Genealogy

blue lander

blue lander

Joined
Aug 16, 2011
Messages
1,386
I've been researching my family ancestry through ancestry.com, focusing on my dad's side for now. They're all from Quebec and I've been able to trace most of them back to France , except one ancestor from Scotland who was a soldier in the British army when they took Quebec from the French .

All of them down to a man had been simple farmers, good peasant stock. All expect one line....

image.jpg

That's my 8th great grandfather, Louis Joseph Morel, Sieur de La Durantaye. He was a minor French lord in Quebec. His ancestors were lords in Brettany France. His family was considered "ancient " even in the 1400s, meaning they'd always been noble since before recorded history. Apparently they were a knightly family, meaning I have some tiny minuscule fraction of a drop of knightly blood running through my veins along with all the farmers DNA.

His descendants kept the lordship of Kamouraska for a couple more generations but not through the line I'm descended from. By the time my Morel ancestor came to the U.S. He worked in a cotton factory.
 
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I'll have to read up some now. Are we spose to like curtsy or bow or something in your presence to appease the knightly blood running through your veins. I want to be proper and not mess up ya know?
 
I say let them eat cake....

Mine is German, Swede and Cherokee.....can trace the German/French side (close to border and depends on who won what war) back to Middle Ages and family of armorers and brewers....Swedes back to raiders and then land farmers, and the Cherokee back only to where a grandparent was adopted and from folk who hid out in mountains rather than be deported....

I only curtsy when i wear my cute little cocktail frock...
 
Family lore says we're part Native American but nothing came up on the DNA test and I haven't found any in the family tree. Oliver Morel, who'd be my 9th great grandfather, did fight against the Iroquois though. He apparently was a big shot as far as Quebec goes, serving on the "Conseil Souverain" , the ruling body/supreme court of Quebec that reported to the king back in France. He even has his own Wikipedia page!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Morel_de_La_Durantaye

He built a fort that eventually became the city of Chicago. But not really. The fort he built was nowhere near current Chicago but due to a map error for awhile people thought it was.

The oldest male line ancestor I could find was a gunsmith who came to Quebec right before the British took it. After that he was a woodworker, I wonder if the British banned gun making or something.
One thing you learn from looking at family history is that people didn't really move around or change professions much back then. If your dad was a farmer then you were going to be a farmer and you were going to marry a farmer's daughter from a neighboring village.
 
About 1/2 British, 1/4 Swedish, and 1/4 Danish for me. There's other stuff as well, but that's the simple breakdown. I've also used a program with access to vast records to find out I'm descended from King Duncan of Scotland as well as a whole mess of European royalty. I'm also distantly related to several presidents, the Wright Brothers and some others.
 
Niiiice!

I *might* have a little noble blood on my Polish side. When the russkis and Germans partitioned Poland, my ancestors ended up on the Russian side. The Russians went through and decreed that any Polish nobility that wanted to stay nobile had to produce documents proving they were lords or whatever and/or pay some huge fee. So only recently ennobled or wealthy families could past the muster. Petty country lords, who had been lords for centuries but weren't very well off, suddenly became commoners.

That happened to a family with the same surname as my ancestors in the same area they lived in, but I can't prove I'm related to them (yet). So they might just be filthy peasants like the rest of us.
 
I have never done a full blown search as i already know we all are related, past, present, and future, and the searches mainly turning only on degree....
 
Too true... One of the main takeaways I've gotten from doing the family tree is that we're all related if you go back far enough.

Another is that we're incredibly lucky to be living in the time/place that we live in. For most of human history folks had no chance of upward mobility for themselves or their children. And even if you were somebody, all it took was a foreign army rolling through or a change in government and you're back to being a dirt farmer.

A person these days can do more in a decade to change their station in life than our ancestors could over the course of a hundred years. It makes you understand why poor people are so desperate to come here. Not to make something better for themselves but to ensure their kids/grandkids/great grandkids can do better than their parents/grandparents/great grandparents.
 
Personally I do find descendancy to be more interesting than finding random cousins. Lots of interesting family stories can be found that way, but it can be fun/funny to see who's a distant cousin and to find some of the unexpected ancestors way far back.
 
I found out my great, great grandfather was a piano player in a brothel. I stopped there that was satisfactory for me
 
i am descendant from charlemagne, holy roman emperor. bow down and offer obeisance all ye lesser mortals.

my credentials <-linky1

if any of y'all are also so favoured, ye may stand at my side in the shield wall and bow to no man.
 
Some information is best left unknown:D

e.g. Bawanna FYI (from the linky):

"Meanwhile, on his father's side, we are all related to President Barack Obama since anthropologists have determined that all modern humans are descended from a common African ancestor."

Otherwise I must be a descendent from Charlemagne.
 
i demand a paternity test. his MOTHER was white european, his father was african. besides, it's 5 african women we are all descended from, so it's only a 1 in 5 chance he's descended from the same one charlemagne was descended from.

anyway, i'd worry more if hitlery and/or billy clinton were in the family. BO will soon be a has-been.
 
My mother always claimed she found me under a rock and often times wishes she had put me back where she found me. I'm going with that story with pride of anything linking me to the poser in chief.
 
don't worry, bawanna, we know you are not related to anyone. excepting any children you may or may not have and may or may not know about, of course. - i think that also implies you are not related to your wife genetically, just legally. which i am sure will relieve your offspring a lot.
 
kronckew said:
i am descendant from charlemagne, holy roman emperor.
Click to expand...

You and the entire Western Hemisphere. Maybe you should be paying obeisance to me since I'm descended from Scottish kings who were never conquered by the Romans or their successors.
 
Charley was a Frank...or the other way around....we called him Frankie....as for the "science" of most anthropology conclusions, they generally start with an assumption, and look for any scrap of evidence supporting their presuppositions while ignoring anything which conflicts.....very little remains from the shipwreck of time from even 2000 yrs ago as far as anything original, and startling conclusions always put forward from the tiniest shard with a bit of etching, while any statistician would tell you it not a validly large sample from which to draw ANY conclusion, much less a few odd fragments of bone and entire bodies, clothes and hair styles put forward, or way of life simply by going through garbage....i wish we could take a man or woman from an isolated area ignorant of the west, train them in modern "scientific" methods of research, and turn them loose in one of our landfills, and see what conclusions they came up with regarding a normal person's way of life, dress, worship, etc.......one thing for sure would happen......they would get it all wrong.....it is based on "all the fish i have seen have fins, therefore all fish have fins", or "all the fill-in-race excel at fill-in-activity, therefore etc etc"....folk treat this methodology as religious truth today, despite each and every time them being startlingly wrong and revising EVERYthing and still people keep the faith that it will fix and discover everything.....including my most ancient ancestor being from one of five women....
One thing for sure they have discovered....but ignore....in the normal scale of such things in nature, mankind appeared as fast as a flash of lightning across the face of the entire planet complete with all his rituals, hopes, fears, strengths and weaknesses, and in a very sophisticated form....meanwhile we still wait for birds to learn how to build their own bird houses....

As a PS, a great great grandfather played in John Phillip Sousa's band and his son served in WWI front lines....i have the letter the son wrote to my father on the day of my father's birth....
 
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Frenchman here too. My grandfather god rest his soul was hugely into genealogy. My father side are from Normandy France. My mother side is Scottish, actually the highlands of Scotland. My last name means "The Bishop" in French. Its uber cool to know where your ancestors are from.
 
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