Ancestry Research

For various reasons, I concentrated on researching what I call my mitochondrial family line - my mother’s mother’s mother and so on - and within that line we have lots of agricultural labourers and one pub landlord as well, Bletch!

That line came to the Island around 1770 from the delightfully named Sherfield English, which is near Romsey.

Have Irish ancestors on my father’s side.

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My family on both sides are agricultural workers. They both started in Basingstoke and migrated southwards following the work. One interesting note, is that I believe my mum and dad are related courtesy of a common nine times great grand parent.

CB Saint should really be a Pompey supporter by his own admmission.

I’m pretty sure that the gills and webbed feet was bred out of us half a dozen generations back.

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Well yes I was/am involved in my family history. I’ve always been involved since childhood. My Victorian GG grandfather was quite a well known London publisher and had a biography written in the 1930s. The inherited remnants of his estate, mostly books, portraits etc were heavily featured in my grandparent’s house and as a child I asked questions.

When my dad retired in the 1980 he threw himself into his hobby of local history…he was already a Southampton registered “Blue Badge Guide” but I managed to persuade him to put some of his efforts into family research too. Through research carried out in the 1930s for my ancestor’s biography we knew another branch of the family had an extensive, unpublished account of the family history. My dad set out to find that branch of the family.

Very looooong story short…my dad and his newly found cousin started our Named Family History Society in 1986…It held it’s first “gathering” at Leeds University in 1989. The missus and I are going to the next one in Bury St. Edmunds in September…we go to most.

I’m not a genealogist…we have enough in the family already…you could say, I’m just a “social member.”

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Originally posted by @Halo-Stickman

For various reasons, I concentrated on researching what I call my mitochondrial family line - my mother’s mother’s mother and so on - and within that line we have lots of agricultural labourers and one pub landlord as well, Bletch!

That line came to the Island around 1770 from the delightfully named Sherfield English, which is near Romsey.

The line my mother’s decended from came from Lockeley and Sherfield English…maybe we’re related :wink:

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Well, you never know, slowlane!

One of the women in my mitochondrial line, with the initials EB, was also born in Lockerley in 1683, and got married in Lockerley to a man with the initials JM in 1707. Some time very shortly after that they moved to Sherfield English.

NB I’ve limited myself to initials in case you prefer me not to reveal names on here.

I’m not bothered about revealing names…my mother’s family name was Sillence and is quite a common name around the Romsey area. BTW my name is John if you’re fed up with typing “lifeintheslowlane” :wink:

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Ok, John, seems like we’re not related.

Halo :wink:

Well we all know this is all a load of bollocks really because if you go back far enough we are ALL related. :smile:

Having said that I have actually had a DNA test to establish a family history link. My dad and another “suspected” cousin (i.e. a link not confirmed through documented evidence) had long searched for the link to connect two branches of the family tree. Everything lined up…village of birth…dates…name patterns…virtually every classic indicator of a family link without the written record in the Parish Register.

Our family history society started a project to link many of the recorded family trees together where these missing links existed. My father never lived to see the link confirmed but the society paid for around a dozen DNA tests and our “suspected” cousin and myself underwent a simple saliva test and it proved conclusive.

Of the 37 tested “markers” 36 were exactly the same value and the one different “marker” deviated by “1”. This indicates we share the same common ancestor within 7 generations…the missing document relating to the 6th generation.

It’s fun when that happens. :smile:

I’m pretty sure that some of my Irish relations (and not too many generations back) are that inbred that they are their own cousins.

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I’m sure there’s an element of truth in that for most families pre-industrial revolution…they just didn’t move out of their local areas. My mother’s Sillence family were recorded in the Lockerley Parish register for 400 years…add up the chances. Inevitable I would have thought.

HTH :smile:

Richard Dawkins’s explanation on how to calculate relatedness (excerpt from the Selfish Gene):

Suppose you contain one copy of the gene G. You must have received it either from your father or from your mother (for convenience we can neglect various infrequent possibilities - that G is a new mutation, that both your parents had it, or that either of your parents had two copies of it). Suppose it was your father who gave you the gene. Then every one of his ordinary body cells contained one copy of G. Now you will remember that when a man makes a sperm he doles out half his genes to it. There is therefore a 50 per cent chance that the sperm that begot your sister received the gene G. If, on the other hand, you received G from your mother, exactly parallel reasoning shows that half of her eggs must have contained G; once again, the chances are 50 per cent that your sister contains G. This means that if you had 100 brothers and sisters, approximately 50 of them would contain any particular rare gene that you contain. It also means that if you have 100 rare genes, approximately 50 of them are in the body of any one of your brothers or sisters.

You can do the same kind of calculation for any degree of kinship you like. An important relationship is that between parent and child. If you have one copy of gene H, the chance that any particular one of your children has it is 50 per cent, because half your sex cells contain H, and any particular child was made from one of those sex cells. If you have one copy of gene J, the chance that your father also had it is 50 per cent, because you received half your genes from him, and half from your mother. For convenience we use an index of relatedness, which expresses the chance of a gene being shared between two relatives. The relatedness between two brothers is J, since half the genes possessed by one brother will be found in the other. This is an average figure: by the luck of the meiotic draw, it is possible for particular pairs of brothers to share more or fewer genes than this. The relatedness between parent and child is always exactly 1.

It is rather tedious going through the calculations from first principles every time, so here is a rough and ready rule for working out the relatedness between any two individuals A and B. You may find it useful in making your will, or in interpreting apparent resemblances in your own family. It works for all simple cases, but breaks down where incestuous mating occurs, and in certain insects, as we shall see.

First identify all the common ancestors of A and B. For instance, the common ancestors of a pair of first cousins are their shared grandfather and grandmother. Once you have found a common ancestor, it is of course logically true that all his ancestors are common to A and B as well. However, we ignore all but the most recent common ancestors. In this sense, first cousins have only two common ancestors. If B is a lineal descendant of A, for instance his great grandson, then A himself is the ‘common ancestor’ we are looking for.

Having located the common ancestor(s) of A and B, count the generation distance as follows. Starting at A, climb up the family tree until you hit a common ancestor, and then climb down again to B. The total number of steps up the tree and then down again is the generation distance. For instance, if A is B’s uncle, the generation distance is 3. The common ancestor is A’s father (say) and B’s grandfather. Starting at A you have to climb up one generation in order to hit the common ancestor. Then to get down to B you have to descend two generations on the other side. Therefore the generation distance is 1 + 2 = 3.

Having found the generation distance between A and B via a particular common ancestor, calculate that part of their relatedness for which that ancestor is responsible. To do this, multiply J by itself once for each step of the generation distance. If the generation distance is 3, this means calculate 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 or (1/2)3. If the generation distance via a particular ancestor is equal to g steps, the portion of relatedness due to that ancestor is (1/2)g.

But this is only part of the relatedness between A and B. If they have more than one common ancestor we have to add on the equivalent figure for each ancestor. It is usually the case that the generation distance is the same for all common ancestors of a pair of individuals. Therefore, having worked out the relatedness between A and B due to any one of the ancestors, all you have to do in practice is to multiply by the number of ancestors. First cousins, for instance, have two common ancestors, and the generation distance via each one is 4. Therefore their relatedness is 2 x (1/2)4 = 1/8. If A is B’s great-grandchild, the generation distance is 3 and the number of common ‘ancestors’ is 1 (B himself), so the relatedness is 1 x (1/2)3 = 1/8. Genetically speaking, your first cousin is equivalent to a greatgrandchild. Similarly, you are just as likely to ‘take after’ your uncle (relatedness = 2 x (1/2)3 = 1/4) as after your grandfather (relatedness = 1 x (1/2)2 = 1/2).

For relationships as distant as third cousin (2 x (1/2)8 = 1/128 we are getting down near the baseline probability that a particular gene possessed by A will be shared by any random individual taken from the population. A third cousin is not far from being equivalent to any old Tom, Dick, or Harry as far as an altruistic gene is concerned. A second cousin (relatedness = 1/32) is only a little bit special; a first cousin somewhat more so (1/8). Full brothers and sisters, and parents and children are very special (1/2), and identical twins (relatedness = 1) just as special as oneself. Uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, grandparents and grandchildren, and half brothers and half sisters, are intermediate with a relatedness of 1/4.

…Estimates of relatedness are also subject to error and uncertainty. In our over-simplified calculations so far, we have talked as if survival machines know who is related to them, and how closely. In real life such certain knowledge is occasionally possible, but more usually the relatedness can only be estimated as an average number. For example, suppose that A and B could equally well be either half brothers or full brothers. Their relatedness is either 1/4 or 1/2, but since we do not know whether they are half or full brothers, the effectively usable figure is the average, 3/8. If it is certain that they have the same mother, but the odds that they have the same father are only 1 in 10, then it is 90 per cent certain that they are half brothers, and 10 per cent certain that they are full brothers, and the effective relatedness is 1/10 x 1/2 + 9/10 x 1/4 = 0.275.

Since all humanity is one species, we are all cousins of one another by definition. Every marriage is between a husband and wife that are cousins to some degree and the closeness of the relatedness in the marriage will help in determining the relatedness of everyone.

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Originally posted by @Halo-Stickman

HTH :smile:

Richard Dawkins’s explanation on how to calculate relatedness (excerpt from the Selfish Gene):

Suppose you contain one copy of the gene G. You must have received it either from your father or from your mother (for convenience we can neglect various infrequent possibilities - that G is a new mutation, that both your parents had it, or that either of your parents had two copies of it). …

Since all humanity is one species, we are all cousins of one another by definition. Every marriage is between a husband and wife that are cousins to some degree and the closeness of the relatedness in the marriage will help in determining the relatedness of everyone.

WTF…I’m betting Richard Dawkins is a close cousin of Redslo. :wink:

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Lol, yeah, I think the interesting point he’s making is that people are no more related to their third cousins than they are to any old Tom, Dick or Harry - after all, we share 99 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees and over 50 percent with bananas :smile:

Btw, there is an error contained within that cut and paste job I did; I tried to edit it but couldn’t because apparently I’d exceeded the character limit. An upvote for anyone who spots it!

My mum does most of the genealogy for our family, but I will probably get more into it if I ever have more time. My maternal grandfather’s family were all farmers in the Chichester area going back to the 15th century. Not that sure about other threads of the family, my paternal grandmother’s family came from Surrey and my great-great grandfather was a goldsmith (my grandmother told me that when she was a little girl he would put goldleaf on her cuts and scratches as its antiseptic), my paternal grandfather’s parents came from Newcastle (great-grandmother) and Herefordshire (great-grandfather) but met in London when they were both servants in some posh house in the West End. My last name Perkins is the Welsh version of a French name from the Norman conquest (Pierre-kin) so I guess the family is partly Welsh and French (makes sense with Herefordshire connection) but don’t think my mum has got that far back yet.

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Whoa…reviving the dead…well a dead thread anyway.
I suppose anyone who indulges in Genealogy is doing that anyway. :lou_lol:

I know a lot about my Victorian ancestors. My g g grandparents led interesting lives. Fortunately, others before me have done most of the spadework but I have, over the years, fleshed out some questions that have remained unanswered.

Genealogy can be incredibly time-consuming and at times an incredibly boring array of names and dates. I’m not a genealogists but I am a networker; I light touch papers and stand back to view results.

Earlier this week I got a great result, one of my g g grandparents’ 1833 wedding presents was found. It was a large portrait of the seventeenth century poet John Milton. I’ve known about this present for a long time, it hung in my ancestor’s bookshop in London for 40 years, but I had never seen an image of it. I didn’t know anyone who had seen it.

I had recently found a reference to this portrait; it was sold in the 1870s to a collector in the US and by the 1930s had found its way onto the walls of the New York Public Library. An online search of their website revealed no mention, although you could view their picture collections.

Time to let the hounds loose, I’m no academic but I know a few so I was hoping they had connections in the NY academic circle. It didn’t take long, online academia’s a bit like the dark web, there’s a wealth of information lurking below the surface if you have someone who can access it.

On Tuesday I had an email from a friend in the US and it had this picture attached. He contacted a friend in NY who in turn gave the name of the curator of the NY Public Library’s picture collections.

The curator, Liz, walked the corridors to find the portrait and took a picture of it for me. Something of a result, I think. :lou_lol:

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So you’re a poet and we didn’t know it?

Aspiring poet…I started out with a Sonnet but could only manage twelve lines. :frowning:

:joy:

Here’s a mildly offensive Haiku for you then:

Not thinking things through,
Lack of common sense to guide,
Stupidity grows.

:wink::joy: