Who Am I? It seems to be on everyone's mind now days?

Question

People seem to be obsessed with genealogy these days. How many of y'all have actually done one of the many available tests that are out there? My brother and I did one and the results came back that we are 85% Irish and 15% English. I just thought it was interesting and wondered who else has done this?

WindAtMyBack · Accepted Answer

I've never done a test, but I have a pretty good idea of my background going back at least a couple hundred years.

Since my family comes from overseas, and neither of my parents knew much about their background, I had almost no idea about it for most of my life. Before the Internet, it was very difficult to find out anything from overseas.

Over time, there was more and more info on the Internet. The first few times I tried searching I found nothing. One day I vaguely remembered an old newspaper clipping about a relative marrying a mayor of a small town in England. I decided to search for a list of mayors of that town and found his name. It didn't take long after that to find a living relative in England (a 2nd cousin). He didn't know a whole lot either, but I did get a little new info for that line.

I later did a generic search for family names and stumbled across someone else who was searching for the same family names. This person ended up being a gold mine of info and put us in touch with several relatives in England.

One of those people happened to be a high level judge with access to a lot of court records. He did an extensive genealogy study going back to the early 1700s.

An interest in photography seems to run in the family. We have old photo albums with pictures going back to the mid 1800s, possibly earlier. For most of our lives we had no idea who most of those people were. We have now identified almost all of them.