Posted on 05/08/2008 3:18:15 PM PDT by forkinsocket
Leo McKinstry says the current craze for genealogy reflects an unhealthy combination of snobbery and inverse snobbery, and is a poor replacement for national history
When I visited the National Archives at Kew last week the place was full of them, scurrying about with their plastic wallets in hand, a look of eager concentration on their faces. It was impossible to escape their busy presence as they whispered noisily to relatives or whooped over the discovery of some new piece of information.
These were the followers of one of Britains fastest-growing craze, the mania for researching family history. Studying bloodlines and tracing ancestral roots was once the preserve of the aristocracy. Today, as I saw at the National Archives, it has become a favourite activity of the British public. We are becoming a nation of obsessive genealogists. According to a recent study by the polling organisation YouGov, 28 per cent of British people have tried at some stage to trace their family tree, and 10 per cent of the population are currently doing so. It is said that genealogy websites are the most commonly visited on the internet after pornography. The website Genes Reunited, which claims to be the UKs number one family tree and genealogy site, boasts that it has no fewer than eight million members. Another major web company, Find My Past, says that it has a registered usership of 1.32 million people and a mailing list of almost 600,000.
Ten years ago, there was just one mainstream genealogy magazine. Now there are seven. Another indicator of this fixation with family history is the phenomenal success of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?, whose weekly episodes feature different celebrities tracing their roots.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.co.uk ...
Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! Im being repressed! Bloody peasant! Oh, what a give-away. Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? Thats what Im on about. Did you see him repressing me? You saw it, didnt you?
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Haha! I’m not sure what the heck that all means, but it was fun reading it...twice. I only speak american, sorry.
Word, sunk-dog! Peace out.
Heh... “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, probably my favorite scene. “If I said I was Emperor, just because some moistened bink had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!”
Oh, OK! Now see monte python in that post. At first I thought you might have been posting drunk or something.
I does look like something related Kessler’s Smooth as Silk, doesn’t it?
Some of my ancestors were the first English to settle in Maine in 1627. When I watched the PBS show where folks volunteered to experience what it would have been like to arrive as a colonist in that area, it was very meaningful. They must have been very tough, hardy individuals to make it through those first years. And they didn’t all get along with the local Passamaquoddy tribe as in the tv series. At least two died at their hands.
They were an Anglican community that fled England when the Catholics reassumed the throne. One of my English ancestors - deCramner, was the first “Primate” of that church separating from Rome under some of Luther’s doctrinal ideas, which allowed Henry VIII to divorce. De Cramner was eventually burned at the stake. It is interesting to see his character portrayed on the tv series The Tudors.
It helps me to have a connection with people who came here to create a better life, of which I am now a beneficiary. I have other waves of immigrants in my family tree. Each puts a face on a period of American history and the history of the area from whence they came. I found weavers on both sides of my family - wool and flax. Ironically, I had a loom years before I discoverd this fact.
:-)
Macy's
Gardner's
Coffin's
Folger's
etc.
There are tens of thousands of us, but I still enjoy the fact.
Not following you, but ok.
Note: this topic is from . Thanks forkinsocket, this is just an update for the ping message, and why not, a re-ping. We've all been cooped up and probably catching up on genealogy online.
Native American
I started my family tree on Ancestry.com last year, and had my DNA done through them too. It’s interesting to see where the next link will take you, but I’ve also developed a healthy skepticism as to the truth of those links. While it’s cool being a descendant of English, Scottish, and German nobility, and royalty, you have to take it with a grain of salt, because there’s no way to actually prove it.
Edward III is supposed to be my 18th GGF. In that line so far, I’ve gone back to Henry II. Robert the Bruce is supposed to be my 20th GGF. Most of the interesting connections (Mayflower, settlement of New Amsterdam, French & Indian War, Revolutionary War, etc.,), plus royalty, and nobility, are from my mother’s side of family. She was born in Canada. My father was born in Holland, and came to the U.S. with his parents, and his two brothers. They were mostly farmers, and laborers...no nobility on that side of the family, and very few connections farther back.
Sadly, dighton hasn’t posted since 2010. Was a good FReeper.
I became very skeptical of the info in Ancestry.com hints when one of my links took me back to Cardinal St. John Fisher. The hints showed him married, and having a child. And that never happened. There is no documentation for it. He entered the religious community early in his life. In fact he had to get a special dispensation to attend at such a young age. He spent his life in the Clergy, and chose to die, instead of taking an oath to support the phony divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon. Yet, so many of these people on Ancestry.com accepted the fake info that is out there in the genealogy world. I may be related to some Fishers, but if I am related to John Fisher, he's an uncle or cousin somehow through his siblings...not a Great-grandfather as so many people choose to believe. And there isn't even credible information as far as his siblings go. He had a brother, but his father died when he was young, and his mother remarried, and had children with her 2nd husband.
Yep...I had Patriots and Loyalists on my mother's side of the family.
Thanks for waking me up. I hadn’t even noticed the date. Maybe he’s reading it anyway, from up above :-)
Don’t know where dighton went, just stopped posting.
Well, according to the theory, we’re all Africans.
So where’s my Reparations?
Somebody in a response alerted me to the thread being from 2008, and that deighton passed away.
I may have heard that but don’t remember. Makes sense though. So many of the good ones gone.
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