Have you ever thought about where your family comes from? I grew up in New York State, so I learned about U.S. history, New York history, and then world history in school. But where was my family through all of that? You know, it’s too bad that we don’t develop much of a sense of the greater world around us until we get older because I had access to three of my great grandfathers when I was young. I would love to hear their stories now.
I looked into my ancestry once before, roughly 20 years ago. My father-in-law was researching his family tree and he must have introduced me to Ancestry.com, so I gave mine a shot. I learned a bit, and it was interesting, but I quickly came to dead ends and moved on. I found out that one of my Mom’s relatives had also researched their family tree.
Drawn Back In to Genealogy
This is kind of an odd path back into genealogy, but hear me out. I don’t currently have a printer. I only need to print a few times a year and the print head in my most recent printer is gummed up with ink from lack of use. It’s the second printer I’ve had that happen with, so I don’t think I’m going to replace it. Instead, I have decided to use the local public library to do my printing.
I went in a couple weeks ago to print something and decided to get a library card to save myself a little bit of time in getting into a computer. My new library card gets me into some online services that the library offers as well, and one of those services is an online genealogy database. How interesting! It turns out that a LOT more data is available now than there was 20 years ago.
Mostly, it’s genealogy websites that let more serious researchers post their family trees, and the trees all get merged into a global family tree. That works for me, because one thing I have learned is that I don’t have the patience to be a real researcher. I have no interest in spending hours or days tracking down one name. Or traveling around the world to do it.
One other thing. What I learn from looking into my family tree probably isn’t going to change my life significantly. It’s really just trivia. But it is fascinating to see where your ancestors came from.
My Family Tree
I’ve been using familysearch.org to see my ancestry because it is completely free. Just create an account. No, this isn’t the service through the public library. I switched because I found familysearch.org easier to navigate.
I started with what I know – me, my parents, grandparents, and a few great grandparents. You can’t access information on living people for privacy reasons, so you have to go back a few generations before you start finding anything. My grandparents have all passed away and I was able to find them, so now I’m into the big tree.
Now I can just click my way up the tree and see what I can see.
Remember, none of this really means anything and isn’t going to change my life. Also, I’m not going to go very far into trying to prove that any of this is actually true.
My family name, Woodworth, goes back to Plymouth Colony. Not on the Mayflower though. Walter Woodworth apparently came over about 20 years later. Still, that’s pretty cool. Then eventually we moved through the Connecticut Colony and into the New York Colony. At least 2 of Walter’s great grandsons fought in the American Revolution in the New York militia. One of them, Amos, is my direct ancestor.
There is a path back through my tree from Amos’s mother back to King Harold Godwinson, the last Saxon King of England. He was killed in the Battle of Hastings during the Norman Conquest of England.
Don’t Believe Everything You Find
Am I really descended, through many marriages, from King Harold II of England? Maybe. The Battle of Hastings was in 1066. That’s a bit far back to make a strong determination. But noble lineages were more likely to be tracked and recorded through time, so it is possible. His daughter married a Norman noble, so their descendants’ births, marriages, and deaths would continue to be recorded because that line remained noble under the new system.
Walter wasn’t a noble, but he lived in the 1600s when better records were kept in general and more likely to survive until now. I’ve read that you can track back somewhat reliably to around 1500, but probably not much before that. King Harold exceeds that by another 500 years, but then again, he’s a noble.
In The Realm of Less Likely
I found a couple paths that claim to trace all the way back to Noah. One through the city of Troy and on to Shem, and the other through ancient Irish kings and on to Japheth. Cool, right?
I d0n’t buy it. I had a few specific issues aside from the fact that the whole idea of being able to track back that far seems implausible. One, in the Irish path back to Japheth, there is an Irish king that was about 150 years old when his son was born. That would be okay in Biblical times, but not around 1000 AD. The other issue is Troy. In order for there to be birth records back that far they would have to have been recorded on a stone tablet to survive. Possible? Yes. Likely? Not so much.
So I did some research. Where do these claims back to Troy and Noah come from? There were two good answers I found.
The first is that Kings in Europe claimed ancestry to heroes of history and legend to validate their claims to the throne. Along with claims of being chosen by God, they would claim descent from the heroes named in the Iliad of Homer and in the Bible. They were impossible to verify and likely fictitious.
Science and Religion
Second, there is an organization that claims to be able to analyze the Y-chromosomes in men and determine which of Noah’s sons they are a direct male descendant of. The basis for this is that scientists have determined that they can use mutations in the Y-chromosome to determine the relative size of the gene pool throughout history. They discovered that there was a significant narrowing of genetic diversity around 3000 BC, especially in Europe, around the time when Bible scholars put Noah’s flood.
My issue is that “narrowing” doesn’t mean “all the way down to one” which would have to be the case if the Bible’s version of the flood is true. According to the Bible, Noah’s was the only Y-chromosome to make it through.
The same Bible scholars put Adam at about 4004 BC, but the scientists studying Y-chromosome mutations have us going back hundreds of thousands of years.
For those concerned, I consider myself a Christian, and I have theories regarding how Adam and Eve could have appeared in 4004 BC while Y-chromosome and mitochondrial studies put humans much earlier than that. This isn’t the time or place though.
Summary
I’ll probably talk more about genealogy in the future, but that’s enough for now.
It can be very interesting to look into your family tree, but try to keep it in perspective. While I may be descended from kings from a thousand years ago, so are thousands of others. None of this is going to have any impact on my life, other than stirring a little more interest in researching some of those people and the history around them.
It’s a diversion, and sometimes pursuing a diversion can be beneficial.
If you decide to look into your family tree, let me know if you find something interesting.