the Tower of London installation in his memory and would love to know more about the family from that time.

 

No chance of finding anything out on my dad's side as he'd lost both parents by the time he was 16. I know the names of his grandparents from a death certificate that I looked up but he won't talk about it and I can't find anything else without information, though it fascinates me.

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I'm doing it blind - as my Mam had me when she was 40 and a few years after my brother and sister I was always the bairn of the family do didnt get a feel for the previous generations. I only knew one grandparent and only have vague memories of older relatives. I could ask my sister but think I might surprise her with it for xmas.

 

I'm getting hints of minor scandals. I think both sets of grandparents were shotgun weddings judging by the dates.

 

Ridiculous numbers of kids were also common a couple of generations ago.

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:)

It's when you start looking a the details that you think " Hello..... Dirty buggers!"

My great grandad married my great grandmother in October 1908, when he was 19 and she was 17.

My grandad was born in January 1909 :lol:

One of my gx3 grandfathers had 6 kids with his wife, who died giving birth to the last one.

Census records show that her youngest sister moved in to look after the kids, sure enough, by the next census, there's 4 more kids ;).

I think the best find so far is a branch of our lot who went off to the States in the 1860s, did the whole wagon trail thing across the continent to Utah ( yep founding fathers of the Mormons) , and settled in a tiny place called Liberty, Bear Lake, Idaho.

One of them had two wives, Mormon stylee, 13 kids to the first and 12 to the second.

The first wife, who popped out 13 nippers, was called Fanny Aiken :lol:

I'll bet it feckin was.

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:lol:

:D

True as well.

If you type her name into Google images, she's the first hit- miserable as fuck.

Add her married name,"Fanny Aiken Roberts", and her half of the swarm show up, well, the ones that made it past their first year.

The big bugger on the right is the fanny rat husband.

Edit; just looked again and it seems he's jizzed all over his jacket. The man was clearly insatiable :lol:

Here's the pic of Fanny's Aiken half of the brood

66893251_130748105632.jpg

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I think a brother of my great-great grandmother may have emigrated to the US - I'll follow that up eventually.

 

Thing is without doing the exact numbers, when you start to see how many siblings people had and also how concentrated in one place they were as I said, and then project forwards from say 1800, I reckon I must be related to a fair proportion of the people in Shields.

 

That's in a town of say 80-90000 now - fuck knows what smaller towns and villages must be like before we started to travel more - limited gene pool city.

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One of the lasses who works in the accounts dept of a property agent I do some work for shares my surname.

I asked her one day , " are you from Washington , by any chance?"

She was, so I asked what her dad was called?

After explaining that we had the same surname, I pulled up the family tree on my phone, found her dad, grandad, great grandad etc all the way back to originator of everyone in Washington with our name.

He was born 1804 on the Isle of Man, moved to Whitehaven and married an Irish lass and she gave birth to a football team :D

Some of these moved to Washington to work the pits, then a second wave, several kids of those who stayed in Whitehaven, moved across to Washington too.

Me and the lass were both descended from the 2nd lot.

When you throw in my paternal grandmother's family, who got to Washington at the turn of the 20thC and bred like rabbits, I reckon there's a good proportion of the town that I'm related to.

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One of the lasses who works in the accounts dept of a property agent I do some work for shares my surname.

I asked her one day , " are you from Washington , by any chance?"

She was, so I asked what her dad was called?

After explaining that we had the same surname, I pulled up the family tree on my phone, found her dad, grandad, great grandad etc all the way back to originator of everyone in Washington with our name.

He was born 1804 on the Isle of Man, moved to Whitehaven and married an Irish lass and she gave birth to a football team :D

Some of these moved to Washington to work the pits, then a second wave, several kids of those who stayed in Whitehaven, moved across to Washington too.

Me and the lass were both descended from the 2nd lot.

When you throw in my paternal grandmother's family, who got to Washington at the turn of the 20thC and bred like rabbits, I reckon there's a good proportion of the town that I'm related to.

 

 

Thankfully, despite living here for 30 years on and off, I wasn't born here. I did go to school with a lass who shares your surname though..

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One of the lasses who works in the accounts dept of a property agent I do some work for shares my surname.

I asked her one day , " are you from Washington , by any chance?"

She was, so I asked what her dad was called?

After explaining that we had the same surname, I pulled up the family tree on my phone, found her dad, grandad, great grandad etc all the way back to originator of everyone in Washington with our name.

He was born 1804 on the Isle of Man, moved to Whitehaven and married an Irish lass and she gave birth to a football team :D

Some of these moved to Washington to work the pits, then a second wave, several kids of those who stayed in Whitehaven, moved across to Washington too.

Me and the lass were both descended from the 2nd lot.

When you throw in my paternal grandmother's family, who got to Washington at the turn of the 20thC and bred like rabbits, I reckon there's a good proportion of the town that I'm related to.

 

:lol: That is an impressive amount of research to be fair to you...

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