But luckily it’s the family tree thread.
In compiling my tree over more than 20 years I only feel happy with distant ancestors if I can tie them in with official records and/or family records/ knowledge. My Scottish heritage is fortunate as Scotland’s People website is a great information giver. My bete noir is tracing back from maternal Irish grandparents due to so many records being lost in the Civil war.
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Imagine how hard it must be for Welsh relatives then, with so few surnames in the population that they add the job to the name (ie Jones the baker) so everybody knows who you mean.
I thought my family was of distant Welsh heritage because right up to both grandpas everyone spoke Welsh and I could trace them back several generations thinking how lucky I was in the circumstances.
Not a bit of it, there is a ‘k’ in the middle of my family name…and ‘k’ doesn’t exist in Welsh. 
I once tried finding out where my grandfather, Evans from Cardiff, had been injured in 1917. That was looking for a specific piece of straw in a haystack. About a week later my sister sent me a carbon copy of a letter my grandmother had typed to his regiment in the 1960s and that not only had his Army number but his injury reference number as well. Those numbers changed everything.
[quote=“JohnBoy, post:15, topic:52487”]
If you have at least a name and approximate location in America and of course thier daughter/your mother info then it may well be possible. PM me if you wish with total privacy.[/quote]
Thanks, that’s a very kind offer that would be hard to refuse, I’ll send you some info and also my speculations on my mother’s European ancestry. Having dug a bit more the last couple of days, I think one strand (ie. great-grandparents) were Poles who had emigrated to the US around 1900 and were descendants of migrants from SE Europe/Ottoman Empire, who were, or more likely(?) were presumed to be of Turkish origin.
Interesting to read your comments about errors. I found gypsy blood on one side of my family and on the other side there is also a large similar group (perhaps even overlap) I haven’t been able to join the dots. A school friend with the same family name is in another isolated “island”. I understand that a couple of hundred years ago people didn’t move around much so I suspect that these people are linked. I feel that taking a DNA test would be cheating at this stage.
My neighbour here in France has done a lot of research into her genealogy and most of her ancestors have lived within a very small area. She herself was born only about a kilometre from her present home and was amazed to discover through her research that where she lives now was once owned by her ancestors. She has written three books based on her research which have been of real interest to a lot of local people. The fact that her family have rarely spread far away has been a huge advantage.
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@LiamW and @David_M_Matthews commented how little people moved around historically.
This is echoed by very similar findings from my Luxembourg father-in-law. His own family tree research showed that both he, and no less than 7 generations of his family prior to him, were all born within 30km of each other, in a rural Luxembourg valley, 10km from the German border.
His birth certificate first name is different from his current name, as -fearing and anticipating future German invasion - Luxemburger parents commonly gave Germanic names to their children born just before WW2, in the hope of protecting them.
Research into Irish grandparents is complicated by the fact that Irish parish registers were often written in Latin in the C19th (and possibly later). Hence my Grandfather (John) was actually christened ‘Jacobus’ as that was as close as the parish priest could get to John in Latin.
I think that was true of a lot of my childhood friends in Cornwall. Many of them were the first generation to move outside the county and a lot of those who did have moved back. A huge number stayed local.
I’ve always found it fascinating that here in rural Correze quite a few locals have surnames the same as small hamlets they live in or close to. Presumably it goes back to the days of first names only causing confusion so the hamlet where they lived was attached and thus handed down.
Again highlighting the static nature of some rural populations.
My neighbour’s surname reflects the village that some of her ancestors moved from. It’s not far from where we live. He name is Devillagename. We once went to look at the cemetery in the village and she was surprised to find that there was nobody buried there with her surname. I said that did not surprise me as the surname probably arrived after the ancestor had left. When they arrived in their new home it’s likely that they would have been known as John/Pierre/Lucie from that village and that that eventually became the surname. I gave her another example, a friend I know as Padstow John because that differentiates him from my lifelong friend Meva John. Padstow John is her Jean Depadstow. My theory meant that her researches would have another problem to overcome as there might be a lot of people in the records who shared her surname who were actually other people who had moved from the same village not necessarily related to her. That theory has proved right, there are at least three families around who share the surname and only occasionally are they related and then by marriage.
When she was researching for her first book we followed the path that had taken a branch of her family tree from a village about 50km to where she was born. The generations slowly moved west but rarely more than a short walk from where they were born.
Good thing none of you are Icelandic and have to deal with tracing genealogies where they don’t have surnames in the Western European sense and everyone is just -sson or -dottir (“son or daughter of…”) 
Fortunately the cunning Vikings anticipated this problem and wrote everything down in a Bok* (Íslendingabók ) which has family histories back to the 9th century.
DNA testing in the fight against crime has certainly made massive improvements to confirming who did or didn’t commit the wrongdoing and I am sure that many wouldn’t have swung from the gallows in years gone by had the revolutionary system been available back then. In theory DNA testing should work in tracing ancestors as the principle is the same but of course it will only cross match the results for those who have taken the test. In my opinion what clouds the success in Ancestry DNA testing is that it also factors in the information from millions of search results created by individuals who see themselves as expert genealogists who, having found a name on the website that matched the person they are looking for assume it must be correct. My experience is that in some cases this may well be true but in many cases it isn’t therefore resulting in false information being used to determine a DNA cross match which of course is only as accurate as the data used.
A typical example of this is when I received a message via Ancestry from a lady in Australia asking how it was possible that we had a DNA match when we have no common ancestors. The test supposedly confirmed that we shared the same x3 grandfather!
My paternal x2 great grandmother had 5 children, 2 boys followed by 3 girls. The girls father is proven but the 2 boys isn’t although from photos of them they are almost identical so reasonable to assume that they had the same father, but not the father of their sibling sisters. The first born son was my great grandfather. So could the x3 shared grandfather’s son have been my x2 great grandfather?
I thought this revelation would prove to be a game changer and set about the lengthy process of proving it. The age of the supposed x3 grandfather and more importantly that of his sons ruled them out as being my x2 great grandfather.
Research around my supposed x3 great grandfather showed he had a brother who in turn has male offspring. It was one of these offspring that proved to be the most likely father of my great grandfather. If this was the case my suggested 3x great grandfather was actually the brother of my 3x great grandfather.
The DNA link certainly helped in this situation but to take it at face value can lead to the wrong conclusion.
I’ve got a copy of that somewhere.
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In addition to talks with older relatives, it is never too late to start writing your own, perhaps to you insignificant, autobiography. I knew very little about my parents before my birth in 1942 and, since they came from very disparate backgrounds, they might have had interesting things to say. I have much more information about my (necessarily paternal) family with a family tree, compiled professionally, about 8m wide and 2m deep, but only bits and pieces about more recent relatives!
There were so many questions l wished l’d asked. I bought a book from Amazon for each of my grandchildren, called ‘Dear Grandma, from you to me’. Basically a list of headings which prompt one to record family history, including about their parents as children.
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When you have German ancestry you don’t go looking. Well I did. Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, and highly decorated; no real problems. One relative was sent to Ravenbrück for being gay. Further back all farmers.
Then I looked at my British lines. Royal Marines from the 1700s, guards regiments including a full colonel who probably knew Ribbentrop, again no real problems then the bodies pile up. The worst UK mining disaster, the greatest British social injustice, the Peterloo massacre, slave owners.
Other lines were servants, steel workers, farmers, oh and again mine owners.
Snap. My grandmother’s father was also a mine owner. His mine has the doubtful honour of being the site of the first strike in Welsh mining history. Apparently when the miners walked out the pumps stopped working. The mine flooded and wasn’t reopened. About the same time the same great grandfather lost a lot of money while selling a Brewery. The result of this was that he committed suicide, he shot himself in the head in his study. What I didn’t know until about 10 years ago was his that it was my teenage grandmother who discovered his body.
334 dead.