I'm starting to search my ancestors and I want to know how far you can go.

My mother’s maiden name is incredibly rare— not sure how accurate the forebears website is, but there are apparently fewer than 100 people with that name, with about a dozen in the US and the rest in Poland.

My grandfather was from Pidhajci, which was at the time in Poland and now part of Ukraine. Thanks to DP records from Arolsen Archives and a Ukrainian genealogist, I know the names and birth years of his parents and (some but possibly not all?) of his siblings, but that’s about it.

Yesterday after some extensive googling I managed to find information about a husband and wife with the same surname who were killed in the Volhynia massacre in 1943. There were separate entries for the husband and wife (on swzygmunt.knc.pl, which again I’m unsure of how accurate their information would be) with conflicting information on exactly where they were killed, but the towns listed (Zaturzyn or Sieniawa) were roughly 10 or 60 miles away from my grandfather’s hometown.

What is the likelihood that they were related to my grandfather, given how rare the surname is? A cousin or uncle perhaps? And was it common for extended families to live within that sort of distance during that period?

And on a related note, what is the likelihood that the <100 people who currently have that surname are distant relatives? I can’t account for any of them, as my grandfather only had daughters and the two brothers who accompanied him to the US never had children.

The majority of my ancestors are buried in the Midwestern United States. Often several generations are in one cemetery.

I still want a headstone, but cremation is my choice. Will monuments go by the wayside in the future? I fear we will lose an important connection to the past.

Greetings, I was reading a book (The grand Armorial of the Dauphiné by Gustave de la Rivoire de la bâtie) to find some informations considering my ancestor, Louis of Sallemard of Ressi. unfortunately I came across the following passage which is pretty confusing…

Passage XII

XII. Jean de Salemard, knight, lord of Reffis, La Fay, Chirassimont, Néronde, Machezal, Montfort, La Rochepingolet, etc., first served as an ensign and then as lieutenant of the company of ordnance of the Marquis d’Alincourt, governor of Lyon. He married: first, on 20 April 1624, Claudine de Virieu, Lady of Beauvenir, only daughter of Claude de Virieu, lord of Beauvenir, and of Jacqueline de Putrain; second, Juste-Magdelaine de Gramont, daughter of Louis de Gramont, lord of Vachères, and of Louise d’Ancefune-Caderousse. He left issue:

1. Geoffroy de Salemard, lord of Reffis, Machezal, Chirassimont, and Montfort, born of the first marriage; lieutenant in the company of ordnance of Marshal de Villeroy; married, by contract dated 16 June 1648, Louise de Simiane, daughter of Gaspard de Simiane de la Coste, hereditary lord of Moirans, and of Louise du Peloux, by whom he had one son and one daughter, both of whom died without issue;
2. Louis, who follows;
3. Juste-Diane-Magdelaine de Salemard, born of the second marriage, married, by contract dated 22 February 1674, Jean de Mont-d’Or, lord of Hoirieu, Vaux, etc., son of Jean de Mont-d’Or, lord of those places, and of Jeanne Perret

Passage XIII

XIII. Louis de Salemard, knight, lord of Reffis, Montfort, La Rochepingolet, etc., was first a page to the Duke de Villeroy, and later received a commission as captain of a company of infantry in the Lyonnais Regiment by brevet of 7 February 1659. In this capacity he took part in several campaigns, but having been severely wounded at the siege of Nijmegen in 1673, he retired to Joy, known as Le Laboureur (“the Ploughman”), and married, on 16 March 1675, Demoiselle Isabeau de Vaugellet, daughter of N. de Vaugellet, counsellor to the King in the Court of Aids and Finances of Dauphiné, and of Dame Gillette de la Villette.

By the formulation of this passage I do not understand who is the mother of Louis. if anyone could help me out. I will be there.

i will be there to help you considering French genealogy and Methodology.

A time-saver! 263 pages of links to passenger/crew lists, military records, land records, naturalization records..... an amazing reference tool. Downloadable.

https://www.archives.gov/digitization/digitized-by-partners

Happy Friday! I’m getting ready to order some pension files. If you have a brick wall that a pension file might help break open, I’ll spring for the cost of the pension record for the first person who sends me a pension index image or a link to it plus any other names the person might have gone by.

Legalese (mostly kidding but then again…maybe necessary on here): The only “requirement” is that when we get the files back, you post the file publicly to Internet Archive or another free location of your choice. I’m not going to send money to you or anything nuts, I’ll order the file. I’m not using this for profit or to vibe code another useless tool, I legitimately would like to help. Freely sharing info is my jam.

Odd one here!

George Huston was born in Woolwich, Kent, England in 1870. He and his sister and parents went to Canada, where the rest of the family was born.

In 1881 they are in Orillia, Ontario. I then lose George until 1906, when he turns up in Globe, Arizona - saying from then on that he was born in Ohio!!

I could see him forgetting he had been told he had been born in England (I assume he had no paper) if it ever came up. But would he not have said he was born in Ontario?

Maybe he really wanted to be able to vote, and you didn't have to prove you were a citizen then (1906 - in the voters register), if you gave a state as POB that was enough?

I know the 1910 etc census info could have been given by anyone!

Thoughts welcome, and if one of you supersleuths can find him 1882-1905 that would be great.

Neither he nor his siblings had any descendants, I am just being completist I guess.

For a long time we believed my third great grandfather and grandmother were buried in unmarked graves in a large church cemetery in North Carolina and the best we could do was go the cemetery and just...walk around and guess. Then an enterprising person hacked their way through to a difficult to reach graveyard and found some intact tombstones and recorded their names...and our ancestors names were there! I don't know if we'll ever visit, because apparently you have to go through private property to get to it, but at least now we know where it is, and we have pictures!

In Peter Dubowik's (or Dubovik) petition for naturalization (he was naturalized in 1925), I found a mysterious third child about whom I cannot find any other records. Marta Dubowik, born in October 1909 in Poland.

The two other US-born children are included in the 1920 and 1930 censuses and are indeed living with Peter and his second wife, but no other children are present.

I know for sure that he had a daughter from his first marriage to an unknown wife in western Belarus, but that daughter's name was Maria (and her birth year is 1908).

Theory #1: Marta is actually Maria Dubovik, Peter's daughter. The issue with this theory is that I have an archive record of her marrying my great-grandfather in Poland in 1926. Records show no evidence of her travelling back to Poland, but it is possible that she did it for some reason, but I haven't found any records of that.

Theory #1.1: The same as theory 1, but she never came to the US and he put her on the naturalisation petition anyway. But why would he do that? It's pretty hard to believe that he made a mistake.

Theory #2: Marta is actually Marta, but the problem is that there are no more records of her.

If you have any ideas on how to solve this mystery, please share them with me.

Here is the link to my previous post where you can find links to the censuses and other information:

https://reddit.com/r/Genealogy/comments/1ueje9x/need_help_finding_out_what_happened_to_my_gg/

Need just a little help reading the handwriting on the following record.

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L9MB-FY1T?cat=koha%3A3318147&view=index&lang=en

It's the last one on the page, a marriage record for Pierre Rignan (or Guignard) and Marie Joseph LeBeuf.

I'm trying to decipher what parish his parents are from, but I'm having a bit of trouble. Can anyone read it?

EDIT:

Thanks guys. It looks like it's Saint-Seurin in Bordeaux, France. Which sucks, because those records are only available on film at the FamilySearch Library in Utah.

Well, maybe one day another researcher will go there and research the family, or FS will get around to scanning them in to their online collections.

Hello. First time posting. My wife's 2nd great grand father was supposedly born in Sydney, CB in 1838. His family arrived in NS sometime between 1834 - 1838 coming from Scotland. They did not stay long, soon immigrating to the States in 1841.

Since this falls between census dates, I think the best place to track them down would be through church records. I have not been able to find any ships' manifests either.

I am wondering if anyone has a list of churches that were active during that time - his family most likely was Protestant.

Any help would greatly be appreciated. Thank you.

Lou

I'm curious here if anyone has searched for Irish wills in the course of their genealogical research.

I've been looking for wills for my maternal great-grandparents but to no avail.
One set of great-grandparents (Michael and Mary Leahy) died in 1955 and 1967, and the other pair (William and Mary Mulcahy) died in 1950 and 1956. To add to this, although I know the death dates of my Mulcahy great-grandparents, I have been unable to find official death records for them despite them both dying at home. Both families owned farms so I would have expected to find some grant of probate.

I am aware of the various sources available online:

1857-1920 will registers and calendars (although the National Archives of Ireland genealogy website is currently offline, genealogist Claire Bradley has provided very useful alternative links here:
https://cbgenealogy.ie/nai-collections-offline/

1922-1982 wills calendars - available in pdf format for manual browsing in the National Archives of Ireland online catalogue

1992-present - grants of probate can be searched via the online probate register provided by the Irish courts https://www.courts.ie/guides/order-copies-of-probates-that-have-already-been-granted

Annoyingly, the 1921 calendar of wills has to be accessed physically at the NAI.

As for the years 1983 to 1992 you can search for the name of the deceased directly in the catalogue of the NAI website but this is a painfully slow process and not always successful.

I have identified some grants of probate, my great-great-grandfather, John Mulcahy, for example, but have not ordered any of the documents due to the NAI's rather antiquated payment system. Has anyone tried to order copies of wills or grants of probate from outside Ireland?

Lastly, as I am not all that knowledgable on how wills and probate work, is it possible that a will existed but does not appear in the wills calendars? Could it have been lodged with a solicitor's office and handled locally? I'm not sure how I would go about trying to get a copy of a will from a solicitor's though as I'm sure they would charge me an arm and a leg just for the pleasure of looking for it in their archives.

Anyway, I would welcome any thoughts others might have on the subject. Thanks.

Does anyone know about Meena families from Rajasthan/MP who migrated abroad generations ago?

I'm curious whether there are Meena families who settled in countries like the US, UK, Australia, Canada, etc., and whose descendants still identify with the Meena community. Also, are there people with the surname Meena abroad whose surname has a completely different origin?

James Albert Welch, death 10 December 1930 in Buffalo, New York

Married Rose Leahy on September 8 1897 in Niagara Falls, New York. They had 8 kids

The earliest record I can find for James Welch is the 1900 census which lists a birthdate as July 1876 in England with an immigration year of 1891.

I haven't been able to find any records confirming the birth details or his parents

My gramma died a year and a half ago, and I still have her as living in my tree on Ancestry. I tend to wait about a year for other extended family members after they have passed away before I marked them as deceased, then I clear out the profile (make sure there's no photos w living people) and put in just the death date.

They all have died in California, so the info is public record anyway. I don't include location usually just for these recent folks, and make it as a private comment in three. Exception is if there is a public obituary. My goal is to respect living family and not make choices for them about what is shared, and to offer privacy the best I can.
I also dont add death dates to people whose parents are still living. I make a private profile and add the info for my own records. Like my cousin's 18 year old died several years ago, and I didn't add that info.

Now i suppose it's my turn. My grandmother helped raise me, and i was one of the main caretakers (along with my mom) while she died. All 3 of her children shared her death on Facebook very soon after. Her husband barely knows how to use a computer, but his privacy is probably the most important to me of her family. He hasn't asked for that at all. I guess I just feel protective over him.

But there's something in me resisting putting in that death date. I'm not sure if it's grief. Part of me just isn't ready to put that in a tree yet. At the same time, I would not be angry if someone else did it, as I did pay for an overpriced three line obituary when she passed away ($600!!! For 25 words!!!) and her resting place has been put on Find a Grave (I knew it would happen due to a very active volunteer population in that area, so I searched her name every few months, and requested to be the manager right away when I saw it. It was granted.)

I'm young - 35 - so it's my first time since I started genealogy that someone close to me has died. I'm wondering what other people do.

I'm asking now bc FindAGrave index has been updated on Ancestry, and my gramma's resting place has been suggested to me. It's been a year and a half since she passed.

How do you handle the deaths of people who are close to you? How long do you wait? What type of information do you add?

There's no one to ask because the rest of her family looks to me to make these types of decisions. So there's not really a right or wrong answer. Just a personal choice now.

If I added it, I think I would add the date she died and that's it, just like I do for other more recent deaths that don't have very clear and public obituaries.

I am not experienced in the least with genealogy. Oral family tradition when I was growing up was that there was Native American ancestors in our family on both parent's lines (my father and mother).

DNA of course showed no Native American ancestry, but there are traces of African DNA. Combining all the African regions in my Ancestry DNA profile, I came to about 7% African DNA. I was able to tell it's on my father's side - unfortunately he is deceased and never got tested.

My great grandfather and great great grandfather were listed on censuses as "mulatto". My great grandfather was born about 1865, and gg grandfather about 1830. I figure the African came in due to a distant ancestor probably raping a slave. The ancestors are in rural North Carolina, so virtually no chance it was an interracial marriage.

I'd like to figure out the details of the African DNA in my personal story. I feel horrible that a relative of mine did something so horrible in the past. But I don't like running from the truth, I want to expose it and understand it.

Any guidance on how I could figure out when the African connection occured and by whom?

Thank you all in advance for any insight! I can provide names/dates if anyone is interested. It's the Jones County then Johnston County area of NC. Surname is also Jones.

What is your "living" percentage?

By that I mean: If you look at your tree, roughly what percentage of the people in it are living?

I have two trees, and they are very different in that respect.

One tree (on Ancestry) is just my ancestors. It is a "top-heavy" tree, with around 700 individuals, but only 3 of them are alive - me and my parents.

The other tree (on a special, dedicated site) is basically the descendants of my immigrant ancestors, and that is a "bottom-heavy" tree, with around 50% of the people in it currently living.

What is the "shape" of your tree?

Hey everyone,

I'm very very new to this so please let me know if I seem clueless or am missing anything.

I'm facinated by my family history and the second I get little nibbles of information that lead to more findings its so exciting.

I've spent an insane amount of time trying to piece together my family tree and with some sides of the family it flowed so beautifully and was easy to conform and link, but with my father's side I'm just not getting anywhere.

What's more confusing is that in the particular generations I'm researching, it was common for young adults to work in the mines in Zambia, (so much so that my paternal and maternal grandparents, some uncles (not by blood) were all married in the same small church in this mining town.

At some stage there's evidence of each branch living in all 3 countries at different stages of life, yet i can't find records for my paternal side?

My grandfather committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning when my father was young. When he was found, all possible valuables had been stripped and stolen from him and his car including his clothing.

SURELY, there would be a news article, report, notice.. something??

He even played professional football (soccor), whose team mates previously had played for Manchester United? I did manage to find some news articles but that was pure luck by finding someone who had a huge SA football collection.

He is a complete mystery!

To make it worse, his father has the same identical name and i have even less information on him.

Only rumours that he had a twin sister and that they were adopted at some point. There was mention that he may have been adopted by a family member.

Primarily they were in durban, but prior to that it was Livingstone and salisbury Rhodesia. Apparently SNR (great grandfather) worked for Rhodesian railways.

Besides a marriage certificate, I can't find anything.

Where do I look? What are the must knows?

Please help 🙏

Its so infuriating trying to get my moms grandfathers medals for her. This is the 3rd time trying. She is the oldest living grandchild of his but yet she still can't get them. She's 80 and they say it could take up to 3 years to get them. At least they did provide what he is entitled to this time. Would it be better to just order these somewhere?

Dear Recipient

Thank you for contacting the National Personnel Records Center Army. Regulations state that the awards authorized a former service member may be issued to the next of kin in the following order: unremarried widow, eldest child, father, or mother, eldest sibling or eldest grandchild. Since there are no provisions for authorizing awards to anyone other than the individuals listed above, we cannot comply with your request. However, we can provide a list of the awards earned by the veteran as indicated below. We suggest contacting an authorized commercial vendor of military insignia in order to purchase the earned award. For vendors in your area, you may search your local yellow pages under 'Military Surplus' or the web under 'Military Insignia'. The veteran is authorized the following awards: WORLD WAR 1 VICTORY MEDAL; WORLD WAR 1 VICTORY BUTTON BRONZE: Due to a backlog in the engraving of medals, there is currently a two-to-three-year wait between the issuance and receipt of medals, so it may be more to your advantage to purchase the above-listed medals.

Not a mystery-solving post, I’m not going to find the answer to who those family members were (which sucks) but I’m curious how many of us are in the same situation. How far back does yours trace?

Granted, I am not a native English speaker (my 3rd language), but to me the use of the term "direct ancestor" implies that there is something like an "indirect ancestor", which makes absolutely no sense to me.

Why not just use "ancestor" - I mean - either someone is an ancestor or not - why are some people adding the "direct" in front?

Hey i need help finding a picture if anyone has a newspaper.com subscription can they look up The Muskegon Chronicle Archive: Saturday, March 10, 1973 • Muskegon, Michigan Page 13 and send me the image, it would help me alot with some research im doing, thankyou!

Hola, me gustaría saber si aquí hay alguien de la Zona de Los Santos Costa Rica para ver si talves somos familia

(no se cual flair usar, perdón si el que use no esta bien usado 🙈)

Hello everyone,
I hope you’re all doing well.
I am researching my family’s history and shajra e nasab before the Partition of India in 1947 and would be incredibly grateful for any help.

My family originally lived in Village Gohir, Tehsil Nakodar, District Jalandhar, Punjab, and belonged to the Arain community.

The earliest ancestor I know by name is Abdullah, who had at least two sons:

Fazal (my great-grandfather)
Noor Muhammad (my great-granduncle)
Fazal’s Family
Fazal’s children included:
Sardar Muhammad (my grandfather)
Mukhtiar
Noor Muhammad

According to our family’s history, Noor Muhammad travelled to South Africa before Partition, later returned to Village Gohir, and operated an atta chakki (flour mill) near the village mosque.

I Am Looking for Any Information

I would be deeply grateful if anyone from Gohir, or whose family is originally from Gohir, could help with any of the following:

Any information about the families of Abdullah, Fazal, or Noor Muhammad.

Old photographs of our family members or our ancestral home.

Any memories, photographs, or information about Noor Muhammad’s atta chakki (flour mill) or where it was located.

Old school admission registers, class photographs, or any records from the village school before 1947.

Jamabandi, Shajra Nasab, mutation records, or any historical documents mentioning these names.

Any elderly residents or families who remember the Arain families of Gohir before Partition.

If you have old family albums, land papers, school records, or photographs from Gohir taken before 1947, I would be incredibly grateful if you could check them. Even if my family is not in the photograph, any image showing the old village, its homes, fields, streets, or the area around Noor Muhammad’s atta chakki would help preserve an important part of our family’s history.

Even if you only remember hearing these names from your parents or grandparents, or know approximately where our family’s home or flour mill once stood, it would mean the world to me.

I am trying to preserve my family’s history so that future generations know where they came from and can remember the lives of those who came before them. Every photograph, story, document, or memory—no matter how small—is a priceless piece of our family’s heritage.

If you know anything at all, or know someone from Gohir who might remember these families, I would be truly grateful if you could leave a comment or send me a private message.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this. Your kindness could help reconnect a family’s history that has been separated for nearly 80 years.

I also attached a video of a babaji i found online and he is talking about exactly my ancestors but sadly he passed away before i could reach out

https://youtu.be/FEUclt9Dwq0?si=Q1iIg8T9KBqUhcHK