Tracing Your Family History - How to Get Started

[Music] all right let's do this i'm gonna give a couple of minutes uh just for folks to get in now that the stream is live and uh then i'll kind of explain and walk you through what i'm gonna be doing today i'm sure you guys will have a lot of questions i will try to get to those as best i can but i mainly want to kind of step stick to a particular agenda that i've got as far as wanting to show you some real basic things about how to get started with researching your family tree i'm going to be using my own grandmother this is my maternal grandmother who is still living and you guys are probably awful often heard me talk about her she's uh dealing with parkinson's and dementia and she lives in a nursing facility but uh she is still with us but uh i thought i would use her because she has a pretty fascinating treat because she has a little bit of everything that i want to be able to show you today and i'm starting as though i was starting from scratch to show you how i would find the people in her family tree and uh hello everybody so the only thing i ask and i put this in a pinned comment as i ask that you keep any questions for me on topic so like don't ask me what i think of some world war ii general because we're talking about family history today uh we'll do another meme stream real soon you can ask me whatever questions you want so i'm using ancestry.com and the reason i'm using that to show you most of this today is that i find that of the multiple resources that i use for researching family tree and there are a lot of different ones that i have memberships too ancestry seems to be the the most user friendly for somebody who's new starting out there are other resources that are free but are much more difficult to use until you know what you're doing a little bit so thank you john i appreciate that um so i emile what i'm doing is i'm using my family uh to show you how to do your own research uh show you kind of the the tips and the strategies and the tools to use for that and you can see i've got a number of websites open and uh open up that i'll um that i'll uh show you uh on here but so let me just tell you a little bit about my grandmother and so i'm gonna i'm gonna come at this as though i was somebody new starting their family tree only with the little bit of information that they're aware of and then i'll show you how to take that and discover more through the records so um my grandmother was born i know this because she's alive and so i could ask her this information when i started researching i know she was born february 7th 1943 she was born a hospital in youngstown ohio though she grew up in mineral ridge which is my hometown i know her father's name was thomas i actually knew thomas he was 88 years old when he died i was five years old my great-grandfather now you'll notice something right off the bat that's pretty interesting about my grandma's family and that is when her parents were born my grandma was born in 1943 she was the youngest of seven children her oldest brother was born 28 years before she was the the the seven kids were really spread out and so by the time my grandmother was born her dad was almost 49 years old uh and her mother was 46 years old or almost 46 years old she's 45 so they're right at the end of when they're able to have children double azure himself a lot of these resources will work internationally because like ancestry for example has a ton of uk resources i'll show you some of those because my grandma's great grandfather was born in in the west midlands in england so ancestry is a pay service but there are some free ones that i'm going to show you in a little bit but i'm using ancestry only because it's very user-friendly and it's a good place to start so i know uh and here's what i entered in so i knew my my great-grandfather was 88 when he died i knew i was five years old when he died okay i was born in 1977 which means that he died probably in 1982. so i put that into the tree that he died in 1982 in ohio that's all i've put in so far uh knowing that he was 88 i put in that it was born around 1894. i put that as about 1894 again in ohio as though i don't know anything else i know that my grandma's mother's maiden name and you always want to use maiden names for the women because that's how you're going to find them is based on what name they were born with her name was mildred all of chambers and she died when she was around 70. she had pancreatic cancer and i know she was around 70 because my grandma remembered that so again and she was born at a place called york ohio which is down near steubenville now again i know a lot more than this but i'm only telling you this to show just to show how to research it yes this will uh all streams that i do stay up on the channel later so they'll be available um so yeah this will be up later if you if you can't stay for the whole thing and you want to be able to watch so let's start with my grandma's dad so here's what we know about him now you can see the hints now i want to warn you something about ancestry hints take them with a grain of salt because they might your person might match someone else like for example my thomas has an uncle named thomas that was born in the same town three years later yes he's older than his uncle uh and so it'd be easy to confuse the two guys so the hints are a dangerous thing but here's what i'm gonna do i know his wife was mildred i know they had kids in the 1920s and 1930s so i'm going to start with the census thank you yeah i'm still dressed from church i'm going to start with the census the united states census is taken every 10 years starting in 1790 and all the way up through the present day now uh they they released census records 72 years after the census so next year the 1950 census will be released for research so right now the newest one we have is 1940. in the uk they also did a census every 10 years but it was on the the one year so it was like 1911 1921 1931 etc and i believe in the uk 1911 might be the earliest one divide by zero zero thank you for that um so ha ha three-fourths of my family's from the appalachians uh three of my four grandparents this is my one grandparent who doesn't have roots in eastern kentucky so what if they're east asian yeah it's completely different story doesn't necessarily work for that so i'm going to go to the 1940 census here's weathersfield township that's where mineral ridge is which is where my grandma grew up so i'm thinking okay my grandma grew up in mineral ridge here's a thomas whitaker in the 1947 says this is probably my guy and i can highlight over it and see that it says lincoln avenue my grandma grew up on lincoln avenue i know that it was right across the street from the house i grew up in so i know this is her family so i'm going to click on the 1940 census i know this is my great grandfather and i'm going to take a look at this so right here is the 1940 census and you've got thomas and mildred o whitaker which i know was my great grandparents name so this is their family so now you can see all the information i can get from this 1940 census mineral ridge trumbull county ohio they live on lincoln avenue you can see that right here uh right here is the value of their home which in 1940 is three thousand dollars which is pretty good especially right at the end of the great depression um i can see he's the head of household he's listed as uh mildred is listed as his wife uh now this is actually and you're gonna find a lot of mistakes like this uh my uncle ralph is listed as head as well because he and his wife are living with them but then georgetta and donald are actually my grandma's brother and sister i knew both of them in fact donald's still alive my uncle dawn so i know this is the right family this tells me what state they were all born in so thomas and mildred are born in ohio ralph my grandma's brother's born in ohio his wife virginia is born in west virginia and then his kids georgetta and donald are born in ohio this tells me where they were living in 1935 five years earlier it says they were in the same house and you can see all of this in the heading here so here and you can see they're real helpful with showing you this so it kind of lines up so invincible they release it 72 years later because of privacy issues uh so they don't want people having access to the 2000 census for example because it would give you a lot of information about people who are very much alive whereas most of the people who are listed as heads of household in the 1940 census for example are going to be gone by now uh so now this tells me here uh is he at private work no at public work no seeking work yes so that tells me that right now he's actually out of work he's been laid off and this is part of the depression he was a steel worker steel mills were a huge thing the youngstown area was one of the primary steel producers in the country at this time he's been out of work at this point for four weeks so that tells me all of this information about this how common are skeletons in the closet very very common i'll tell you about an example from my wife's family uh in a little bit carlos yeah there's a little bit of southern accent you'll pick up every so often from me and i lived in southern indiana for a year and it came out big time um so he his most recent occupation was that he was a rougher in a sheet mill a steel mill they were making sheet metal uh you can see worker class is pw which means private work um and then these codes are just things that were used by the census uh he he worked at that job for 90 weeks in 19 he didn't work that many in 1939 i think it's probably 40. his income this tells me how much he was making per year seventeen hundred and seventy seven dollars what's his income now you might think that doesn't sound like a lot but look at the other people on his street what they're making 270 1300 360 1344. he was one of the highest paid people in his neighborhood you got one right here that was harry knight uh who made 2340 but everybody else in the immediate vicinity to my great-grandfather made less than him and that's actually something i knew from talking to my grandparents because my grandpa whose family was from eastern kentucky his dad was a a brick worker a brick maker they were much more lower class uh and my grandma's family actually didn't like her dating my grandpa because they were kind of middle class and my grandpa was very poor um coming from kentucky and so there was a big discrepancy in terms of the uh the social classes that they were in uh so yeah my my great grandfather was doing really well but i've been told that even then they mostly during that time were just paying the interest on their mortgage to be able to pay for their house so uh so this tells me that i've got the right people and it tells me he's 46 and she's 42 in 1940 which is right about you know what they were and i know that's right so i'm gonna look for something a little different here here's the 1900s census so now my great-grandfather is gonna be a five-year-old kid so this is what uh what what this is gonna tell me are the names of my great-grandfather's parents uh which i let's say i don't have that yet so now we're going to take a look and this is niles which is right next to mineral ridge it's just a couple of miles away it's the next down over in fact it's in the same township and so now i can see here is my great grandfather thomas whitaker and it says he's born in september 1894. the 1900 census is unique among u.s census in that it's the only one that actually gives a month and birth year um they're a month and year for birth yeah in many places in europe there's a state church and we'll get into that a little bit when we go back a little further on this line because you're going to see pretty soon because thomas's grandfather was born in england and we're going to look at those records to show you how they're different and you can see this here so here's thomas's mom and dad edward is his father born in june 1874 which is not exactly right but sometimes that happened for some reason he's 25. his wife caroline's 23 born in november 1876. they've been married for six years they have had three children born to them all three are still living and that's thomas william and edwin right there you can see here that edward was born in ohio his wife my great great grandmother was born in pennsylvania you can see their parents birth places so edward says his father was born in england so now it's like okay there's an immigrant ancestor for me her father was born in pennsylvania her mother was born in pennsylvania and then edward's mother was born in ohio which is actually again not true as we'll find out later and this is why it's important to have multiple sources if you just take information from one source a lot of times it's wrong edward's just saying what he thinks he doesn't remember that his mother was actually born in lewistown pennsylvania so he's like yeah mom's from ohio because she grew up in ohio she came here when she was three years old so as far as edward's concerned his mother was from ohio but we'll see later that that's that's wrong uh hey how's it going connor uh so again you can see here edward my great great grandfather he's a sheet mill catcher is what he does and this is an important thing here too because you're going to find this is pretty uncommon back in 1900 edward and his wife caroline can both read and write and they speak english they're renting their home which again was very common and it's a house not a farm that's all information i can get from the census so now austin curtis you're descended from devil and hatfield that's amazing so now here's what i'm gonna do i did a doctor right now it's a census taker and a lot of times and something else i'll tell you that's really important spelling is absolutely meaningless in records especially when you're dealing with the majority of people especially for me family being from kentucky they were farmers most of them could not read or write they could barely sign their own name a lot of them would just sign an x so they didn't know how to spell their own names and so you'll see spellings all over the place with last names that's how you end up with different last names being spelled differently because a lot of times it just depended on who was writing down the information how it was spelled so now i'm going to add thomas's father because i know his name was edward and we're going to enter in that he was born in 1874 and again we're going to say ohio because we don't know specifically where in ohio and now we know that his mother's name was caroline now we don't know her maiden name yet but we know she was born in november 1876 in pennsylvania so that's all we know did i spell that right let me take a look pencil okay i did so now we've added that information so now i'm going to go ahead and show you the hints because the hints are a thing and these this is a real quick easy way to save information to your tree but it's important to know if it's right first um so i'm going to look right here this is actually something i uploaded to my own tree but this is something that somebody else has already found in this case i am that someone else this is my great great grandfather's obituary uh and actually it's not the obituary this is actually just the funeral notice let me find here's the no that's not it either where's the obituary here it is here's his obituary so ed whitaker 71 dies in hospital retired steel worker so here we go now this tells me a ton of information bro block that's awesome i appreciate that the deceased was born in niles march 25th 1874 the son of joseph and alva granger whitaker now again that name is wrong for his mother but we'll get to that his wife caroline croft whitaker so now we know her maiden name is croft died in 1918. so let's go back for a second first of all i'm going to save that to my tree and i just hit save and now that has been saved to my tree but then look at this find a grave and that's linked to ancestry find a grave.com is a free site that is fantastic and what that is is that's a website where people enter in uh grave information these are transcriptions of tombstones from cemeteries and i've been a transcriber i've gone around taking pictures sometimes people upload biographies to this so let's take a look at that for a second now we know he was born in 1874 and that he's in niles ohio so let's find edward there he is so again here we go born march 25th 1874 died 21st november 18 in 1945 in warren ohio he's he died in warren because warren's where the hospital was and he's buried in niles union cemetery now check this out and this is why find a grave is an awesome free resource if you can get connected to somebody on there i've got his parents right here with their information i've got his wife right here i've got all four of his children including my great-grandfather thomas right here and i can click on any one of those here's all his siblings he was one of 16 kids and most of the siblings are here and i did most of this information myself i linked all of this but let's go ahead and look at edward's father now i took this picture that statue is actually gone now from that but i'm the one that took that picture that's been added to find a grave there this lady added these other two but check this out okay now i find his father and it says september 1844 in tipton metropolitan borough of sandwell west midlands england that's my great great great grandfather so just in what we've been sitting here for 20 minutes i've gotten back to my third great grandfather and my first immigrant ancestor just like that so that's really cool one of the cool things about this uh and how easy it is to find insane i'm working on it my friend it's been tough because there's the dutch records are not very good um no i don't have any whitaker family in mississippi i do have windsteads in mississippi but yeah find a grave does have because check this out uh i'll keep going back i'll click on mary lambert whitaker this is my my uh fourth great grandmother she's born and tipton died in cleveland and then here's her father joseph and this is one of my uh guys who owned a pub in england uh and joseph was born a whit church cardiff wales he died in 1861 in tipton he's buried in saint bartholomew cemetery in winsbury in the west midlands so there you go there's some english information there so let's back up for a second because again i can add all of this right to my tree directly from find a grave so now we're going to update his birth information right there his death information is going to be added we're going to add his parents to the tree elvira was my great great great grandmother's name and you can see here she's born in lewistown mifflin county pennsylvania which is in the center part of the state we've got her death date here and we're going to add all of that to the tree just like that bradley your family were born in tipton that's amazing my tipton ancestors the whittakers actually lived in prince's end uh and uh you'll see in just a second when i get back that far joseph whittaker's father richard and his grandfather joseph ran a pub that's still there today it's on church lane it's called the english oak and i actually reached out to the owners of that pub and they they were familiar with the name joseph lambert um romanian records are decent uh believe it or not uh and mcmaster it is not elvira i don't know uh you might have known somebody else who had it pronounced that way but that is not how my great-great-great-grandmother's name was pronounced paul you're from glasgow so um let's talk about glasgow for a second because we're going to look at joseph so here's one of the big uh issues i had early on i've been researching the whitaker i just wrote a book about the whitaker family um a couple of years ago there were two whitaker families in niles joseph and then a guy named alfred who was born in scotland and from all the records and everything i could see it seemed like these families were related to each other and i was convinced they had to be brothers but i couldn't get past the fact that joseph was born in england and alfred was born in scotland and it just really messed with me for a long time and then i discovered that when joseph was two years old his father moved the family to glasgow scotland and he ran a pub there called the old toll which is actually still there today mexico's got some decent records on ancestry actually scandinavian records yeah a little bit i've done some research for some folks in sweden and norway they were actually full brothers john they just joseph was born when they lived in england the other one was born when they lived in scotland but those are a lot of questions that i had at the time so let's go ahead and look at joseph now so joseph again lives in niles which is where the family was all uh from i want to look now at some of the records for example let's go back to i want to go to one of the census records so here's that same 1900 census filipino records i haven't done much with hungary uh my wife's grandfather's hungarian so i've done a lot of research there they've got a lot of really good records on um ancestry and family search for hungary japanese i don't know much about um east asian records unfortunately so here's joseph and elvira and you can see this is how she actually spelled her name e-l-v-i-r-a august 1856 now joseph's birth date is wrong he was not born in may 1839 again this is a common thing people the records are very scattered when it comes to birth birth dates on things like that uh zero uh look at my pinned comment we're not talking about that today call sign yes uh by an ancestry membership is absolutely worth it so now joseph born in england father born in england mother born in england this tells me he came to the united states in 1865. uh he's been in the u.s for 35 years it tells me he's a naturalized citizen so i know he's got a citizenship he's an american citizen at this point now his occupation is making this says faggles but that's actually wrong the person who transcribed this didn't know what they were doing and probably didn't want to type what it really is and i actually i should be able to submit a correction to this he was actually making uh is a term of a for a bundle of sticks in this case is a bundle of steel rods he worked in a steel um a rolling mill and they would make steel rods there for use in concrete and things like that and so it was his job to bundle those together in into a as it was called uh it wasn't a derogatory term at least not that i'm aware of at the time prussian and german records are very good um so then you can see the whole family here you can see his kids his 24 year old daughter his daughter sadie arilla annie sarah thomas in this case this is my my great-grandfather's uncle thomas georgina charles and then prudence and you can see what they're doing opening 10 so some of them were working at a tin factory you can see that joseph can read but he can't write again very common he can speak english he owns his house it's mortgaged and it's a house not a farm elvira cannot read or write records in the baltics i haven't done a lot of so uh so now we know joseph came to the united states around 1865. so let's take a look at that again let's go back a little further now this is the 1880 census and again this is going to be joseph again so we can look uh 20 years earlier look at a little more of his information so here's joseph again this is in niles still where they lived joseph 38 elva it says 24 but this is still elvira you're going to see that very common thing to see the names written down differently the census taker is just going to write it down how they think it is and they're going to sometimes screw it up born in england born in england morning now if you remember when we were looking at this do you remember here's what it says about elvira's name now there's two names here and that's a tricky thing but um granger it lists her as a granger now that's important because when you're looking at the census look at who they live near the next door neighbors to joseph and elvira are benjamin and ann granger benjamin's a blacksmith he's from england and is born in pennsylvania now where did elvira say her father and mother were born pennsylvania and ohio now this is tricky elvira's mother was born in pennsylvania this is elvira screwing up again and this is something you have to deal with with records you have to deal with a lot of incorrect information and try to piece together a picture based on multiple sources so evening rad how's it going um so anne is elvira's mother and benjamin is actually her stepfather and that's why you see two last names you see what the other last name was neyman now look over here right next door on the other side of benjamin granger is a james neiman it's actually elvira's full brother uh they both have the same mom and dad this is anne's son on this side and this is anne's daughter on this side so they're both living next door to their mom and their stepdad and so it's pretty cool to kind of see all of that uh work itself out but now let's go ahead and i'm flying through this it'll probably take you hours to go through all of this stuff but you'll find nine times out of ten once you get back a couple generations to maybe like your great great grandparents chances are really good that somebody else has already worked on at least part of your family tree joseph whitaker has over a thousand living descendants today that i know of and so with a thousand living descendants and with the popularity of genealogy these days in america especially um chances are pretty good that several other people have done research on joseph already so you're gonna find what other people have already done have i done george washington's family history no there's plenty of people who have done that already um so cryptic panda um i like typically when i do it and i'm cheap compared to most um i do uh 10 hours of research for 200 um i'm probably going to have to stop doing that though because after i advertised that on a video about two weeks ago i got like 30 people who reached out to me wanting to hire me so i've got a bit of a waiting list now but ancestry charges 2 500 for 20 hours of research that's why i highly recommend if you can to get a membership and start doing this stuff yourself because really it is pretty easy to get started now once you get back and you have to start going into some really obscure records it can get really difficult but here's what's cool now let me show you some other resources to find with these people newspapers are fantastic resources for information i'm going to go this is one i already know about the niles times was the local newspaper in niles ohio so i'm gonna look up elvira whitaker who's my third great grandmother that we've been talking about and see what i can find about her uh and i so let's take a look right here here's a mention of elvira granger whitaker in a newspaper article from 1958. so and what it is is this is her son's obituary so these are the kinds of things you can find just really quick doing a little search and this is a free site that i'm on right now so charles whitaker 61 of huntington park california resident of niles until nine years ago and say here born in niles august 1897 he was the son of the late joseph and elvira granger whitaker it lists his widow his children his brothers and sisters that are living you can find all kinds of really cool information let me show you another example of somebody asked about skeletons in the closet my paternal great grandfather also lived in niles and his name was carl snowden and i know that he died in 1956 so i'm going to look for his obituary in 1956. and here we go i'm going to find this right here he died in december just after christmas so here's my great grandfather's obituary and you can see here this is one of those examples sometimes you're going to find stuff you don't want to find about your ancestors and in this case my this is my father's father's father his death was ruled a suicide by hanging um he used an extension cord and took his own life when he was i think yeah 46 years old um luis i'm going to be going for a little while yet cm17 my last name is not my biological father's name either um my last name is my mother's maiden name i didn't know who my biological father was until about 10 years ago and it was from an ancestry dna test scottish clan genealogical records are decent i think but i haven't dug into them enough to be able to tell you for sure um so let me show you some other resources now um in particular i'm going to switch over to my um uh to my main family tree now because i want to show you um so here's what i actually this is my actual family tree here um so what i want to show you now is uh i want to show you how to research military history a little bit so let's go to that same line we were just working on uh we're going to go to caroline who we talked about i'm going to go to her grandfather his name was daniel cervey so daniel cervey is born in 1819 in center county pennsylvania which is where um state colleges where penn state university is yes this is definitely possible if you live outside the u.s a lot of these records that i've researched are from outside the u.s now i told you the census is every 10 years uh in 1890 the u.s census burned in a fire that the 1890 census burned in a fire i should say i think the fire was like in the 1920s or 30s but what did survive was a special census they did in 1890 of all union veterans who were still living so if you suspect that you have an ancestor who fought in the civil war at least on the union side and you know he was living in 1890 he will show up in the 1890 veteran census and he will say excuse me what unit he was in when he enlisted and when he left the service if he remembers so in this case dan survey i know that he was alive in 1890 he died in 1894 so and we know he lived in a place called curlsville in clarion county pennsylvania and so this is the veterans census for monroe and curlsville in clarion county pennsylvania uh bradley very cool i'm going to be hopefully going to tipton as soon as travel clears up again um so now we're going to look down this list we're going to find our guy so here's daniel w survey right here uh and it tells me that he was a sergeant in company i of the fourth pennsylvania cavalry and that he enlisted october 14th 1861 and that he stayed in the that unit until july 1st 1865. now that's super unusual for somebody to be in the service that long because most of those enlistments were three years and and the majority of people did not re-enlist when their three years were up so the fact that he stayed until 65 is a pretty big deal and that tells me a lot about the guy that he did that now it also tells me if he's dealing with any health issues because they're trying to figure out who's going to be filing for a veteran's pension things like that so here he is he's line 26 he says he's got an enlargement of the heart but that's all he says about it so company i fourth pennsylvania cavalry so now that gives me some more to do research on and i use a site called civilwardata.com when did i want to become a historian when i was eight years old i actually from the time i was eight wanted to be a history professor i wanted to teach in um i wanted to teach in a university and i i majored in history in college but never ended up doing that so um so uh this is a database i use and again it's a pay site but there's a lot of other places you can find this information um but i'm going to go to the personnel directory and i'm going to type in now again the names are pretty tricky but i'm going to type in daniel cervey we know he served from pennsylvania and i'm going to search and there he is daniel w survey now this doesn't tell me a lot because what this tells me is actually his re-enlistment he was already a sergeant at this time so that doesn't give me a lot of great information so i'm going to look somewhere else for this information i'm just going to type in i want to learn a little more about the fourth pennsylvania cavalry so i'm actually just going to do a google search uh for the 4th pennsylvania cavalry and i'm like oh wow look at this there's a monument to the 4th pennsylvania cavalry at gettysburg which means that my ancestor because he was there from october 1861 to july 1865 which means he was in that unit in july of 1863 when they were at the battle of gettysburg so now i know that my uh fifth grade grandfather four fourth great grandfather was at the battle of gettysburg uh in the fourth pennsylvania cavalry do american people hate the southern generals from the civil war some yeah i am not one of those people and a lot of people look up to the southern generals so um but yeah um i'm just catching up here fourth grade grandfather served in the kentucky 14th cavalry yeah you know nate carlo the vast majority of people in those kentucky units which is most of my ancestors as well died on like scouting raids and things like that because they didn't fight in major battles for the most part most of them so can we do the same with ancestors that fought in the american revolution oh gosh there's a fantastic resource for revolutionary war ancestors fold 3 has a ton of military records on it and when i say a ton i really do mean a ton um so let me just tell you one for example i have an ancestor uh who i know served in the revolution and who had a pension in the revolution all the revolutionary war pension files are on fold three so this is really cool i'm going to look at peter stillwagen and his wife elizabeth and i just found his complete revolutionary war pension file look across the bottom at all of these pages of documents from the national archives that are available for me to research and these are all original document these are images of original documents uh so here so this is just a letter from fayette county pennsylvania be it known that on the fifth day of january a.d 1855 before me the undersigned register for the probate of wills in and for the said county um and what he's saying here uh is to point out the fact that uh this lady died and this is uh talking about the estate of elizabeth stillwagen who was the pensioner on behalf of her husband's military service but you can see here this tells me that peter stillwag and my ancestor that he served in the revolution for five years he enlisted around the time of the declaration of independence near philadelphia pennsylvania he served five years he marched to new jersey where he served as a sergeant under captain stephen fleming colonel holmes and general foreman at colt's neck monmouth and eaton town so now i know my ancestor was in the battle of monmouth from this near which the last name place he was taken prisoner and confined in the old sugar house new york city which by the way there's a monument to in one of the walls of the old sugar house prison is still there in downtown new york in downtown manhattan for a year and 11 months he died in december 1831 his widow elizabeth was allowed pension on an application from 1846 at which time she was a resident of connellsville fayette county and 95 years of age now you may remember that it said she died in 1855 which means she lived another nine years after this she was married to him in 1773 and died in 1855 from a mutilated cutting from the family bible it would appear that peter stillwagon and his wife were married the tenth day of march in the year of our lord 1775. so that is all available online which is really cool but that stuff you find once you know like once you find out who your ancestors are now you start digging into stuff about them you know if i know i've got an ancestor who was born in the 1890s i'm looking to see if they fought in world war one now if if you're an american and they were american it's it's much less likely i would say one in 10 men of military age born in the 1890s probably served overseas in world war one in the u.s but if your ancestors in the uk or france or germany you can almost 100 guarantee if they were born in the 1890s they probably served in the military now i want to go back to ancestry for a minute because let's talk about uk records for just a second now um there's a ton here i want to show you an example of some of the records that are available for people in the uk let me find one of them here we go so here's joseph gordon who's somebody i've been doing research on he's a relative of mine he's a third cousin but i've been doing research on him because he was killed july 1st 1917 in france uh so world war one now i can find information about him here's some england census records here's a world war one pension ledger uh for joseph corden and now i can see right here from this he was in the nottingham and derby derbyshire regiment he was from the west midlands he died first july 1917 he was a private i can see his mother is listed as the person who received the pension on his behalf uh here's a listing for his uh for him in the commonwealth war graves information so right here he is private joseph corden here's his uh service number he was in the 1-5 battalion of the sherwood foresters and again he died first july 1917. so those are the informations you can get into and you can actually dig further and actually find his military records those are all available on ancestry let me see if i can find any of that real quick but there's a couple of other sites i want to show you here in just a minute soldiers who died in the great war is another resource that's available on here and one of the reasons i like ancestry is based on the information you have in your tree it will find other ma other records that it suggests to you that might be the same guy it doesn't 100 guarantee it but it's very likely so for example here 1901 census now we know from that other record his mother's name was hannah so this is probably him right this is a uk census this is uh darby county uh the civil parish of darby and the town of derby i think i'm pronouncing that right i'm pretty sure in the uk they pronounce d-e-r-b-y as darby um so they're split on two pages actually this is the children the parents are on the other page born in burton on trent and so you can see they probably moved right here joseph he was seven at his last birthday born in burton on trent but then right after that the other children were born in darby so they probably moved at that point blake that's okay the whole thing is going to be available online later on the channel so you'll be able to see it all afterward i want to show you one other thing about civil war records that are really cool on fold three so i'm going to go ahead and look for one of my relatives that i know was in a unit because his is a pretty fascinating story if i can find it if i can spell his name right okay i think this is the guy i want so henderson gearhart is an uncle of mine who was in the civil war and i actually don't want this record i want these are the civil war service records english records um really easy back to 1830 because that's when the government started keeping records before that it's going to depend on the church most of the records before 1838 are going to be church parish records which are pretty good for the most part and i'll show you a couple of those uh here in a minute but i want to show you henderson gearhart's military service records because the the civil war service records are really cool um i'm just going to go i'm going to go back and and browse this from the top because it's a little easier for me to do it that way since i already know what i'm looking for civil war service records are broken down by state some states have more information than others like pennsylvania and ohio they only have the index they don't have the full records kentucky's got all the records for both sides confederate and union so i'm going to go to the union side and i want i know that this guy served in the 39th kentucky infantry uh mounted infantry and his last name's g so i'm going to go there and i'm going to look for him and here he is henderson and this says gay heart because that was actually how they pronounced it down in kentucky was gay heart even though it's gearheart now this is going to tell me a lot about henderson it's going to tell me he was in a private and company f 39th kentucky infantry he was 18 years old when he enlisted he uh mustered in at peach orchard kentucky february 16 1863 is when this roll was dated he actually mustered in december 18th of 62 for a period of three years german records go back pretty far and again it's really mostly church records that's going to be the case for a lot of europe here uh every two months there was a recorded company muster roll so you have one for january and february you have one for uh march and april one for june and july or may and june etc so this is the muster roll for company g 39th kentucky uh from the enlistment to february 28th he's listed as the eighth corporal for the company um pretty you know pretty standard here corporal company f not a lot interesting until you get right here now it says this is the role from may and june of 63. he's listed as absent for that role and the reason he's absent he was captured by the regional or the rebels june 27 1863 in brethren county kentucky so now i know he's been captured okay what happened to him well i hate to say it but you don't want to really know what happened to people captured in kentucky by the rebels in the summer and fall of 1863 and we're going to find out in just a minute what happened to him because it keeps on saying the same thing every role is going to say the same thing captured in brethren county kentucky captured in brethren county kentucky so what's the end result we don't know what the end result is we're going to go to the end and hope that maybe at the end of the war it gives us some other information about what happened to him because all the muster record the roles are saying the same thing for every two month period it says this all right and here we go henderson h gearhart company or corporal company f uh here's the muster out role they're going to kind of give the final disposition remarks died at andersonville georgia date not known so now i know i don't know when and he's obviously in an unmarked grave or not an unmarked grave he's in an unknown grave so when i go to andersonville next month i'm going to see all those unknown graves and i'm going to know that in one of those is my great great great grandfather's brother anderson or brother henderson uh who was just 19 years old when he died in that awful awful place andersonville and here's this is why for me family history is so amazing because now i've got a personal connection to something i read about in the history books and you know i read about andersonville being this awful place that was kind of like a nazi concentration camp but now it's personal now it affected my family my grandpa's great grandfather had a brother who died there and i actually will later find out that on my dad's side i had another uncle who died in andersonville i had two uncles who died in andersonville so that just makes it much more personal and when i go there next month it's not just going to be a bunch of people who are unknown to me it's going to be this is part of my family's story you know when i talk about the battle of monmouth my fifth great grandfather peter peter stillwagen fought at the battle of monmouth and i can look and i can see exactly where he was that day you know i know that my um ancestor samuel hughes was in the 20th ohio and when i go and i look and i see that the 20th ohio was at the battle of shiloh and i'm thinking wow that's cool i wonder what he did at the battle of shiloh i wonder where he fought and then i find out oh he was in lou wallace's division lou wallace's division is the one that got lost when they were supposed to be reinforcing and they marched around half the day and and grant was really mad at lew wallace because he didn't show up on the battlefield to help them defend pittsburgh landing my fifth great grandfather was one of the men marching with lou wallace all over the place and then led off the attack on the following day when they started the counter-attack on the second day of the battle of shiloh it was lou wallace's division later on 20th ohio was part of john logan's division at vicksburg they were the very first union division to march into the town of vicksburg after it surrendered my family was a part of that my ancestor was in that division that marched into vicksburg on july 4th 1863. so that gives me a personal connection to this that's why i love it so much and every one of us has that kind of history now some lines are harder than others to research i'll show you one of my family lines that's really tricky and you'll understand why when i show it to you so let me show you my great great grandmother her name was mary howard and she she lived here and our lives almost overlapped she died in 1965 so about 12 years before i was born so this is mary howard she's my great great grandmother and this is her husband my great great grandfather now you may notice that she looks like she's got a pretty dark complexion now there's a reason for that and you're going to find that in the census records let's take a look for a second at the 1910 census in carter county kentucky so nada is my great grandmother okay nada had just been born she's not even two years old in this census record robert and mary are my great-great-grandparents the ones i just showed you that picture of now take a look right here at race robert is white mary and their two children hiram and neda are mu yeah some kind of appalachian ancestors is absolutely right they were 100 percent mu is mulatto okay so they're mixed race my great-grandmother's listed as mixed race in the census her parents are listed as mixed race in the census so now that's got me intrigued right her mother mary who i know her maiden name was howard and that's the one i just showed you the picture of um she's born in kentucky she's born around 18 1878 or so because she's 20 well 1888 i should say she's 22 in the 1910 census um i actually know from her obituary she was born october 18 1885 in mcgoffin county kentucky so uh and now i'm going to show you what i was able to find after a ton of research on her mother my great great great grandmother peggy okay there's peggy caudle my great-great-great-grandmother now you can see how she's listed b she's black uh now if you are 30 years old in 1880 and you're black and you're living in kentucky there's a really good chance that you were not a free person before 1865. um so now i'm thinking okay my great great great grandmother was probably born into slavery now i can't assume that because there were free black people living in kentucky at that time but peggy cottle she's a domestic servant now interestingly she's actually uh living around all of these howard family members and through a lot of research i've done i found out that peggy caudle uh that the father of my great-great-grandmother mary howard was a married man named golson howard who was married to another woman and actually had a sexual relationship with peggy cottle this black woman he couldn't marry her and he couldn't have inter interracial marriage at that time uh but he did have a child with her and that's who my great-great-grandmother is yeah caudle uh and caudle is the name of the owner and you'll see that going back another generation cheney caudle is one of my absolute favorite ancestors and i know so very little about her because cheney was i know for sure from doing research was born into slavery in 1835 this is my fourth great grandmother as you can see right here and i know so very little about her but i can look here um at cheney now this one's pretty hard to read because this census taker did not really think too much about the people that we're going to be reading these years later um but there's cheney there's peggy her daughter there's her daughter mary and then this is another child here genoa cuddle and i come to find out through doing a lot of research that chaney had something like eight kids and she wasn't married to the father of most of them we are 99 sure that the father of cheney's children was her owner we we can't confirm that for sure but his last name was coddle and she actually took the name of her owner so i'm i'm fairly certain that um my fourth great grandfather is the owner of chaining caudle and uh dna records have have kind of backed that up through ancestry dna now how do i know for sure that these are the right and how did i know in the first place to be looking for black ancestors well first of all seeing my great grandmother listed as mulatto was a dead ringer a dead giveaway for that but i want to show you something else let me show you my dna here's what it shows my dna estimate 51 england and northwestern europe 31 scotland 12 ireland 2 wales 2 cameroon congo and western bantu peoples 1 percent nigeria percent ivory coast in ghana so uh just based on the dna that i've inherited about four percent of that comes from sub-saharan africa so obviously i got that from somewhere and in this case i know about where that came from i can also see that most of my family tree ohio and then this area here three of my four grandparents their roots are in eastern kentucky so that fits perfectly with my dna now going back a little further you can actually get really specific check this out i'm going to go now to my grandmother the one that we were just doing research on connie it could tell me not only does she have roots in england but specifically the west midlands of england which we know because we know that doing research that her family came from tipton which is right down here in dudley this is about where tipton is right here west brom that's why i root for west brom you always see me wearing the albion shirts because that's where they are from right there i have not studied the empire empire of congo so i should yeah um that is where they they took most slaves from it was from right along this coast right in here that's where most slavery uh slavery uh happened yeah it does include calais and the english ancestry and you'll notice too it not only includes calais on the english ancestry but a lot of times depending on what source you look at it will also include scandinavia because you have to remember that if you have roots in the uk especially in this part of the uk there's a good chance that your route to go back to scandinavia because so much of that was infiltrated by them yes they can compare your jeans and specifically i can i can actually see matches which is really cool too um and looking at my aunt this is my aunt on my paternal side and so she's a generation closer uh to these people and you can see hers actually shows chad and molly as well and she's got just a little bit more of that sub-saharan african dna and then actually i can i can actually look into my records and i can see second and third cousins who are 100 african-american they look black and because they're descended from cheney caudle but through her relationships with black men rather than her relationship with her owner where she had a mulatto child and so i have cousins who are second third cousins close relatives who you would look at me and you would look at them and you'd think they are not related but they are i'm as bad i'm about as white as you can get and they're black as you can get and we're of the same family so again and i know this can be a sensitive topic and i want to be respectful of this i'm not trying to say that i know the experience of what it means to be black in america because i obviously do not but now when i learn about slavery it's got a personal connection my great great great grandmother was born into slavery now i look in the mirror and i don't look like somebody who would have an ancestor who was born into slavery but i do and now when i read about the emancipation proclamation when i read about the 13th amendment that has a personal connection to me because that affected my family's lives and i also know from doing research that even after they married that 1910 census you saw where we saw my great-grandmother as a two-year-old living in eastern kentucky you know eastern kentucky was not the best place in the world for a mixed marriage to take place a white man and a mulatto woman so mary and her family actually had to leave eastern kentucky they went to trying to remember exactly where it is let me find the census they went to an area near chillicothe ohio in ross county ohio because there was a big migration of people of mixed race and even black people from eastern kentucky into southern ohio which where they were much more accepted and and did not face the discrimination that they did in eastern kentucky and so that's where my family goes initially and then eventually they come to northeast ohio um so that's uh cola chill um you know that's something you have to decide for yourself um about the dna thing i personally didn't have any qualms about it um but you know if you're not comfortable with that that's something you have to decide for yourself but i have found so much information i've actually broken some brick walls i never i actually never would have found cheney caudle without dna i never would have found anything on my dad's side of the family i never would have known who my biological father was except for ancestry dna um but cheney coddled what put me on to her was i couldn't find the records and then i started finding that i had a bunch like i'm talking dozens of dna matches to other living people who were all descendants of this woman cheney coddle and i thought okay i it can't be a coincidence that i have two dozen ancestors or two dozen cousins who all descended from the same lady she's got to be an ancestor of mine too and so i actually worked my way down from her and made the connection to my great great grandmother that way thor i appreciate that thank you i would love to visit africa where my ancestors lived and i wish that i knew a little further back on cheney's line unfortunately i don't i can't get back past cheney um and i'll show you why uh in fact i want to go ahead and show you um let's stick on this topic of slavery for just a second because i'm thinking you know okay i know that cheney was in mcgoffin county kentucky there were something that they did called the slave census because they had to count the slaves right for the whole fifth compromise slave owning states slaves counted for three fifths of a person as far as apportionment to go things like that which is just obscene to me that that's something they did but it was something they did so i want to go to the slave census and see if i can find cheney in the 1860 slave census uh and it's tricky to do that but it is possible so i'm going to try to narrow this down north america narrow it down specifically to 1860. and and some of the stuff i'm doing right now just comes from having done this for a long time i can make my way around this really easily okay there's one slave owner in mcgoffin county kentucky in 1860 with the last name caudle and you can see here again spelling means nothing abigail caudle and she owns several slaves and you notice they don't have names for those slaves but what they do have are genders and ages so there's a 28 year old female owned by abigail caudle she's black she's born around 1832. that's my chaney so this is all i know of cheney in the 18 16 1860 census is she's a black female owned by abigail cottle that's her story that's what i know of it unfortunately um and you can see they have one slave house it says and so you can almost guarantee that the 10 year old male the ten the eight-year-old male the six-year-old female the four-year-old male and the one-year-old male are her kids you notice there's no husband where do you think they came from and you can see the one-year-old m that means mulatto that means mixed race that means cheney has had a relationship probably not consensual with a white man and had a child probably all of these children in this case the process if the records are good the vault guy the records are pretty good i mean i you know i did i was working on my family tree for 20 years before dna was really an option um so the records are pretty good dna more than anything helps confirm a lot of the information you already have found but occasionally ancestry dna tests usually they run sales they're about 59 when they go on sale it's not too bad hey take care everybody uh the folks that just stepped out um ancestry asian records i've never really dealt with too much i don't think they have a ton of asian records uh what is your general approach to present these after doing the research for someone um yeah so uh good great question cryptic panda um when it comes to certain things that are sensitive if i'm doing a limited amount of research for somebody so say um when i work on somebody's family tree um and i am only working i'm doing 10 hours of research okay um and so i have a limited amount of time that i'm working on that let's i don't know let's look at a family tree this is one i worked on and did some research for somebody um basically what i'll do is i'll i'll give them uh you get a link uh to all of this and so they can log in and see all the same information that i'm showing you they can look at all of this i'll usually make a video for them just kind of highlighting some of what i found and showing them some of the really interesting things i'll put the records in there for sensitive things because the records are the records i won't go out of my way with certain stuff i did research for somebody recently and i found out through the process of doing research on their family tree that their great grandfather was in prison for rape i didn't tell them i didn't even add the record i was torn about that but in this case if they didn't already know that their great grandfather had been in prison for rape i wasn't going to go out of my way to tell them about it if they wanted to keep digging and they found it on their own fine but i felt like you know even though the records were public i felt like it just wasn't my place to tell them that uh it was it was difficult for me to do that i've run into that in other situations i've got a situation right now where i've got a relative that i've done dna research for and i know that their their father's father is not their biological father because of the dna i haven't told them um i'm really torn on that and that's something i've gone back and forth with a long time danish records uh are gonna mostly be church records if you go back that's mostly the case in europe if you go back pretty far um there's so many you know it varies so much from one country to the next history explained thank you 23 and me versus ancestry great question if you are mostly interested in things i'll show you 23 and me because i have that too i actually just recently did 23 and me if you are more interested in the medical side of things like wanting to know if you are predisposed to certain illnesses and things like that or and you want to know the breakdown like what percentage of your family tree came from scotland and came from france if that's mostly what you're interested in i would recommend 23andme as the way to go if you want to be able to connect with other people and use dna as a tool for researching your family tree better i would say ancestry is better for that so here's my 23 and me and you'll see my report and you'll see that it's slightly different than what ancestry says because their algorithms are different their database is different you can see the sub-saharan africans about the same four and a half percent uh and it's again it says nigeria 1.6 percent uh ghana liberia sierra leone broadly west african point one congo southeast african uh etc you can see here this one's got 2.3 percent french and german now yeah you have to understand something too about all of this and you can see actually specific again high probability i've got matches from london high probability of birmingham and i know that the two of my or both of my mom's parents had great grandfathers that were born in the birmingham area one lived in birmingham city the other one lived in tipton so you know right there is a lot of my roots up here around manchester uh leeds so now we're talking a little bit more in the north of england i've got some roots but um you have to remember this does not define who your ancestors were this tells you what and what dna you inherited my sister could do ancestry dna and her matches her percentages are going to be a little different um because you you and siblings both inherit different pieces of dna from your parents you get 50 from each parent but you might not get the same 50 from each parent uh so my sister could just as easily show up with a higher percentage of um british than i have or a lower percentage of irish than i have um so this is a guide that helps you and look all you can see glasgow same thing and i know i've got roots in glasgow um it's a guide but don't let this define you like if you do this and you don't have any native american ancestry don't be like oh man my parents lied to me when they said that i had a cherokee ancestor it doesn't mean you don't it just means that you personally did not inherit any of the cherokee dna it doesn't mean it's not there why does 23 and me light up the entire europe russia uh i don't know and let me show you another great example of that my wife's grandfather both of his parents were born in hungary but so in theory my wife should be 25 hungarian right one of her four grandparents was 100 uh hungarian but when i show you her dna you're gonna see it doesn't come out quite like that she doesn't show up as 25 hungarian look at how she shows up she's got 12 percent eastern europe and russia which of course includes parts of hungary but could also be poland ukraine slovakia russia any of those places six percent ireland uh four percent the balkans and again kind of overlaps hungary a little bit i know specifically that her great-grandparents um one of them was from the area west of budapest the other one was from right up here near the border with slovakia so chances are if you go back enough generations they probably were different ethnicities uh and then she's got three percent sweden uh so she doesn't show up just straight 25 hungarian because you got to remember just because they came from hungary doesn't mean if you go back four more generations that they were hungarian that's just kind of the way it goes yes uh i have read that article about cheney caudal collins um very cool that's one of my cousins who wrote that uh yes hungarians are are not slavs you're correct portugal's records are decent but a lot of them are in portuguese dna tests it depends on how busy they are at any given time my 23andme test from the time i mailed it it was like three weeks until i got the records i've seen ancestry take as long as seven or eight weeks sometimes less uh soviet and russian empire records i've only done a little bit uh interesting things so for example i've done some research for people in poland you go back a hundred years uh and what you're dealing with are not polish records you're dealing with either prussian records or russian records and you'll see the information listed as either prussian poland or german poland or as russian poland depending on what part of poland they lived in for my wife when i'm researching records from hungary in 1900 you'll see a lot of the times let me show you a perfect example of this and this is why it's good to know history you know so if i know and my wife's family tree let me go to my wife's great grandfather right here so here's my wife's great grandfather so i know he was born in saaho saint peter in hungary okay but if i look at the 1910 census it says he was born in hungary but if i look at the 1920 census now it says that he was born in hungary but he speaks slovak so now i'm really confused but if i go back to i think it's the 1900 census or some of the other records some of the other records are going to tell me he was born in austria now obviously he wasn't born in austria but he was born in austria-hungary and in some of the records they list it as austria even though he was hungarian excuse me my monster went down the wrong pipe i use a translator great question um there's some records that are in the foreign language and when you see the records often enough you start to figure out what certain words mean like i know if i'm looking at a german record gabornin means born uh ruiz on a tombstone means uh rests or hear lies uh things like that you start to pick up words so i i have a passable knowledge of what genealogical words are in different languages enough to where i can tell what i'm looking at and and when i can't a lot of times i'll use the translator on my phone and i'll actually hold it right up to the screen and it'll translate it for me on the screen because there's a lot of records in hungarian i can do that way what kind of monster uh it's the zero sugar ones uh it's energy ultra monster energy ultimate or ultra sunrise it's the zero calorie ones i get a 12 pack of them and i usually drink one a day favorite is the apple i love the the apple monster flavor do you create your own roots or are they created i'm not sure what you mean by that uh and actually yeah so that one record said slovak but i know that that was actually whoever wrote that down was wrong because they did speak hungarian my mother-in-law remembers hearing her grandmother speak hungarian as a child and dutch records i've had some trouble evan with dutch records i think it may just be that a lot of them aren't online yet so you know when i started doing my family tree i actually had to go to libraries like right now where i'm pulling up these census records and just looking at the digital images i had to drive up to case western reserve university in cleveland pull out microfilm and scroll through it by hand to find these records with now i can just pull up online so here you can see this is the same family that said they spoke slovak in the 1920 census and here it says maggie r which is hungarian and this tells me he came in 1905 his wife came in 1928 this is actually his second wife he went back to hungary to find another wife after his first one died he's a coal miner which is pretty common for hungarians who settled in central pennsylvania to be coal miners here's my wife's grandfather you guys have heard me talk about him he's the one that was a ball turret gunner on a b-17 that's john here i knew him well one of the greatest men i've ever known um and so he was the first of his family to be born in uh america if you want if wanted to have me research your family history what type of info would you need uh the dna stuff's not really necessary because the amount of digging i would be getting into in 10 hours of research wouldn't get me to the place where i would need dna i'd be able to find plenty without that um denmark's records as i mentioned earlier uh hit or miss it depends uh if you were born in america and you're a european would your answer your descendants be american or european they would be americans of european descent i mean that's really how it is oh i absolutely have cousins in europe and let me show you how i know that i've actually connected with some of them um one of the cool things about ancestrydna is looking at your dna matches i can look at a map these are all the people that i share dna with on the map so check this out i got two that matched in australia i've got three that matched in the uk uh you can see that one of them is in manchester nina she lives in wigan in lancashire i've got one living down here in reading and berkshire and then i've got one living in london and these are all relatives of mine nice drum thank you appreciate that answer actually showed you had ancestors fought on both sides in world war one that's that's pretty crazy jamaican records i i've never really gotten into caribbean records um norwegian records are pretty good i have dope uh i've done some in into that my welsh roots are not as deep as my wife's let me show you something cool and there's a lot of things i'm trying to to answer here real quick um let me show you something really cool about me and my wife and our ancestry okay my wife's maiden name is watkins which is welsh okay watkins is a very welsh name her great great grandfather's name was watkin watkins irish records are tricky because there was a fire that destroyed a lot of the irish records um being related to famous people it's really just a matter of getting back far enough um so here's what's cool about this the watkins family okay uh so they're they they go back to a place um where they actually lived uh for a time let me show you on the map because this is one of the coolest things i've ever found in my research uh her watkins family my wife's family came from this place called blina in wales right here okay so there you have that now wales is a very mountainous kind of hilly region you see this kind of big mountain right here right okay now let me show you my family tree for a second and i want to show you one of my ancestors his name was james croft and james was born in ebivale in wales which is right there so my wife's ancestors and my ancestors grew up in towns separated by a hill that's one of those really cool things when you discover you're like holy cow that cannot even be real that here we are we meet in the year 1998 99 1999 in ohio and 150 years ago our ancestors came from two towns separated by a hill less than a mile away from each other it gets crazier than that because my i come to find out x-ray thank you your ancestor was a panzer commander in world war ii under rommel that is very very cool that i hope you've done some digging into that um my grandmother the the tree we looked at the whitaker family tree right my grandmother um her family comes from tipton right uh but another branch of that family comes from west bromwich right here okay so i know that they actually went to a church called the church of all saints in west bromwich so that's this church right here i started digging on my grandpa's family tree okay my grandparents met in the 1950s here in ohio i come to find out that my grandfather had a great grandmother that was baptized in this church so my grandparents meet in ohio in the 1950s in the 1840s their great-grandparents were baptized in the same church in england that's just one of those cool little things that you find out and you find how we're all interconnected like that so i just always found that kind of stuff was fascinating i want to show you one last one and then i'll get to some more of your questions uh this was probably the most ridiculous thing i ever found in my family tree okay so as i mentioned both of my parents my mother and father have roots in eastern kentucky that's not unusual here where i live because in niles ohio where most of my where three of my four grandparents grew up there was a brick yard called niles fire brick and in the 1930s hundreds of workers from all of hill kentucky this little town in kentucky came to niles ohio to work in the brickyard and so both my mother and father had ancestors who came to northeast ohio to work in that brickyard so it's not unusual that both sides of my family tree come from the same part of kentucky kentucky was by and large settled by scotch irish in english ancestors who came from virginia and north carolina now this is where it gets crazy because in my family tree after doing lots and lots of research i discovered this guy my sixth great grandfather his name was william thomas riddle william thomas riddle was a loyalist captain of loyalist militia so he was born in virginia lived in north carolina but fought for the british during the american revolutionary war as many people did fully a third of colonists were loyalists during the american revolution he gets captured in may of 1781 by a group of patriot militia these are fellow north carolinians who are fighting for the patriot cause so these this is a civil war these are people from the same town fighting on opposite sides in the revolutionary war people have known each other all their lives my sixth great grandfather was captured and hanged at wilkesboro north carolina at a place called the mulberry fields meeting house he was hanged from this tree right here which no longer stands i've actually been there i have a piece of the tree the tree was blown down in a storm a number of years ago they've cut it up and they sell it for souvenirs and so i bought a piece of the tree this is my mother's fifth great grandfather a couple years ago i was doing research on my father's side of the tree of the family tree and i stumbled upon this guy benjamin greer benjamin greer is my seventh great grandfather on my father's side of the family benjamin greer was in the patriot militia in north carolina benjamin greer was in command of the company that captured william thomas riddle my father's sixth great grandfather captured my mother's fifth great grandfather which led to his hanging that is the craziness that is our family trees yeah so nate there's a good chance that our our ancestors knew each other um do i know any of the real family move west they absolutely did so um yeah a lot of those riddles might have gone back to william thomas riddle so yeah uh and here's what's cool about benjamin greer his wife who's my ancestor somebody asked about um famous relatives so his wife nancy wilcoxon her mother's name was sarah boone sarah was the sister of daniel boone so daniel boone's my uncle now i'll show you one more famous uh and a couple more of my famous interest and if you research long enough and dig long enough you can find some of this stuff which is really really fun to do um let me see if i can find one for you because i've got three different lines back to this same person here we go i think this is one of the lines here no might be here take me a little bit of digging to remember where this is baker here we go all right so elijah baker is one of my ancestors from wilkes county north carolina his father's name was reverend andrew baker and he was a chaplain during the revolutionary war his mother's name was mary bowling mary was the daughter of a guy named john bowling and you can see there's a picture of him and there's a reason for that john bowling is a pretty famous guy and here he is right here major john bowling john fairfax bowling specifically so now we're getting into people that are actually known in history so this guy here is my eighth great grandfather uh and the reason that this matters is that if you go back a little further in john bowling's family tree maybe let's see here oh it's over here that's why you find out that his grandmother was a girl named john jane rolfe jane rolf's father is a guy named thomas rolfe and thomas rolf's mother was a girl named pocahontas so pocahontas is my ancestor on multiple lines in fact i'd descend from pocahontas through three of my four grandparents uh so both my mother and father are descended from pocahontas which is pretty cool because my kids can say that they're descended from a disney princess which is pretty awesome so that's one of my famous ancestors i've got a few others as well i'll show you one more and when it gets really fun is when you can start diving into things like nobility cryptic panda thank you so much i appreciate that um hey uh mate ambrose thank you for uh for joining us uh let me show you here jemima friend who's one of my ancestors she's got a really fascinating story as well let me see if i can find here we go thomas blossom is my 11th great grandfather the um and the reason i'm sharing these stories is not to brag about my family i'm showing you that this is how you can find this is the stuff you can find when you do this research and your personal connections i found out that thomas blossom was educated at cambridge he was a deacon in the pilgrim church in laden holland leiden laden insane or somebody else from holland am i pronouncing that correctly is it lyden laden i'm not sure um that's where the pilgrims went the separatists before they came to america on the mayflower there were actually two ships there was the mayflower and the speedwell well the speed well kept springing a leak and had to turn back and they loaded as many of the passengers from the speed well onto the mayflower which is why the mayflower was overcrowded the people who couldn't fit on the mayflower went back and thomas blossom was one of the people who went back on the speedwell he came over years later and he is my 11th grandfather now thomas blossom is my connection to a number of famous people thomas blossom is the ninth great-grandfather of president george herbert walker bush he's also an ancestor of barack obama and he's also the fifth great grandfather of wild bill hickok which means that all three of those people are my cousins through thomas blossom the ei is not a natural vocal thingy yeah that's probably why i have a hard time with it yeah sorry i uh ambrose i had a hard time with that nate carlos you're the center for patton very cool so we're cousins distantly uh so anyway let me go back for a minute so that you know so now i'm researching all about the pilgrims because thomas blossom knew all those people there's actually a letter still in existence today that thomas blossom wrote to governor bradford in plymouth colony now i want to show you one more on this line that's really really cool and i'm trying to remember where that line goes through here we go so it's right here mary need is her name now through her family tree you get to this guy here thomas melford gentleman that's how he's listed he's from nottinghamshire in england 1524. why he matters is because of who his mother was ann clifford of skipton in yorkshire now if you're from the uk especially that part of uk you're going to understand why you get excited when you see the name clifford from skipton because now you go back a little further in this line and you're getting to some really interesting people because the cliffords there's sir john the butcher some of you have heard me talk about my 16th great grandfather who killed richard iii's brother at the battle of wakefield and then died at the precursor to the battle of talton at a place called fairy bridge uh baron clifford now his i think grandfather okay so his father now this is what's really cool now i'm connected to all kinds of fun because john the butcher clifford dies during the wars of the roses at the battle of town the bloodiest battle in the history of britain his father thomas clifford died at the first battle of saint albans during the wars of the roses now thomas clifford's father now let me go back for a second because i want to show the whole tree here clifford the big red dog now thomas clifford's father died at the siege of mo which is um i think that's how it's pronounced uh fighting under henry v uh during the 100 years war you go back a little further and you're going to find that on that same line i've got an ancestor sir robert clifford who was killed of the battle of bannockburn fighting against robert the bruce in 1314. uh that same line then baron clifford his grandfather is henry hotspur percy who died at shrewsbury in shropshire fighting a rebellion against henry iv and he is the namesake of tottenham hotspur the english football club so um that just shows you you know a whole world that can open up to you and of course then through the cliffords then i'm also descended from people like henry iii the king of england uh which means i'm descended from king john of england on this line over here you've got edward iii the king of england that i descend from which means i descend from philip the fourth of france the kings of castile i mean there's all kinds of crazy stuff that you get into when you get back that far on that stuff yeah so part of me thinks i probably should have root i should be a spurs fan because i mean legit i've got an ancestor that's got a major english soccer club named after him how am i not rooting for those people i chose west brom because i thought it would be cooler to root for somebody small who came from a town that my family came from so that's kind of why i decided to go with that do i have a claim on the throne not a chance i'll show you my my closest royal link and it's right here this is the closest ancestor of mine who was royal my 15th great-grandfather king james iv of scotland who died at the battle of flodden field fighting against the troops under his command of his brother-in-law's wife um catherine catherine of aragon on behalf of his brother-in-law henry viii but i descend from james iv through one of his many mistresses a woman named marion boyd through his daughter catherine who married a guy named james douglas uh and zach thank you sir appreciate that james douglas actually at one time was the um heir to the throne of scotland so i did have that kind of going for me there and you can see his father i think also died at the battle flodden field uh so those are the douglasses of scotland which you know it's pretty big deal when you understand scottish history that's your a level history exam this week very cool um they say that james iv my ancestors buried in london and they think he they even know what what building he's buried under it's some commercial building now but uh zach you've set the standard now insane's like oh man what do i do yeah i'm like 20 millionth in line that's probably about right like a third of us are probably descended from royalty at least i'll show you one more really cool ancestor this one's on my wife's side he's a legit catholic saint so this is my wife's ancestor thomas moore she descends through his son john so that's part of her family tree thomas moore was beheaded at the tower of london uh on orders of henry viii because he wouldn't sign um an act acknowledging henry as head of the church of england how much does it cost i think you can get an ancestry membership for like 20 bucks a month that's the easiest and cheapest way to get started if you want to do it yourself yeah richard iii was found under a parking lot um how far back can you chase trace your ancestry well you know once you get back to a certain point everything is pretty speculative but i do like to brag about this particular line um that i claim is legit lauren thank you so i'm a prince no unfortunately no um i do have a line a couple of lines back to this guy here if i spell it right you know gotta start with that so there's my 38th great grandfather charlemagne uh and i would say i wouldn't be surprised if half of uh people of european descent can trace at least one line back to charlemagne uh zandivo i charge 200 for 10 hours of research but i've got about 30 people that have reached out to me and at least asked about it so i've got a bit of a waiting list right now because i've already started doing research for a couple of people and i'm going to try to get to more so right now i'm not taking anybody else unfortunately is there an affiliate link for ancestry no unfortunately i'm not aware of ancestry doing anything like that but if you do want to support me um there are other ways to do that there's links in the description to go back to that genghis khan i don't think i have but here's another cool ancestor that i have um and i don't know if he's even gonna show up in here but i do have a couple of if you can trace yourself back to spanish nobility there's a good chance you can trace your ancestry back to the prophet muhammad so that's pretty cool to be able to say that charlemagne's your 41st great grandmother i hope you meant grandfather unless charlemagne is identifying as a woman and i wasn't aware of that how much research can i do in 10 hours all right let me show you a family tree i did here you go this was 10 hours of research on a family tree that i did and this was difficult i can usually find more than this because almost all of this was in europe and specifically in poland this is almost all polish roots right here and you can see all the people that i found in this family tree in 10 hours and a lot of these it's not just finding names it's also finding information about them like i found on this line i was able to find some information like i found out that his third great grandmother had a son who was killed on the next to last day of world war one i actually mentioned him in a video harry bowers killed on november 10th 1918. uh so there's a lot of stuff like that that i was able to find maltese family interesting insane thank you sir asserting dominance regular programming hazards are resumed thank you so much insane i gotta tell you i'm i'm feeling a little intimidated about the possibility of meeting you you know i know we've talked about when i come to europe to do videos for the channel that i wanted to meet you and hang out with you and do some videos together but now that i know that you're like 6'5 i don't know how i feel about it because you're like a half a foot taller than me and that's just not okay you know what i mean um asian roots are much more difficult yes i'm gonna have to wrap this up my wife's been away for the last four days and i think she's home so i'm going to wrap this up so i can go see her but we're going to do this again i'm going to do more of these types of things and show you tips and tricks and help you with research we might even have you guys throw out some information on your family tree and maybe i'll do like maybe as a giveaway in fact that's a fantastic idea i'll do a giveaway and we'll set that up and maybe announce that soon uh and what i'll do is i'll actually research if you're okay with it i'll research your family tree on a live stream and we'll dig into it and it might be kind of fun to do that and it's a great way to show you in real time what it looks like to research a family tree and and dig in and hopefully give you some more tidbits on that uh yes african ancestry is going to be very difficult history explained appreciate that kings and generals is coming i'm going to do more kings and general stuff their stuff is fantastic i love it's one of my favorite channels on youtube so thank you guys make sure you subscribe if you're new um yeah if you have a pedigree back to the 14th century probably not more a lot more i can help for you i do have ancestors from sweden but i will see you next time guys thank you so much

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 131,466

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Id: A7pB1BgEUS0

Length: 105min 48sec (6348 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021