Recently I have been studying my family history. In these days when your mother's maiden name is regarded as somehow confidential information that no identity thief could ever discover it isn't really practical to upload my whole genealogy onto YouTube, so I will just content myself with a few tales. If you're not interested don't bother to tell me, just wait until something you do like comes alon
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i care about as much about your family history as i do about mine. the only branch that matters to me is mine. but hey it is a new martin j willett video so i watched the whole thing. if nothing else for the mental imagery, and eloquent speech.
My great grandfather was a communist jew in tsarist Russia. When he was 16 he supposedly killed an officer and fled to America all by himself. He was really tough with his son, my grampa and he disowned my grampa in the end.
@MartinJWillett Yeah I meant all the way back to the first animals who used sexual reproduction. But you’re right, I am, we all are, billions of years in the making!
@makkathran Logically all families go back billions of years, we all have roots equally deep.
It is very weird to imagine your ancestry goes back millions of years!
I somehow always suspected
interesting video
@MsMommaRose How insensitive! Surely the poor immigrants should have been encouraged to build a replica of whatever it was they left behind them. Imagine the indignity of being expected to acknowledge that what they had voluntarily embraced was superior to what they chose to leave!
Surely strength can only come from different visions and values, and appreciating the inherent superiority of all minority cultures over the culture which made the place worth going to in the first place.
One of the most interesting and insightful 10 minutes I’ve spent in long while.
Any mentally insain and murderers you found out about Martin? I have a couple of those long back in my family, and I found it much more interesting to find those black sheeps that the counless farmers almost any family have.
I can trace one line of my family tree back to a guy that was born in 1605 in London, and came to America on the pilgrim ship Fortune in 1621. It’s interesting stuff.
@iDoctorIL How is this xenophobic? The man is doing his family tree, and exploring his roots. Also, if you care to look you’ll find most English people share common ancestry with the same people who were in the British Isles before the Celts arrived. The Saxon invasions were more assimilation into the locals and stamp your language and culture on them…even if it was not over 1500 years of settlement has to mean something. After all, most Islamic countries have far less.
@OriginalMindTrick I thought I found two but they were false alarms. A sister of my great grandmother lived in a lunatic asylum in North Manchester but she was clearly a live-in maid to the staff rather than an inmate. I haven’t found criminals as such but my grand uncle/great grandfather (that issue will probably never be resolved) stowed away on a cargo ship to Canada abandoning a wife and two children and his army reserve duties. Finding written of evidence of a man on the run is tricky.
@CMO999 Every generation you go back you double the number of ancestors you are ignoring, who are incidentally the ones who are more likely to be correct than the male line, who may have been cuckolded. I have some spindly traces on my family tree which go way back but there is very little evidence to corroborate them. Doubts multiply with every generation, I prefer to get a deeper picture of those whose place in the tree is well established with family memories as well as documentary evidence.
@TheNakedAtheist How many more lines must there be? Just try to calculate how many ancestors you have in that generation. Since 1963 my genes have been in one body, in 1940 they were in two, in 1910 they were in four. In 1880 they were in eight. Before that the numbers don’t quite double in every generation due to some cousin marriages but there are still hundreds relatively recently, back in the 1620s there would be – err, lots and lots!
Interesting video. Being American I know my ancestors came from various countries in Europe, some of which descended from those the immigrated to Europe. I don’t know that any of them where ever invited to move into a new land by the indigenous locals-I am pretty sure that those that came to America were not. I do know that when they got here they basically were told to learn the language, join a political party, and learn the local customs. They did. What we have in common strengthens US.
@MartinJWillett Of course
@thordurinn That is fascinating. Of course it is only as accurate as the original data and I suspect that everybody’s family tree contains inaccuracies if you go back two hundred years or more some inaccuracy is inevitable. I have seen family trees in which sons are born ten years after the mother died, some where whole generations are skipped and plenty of people on ancestry.com have misidentified people in my family tree.
@MsReefmaster You may find you get interested later in life. My interest grew up quite suddenly from a background curiosity to become a burning desire to know as much as I could.
Most white Europeans can trace their ancestry back to when the last ice age started to end, it is thought that white tribes were nomads following the migration of wolly mammoths in north africa and the middle east, back when they were green and covered with forests, when the ice melted and the natives of europe the neanderthals became extinct, the white tribes then started to settle in europe, planting the seeds of some of earths greatest society’s.
in Iceland we have church records available online which go back to the first icelandic settlers in 874. of course, it’s not 100% reliable, and in many cases, names or professions of many people are missing. the also have a feature on the website where you can type in any native’s name and see where your family tree meets. pretty neat.
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