“You might have only thought you are a product of your parents (Mom and Dad), but it does go much further than those two. If you double the number of ancestors in each generation, 2 parents, 4 grandparents, and so on, we can see that by the time you are back 10 generations, you have the potential for 1,024 ancestral lines. True, you might not learn the names of over one thousand ancestors, but they did exist.”1.
How far back have I gone? I’ll start with the German side. We have several ancestors born in the 1600s. I’m not entirely convinced of the connections to the earliest ones, a 9th great grandmother and grandfather born in the early 1600s in Switzerland. The Huguenots were persecuted in France and went various places including Switzerland, so I’m guessing by the location (Switzerland) and then moving to Germany and their names that they may be French Huguenots. The Rheinpfalz region of Germany is on the Rhine river close to France so some Huguenots may have come directly to our ancestor’s area but we know that a lot of the Huguenot refugees went to Switzerland. One of the towns our German ancestors came from was Nuehofen. Here’s a snippet from Wikipedia about this town:
“1618 – 1648 In the Thirty Years’ War Neuhofen is looted and destroyed many times. Its inhabitants move to the surrounding towns. Only few families return after the war, Huguenots settle in Neuhofen.
1637 Plague”
On the Anderson/Kimsey side, there are several 9th to 11th great grandparents born in the late 1500s or early 1600s that I am fairly confident of. Sometimes even if we know their names, we don’t know where they were born, such as Thomas Early born about 1598, whose son William Harley Early came to America. The Early family might have come to America from Ireland, but that would be Northern Ireland (because they were Protestant) where many English and Scottish families moved to, and then moved on to America. Our Scotch-Irish 9th great grandparents David (b ca 1593) and Catherine (Browne) (b ca 1604) Maghee were born and died in Northern Ireland.
It has been difficult to determine parentage of the English ancestors. They get on a boat and come to America and start living. Sometimes we can find birth records in Great Britain but one can’t be sure that a birth record that is found applies to our ancestor. Some families do better because they kept track of where they came from when the memories still existed and write it down so others can also learn about them.
In some cases, even rather recent ancestors remain a mystery. We know quite a lot about Alexander Anderson. He was born 25 September 1805, died 27 Sept 1884, married 9 February 1837 to Martha Gordon. What we do not know is who his parents were… The birth date comes from the Anderson Bible, which had his birth date but not who his parents were. I have scoured the Andersons in Virginia and found nothing that looks right. Of course, he could have come from Pennsylvania or Maryland or immigrated. And Anderson is a very common name…
It is generally more difficult to find the female ancestors because we often do not know their maiden names. We got the very well documented McGee line by finally figuring out who “Nancy” was (see the post “Finding Nancy”).
Many people go much further on our lines, but if I cannot find any evidence of the connection, I do not generally put them in my tree. I sometimes call these ancestors “imaginary”, and it is telling that these links with no evidence often lead to important people like royalty. I will continue to study them to see if any proof can be found.
On the Klamm/Brenner side, although I found the parents and grandparents of my second great grandfather Adolph Truskey (see a previous post), I still have found nothing for my second great grandmother Caroline Dorethea Wegner. Family records showed they were from a part of Germany (Prussia) which is now in Poland. Maybe some day more records will become available online.
As of today, I have in my tree 364 direct ancestors and 1837 people total in the tree. I try to track siblings of our ancestors and sometimes go further afield, partly in an attempt to understand the families better.
Link to the article: You are Here Because of 1,024 Ancestral Lines