Ancestry.com

I'm probably pretty typical, in that my parents never told family stories, but still had boxes of old photos of departed relatives I'd never heard of or met.

My dad's dad was clearly French Canadian, due to his surname and location, and his mom was of German descent. But that's all I can deduce.

My mom was generally 'English,' though photos of her family look awfully 'Irish' to me! I'd really would like to know more.

 

My husband and I have been doing genealogical research for a number of years and use Ancestry and a couple of other Swedish websites a lot. Swedish church records are very comprehensive and go way back to the fifteen hundreds and most of them are available in digital form. They include births, marriages and deaths but also records of annual visitations by the parish priest. If someone moved to a different location it was noted in the visitation record and a separate record for the parishes they moved from and to. Of course you have to have a knowledge of Swedish and be able to read what the parish priest has written. Some of them would have made good doctors because their handwriting is terrible. I think Scandinavia has the most comprehensive records in the world.

One of the problems we've come across with Ancestry when following tips about possible connections are what we here call "name adders" that is people who add "ancestors" to their family tree without verifying the accuracy of the entry. We're always skeptical of family trees that go back to the eight hundreds with tens of thousands of ancestors including many kings and queens of European countries.

Bearing in mind the number of people who emigrated from Sweden to the USA, if anyone has Swedish ancestors and would like to find out about their roots we'd be glad to try and help.

 

We’ve both had our ancestry done however I don’t really get into tracing ancestors any further back a than GG grandparents for one Ancestry is to expensive around the $30 a week mark and I’m not interested enough
to trace my ancestry any further than I have ,I have names way back to GG grandparents.

One thing I found Interesting after having my DNA done was it showed I had German ancestry and I thought
no way……… I would have known that if that was so however on further research by digging a bit into my fathers side of the family I found my grandmother (my fathers mother ) came from Germany as a young woman.

I only met my father once when I was 25 years old and met his parents on one occasion soon after ( we lived 500km apart ) within weeks of meeting my father he was murdered by a 14 year old boy , so I didn’t have any further contact with any of his family due to distance of where I lived .

The bit of research of I did on my mothers side of the family I found my family originated from Cornwall UK
in 1860’s ( my GG grandparents are buried where I live in a small country town in South Aust ) my gran was born here in the same town and went to school in a huge building ,that’s a been museum since 1960 and I volunteered in for 6 years so, I would have walked through the same original doors / rooms as my gran , it even has the original toilets used by the school ( for looking at only fenced off by a wire gate )

however the same building ( toilet ) is still used by the public who visit the museum.

My husbands family is to hard to trace due to the fact his father was a only child of a relationship ( he had a half brother ) but my hubbies father never discussed any thing about his mother or an apparently brutal father .

One interesting fact about my hubs is about 20+ years ago he had surgery on a crocked little finger at the time the surgeon said only people with Scandinavian blood tend to get that “ little finger issue “ so he must have some connection with that part of the world