Genealogy....Family Trees? Anyone?

fascinating subject, but i think i, like most people on A2k, would rather not publicize info like that...

I would love to chart my lineage but I am too cheap to pay for it. he he he...

makesmeshiver. Welcome back, honey. My oldest sister is the keeper of the flame, and she's welcome to it.

LOL, Thanks Letty.

I find it fascinating!! And Kristie.....there's ways around paying for it. Lots of sights are free to join up. Just go to thier message boards, look for post concerning your family names. Most, post the information that they find, therefore......put it together like a puzzle and bingo.

Besides, there is lds.org its a big help in finding family members. Or use Google or Searchalot.com and use the name your looking for, anything that has been posted will come up.

I hate to make this a long post, but just to tell how interesting this can be.

One of my husbands and my best friends has been dating this wonderful woman for the last year. Come to find out her daughter has been doing thier genealogy. The conversation started and I mentioned my family surnames. It turned out that we are distant cousins. We share grandparents 4 generations back. Matter of fact, her Grandmother is an Elmore. LOL

Three days later, we find that our best friend, he and my husband are 3rd cousins, and didn't even know it. Those two have been best of friends since early childhood.

So you never know.......

I have too many relatives as it is, so I don't want
to find out of the hidden ones

Very interesting subject though. My grandfather had
traced our paternal lineage back to the 1200 where
they lived in what is today Alsace-Lorraine.
Wherever I traveled my grandfather always told me
to look up the white pages to see if someone had
the same surname as ours - if yes, they had to be
relatives

My mom tells me the same thing. The Douskurt name is very unusual. I have done a world wide search on it and found no others.

I have not done a family lineage but i suspect that van Kessel on my dads side goes back to medieval holland.

WOW......!

Actually what i found is that the name , Kessell, kessel, or van Kessel, comes from Medieval Bavaria (germany). This probably isnt a for sure, but i found a famous baroque era painter called Jan (pronounced like YAwn) van Kessel. MAybe related?? Ill ask around.

Well, actually some others before me (in the late 20's of last centuy) noted all the related sources and the archived number plus archives, where collected.

This is only of my family's name, which thus can be dated back in printed/written sources back to 1287.
(There are just about a dozen between 1287 and end of 15th century, but the lines can be followed nearly completely.)

Where is your family from. Germany?

You mean mine?

Yes, what was then the country of the Prince Bishop of Münster.

Wow, that is actually pretty awesome. I guess thats when it was the Holy Roman Empire, eh?"D Hopefully i can eventually see where my family tree goes back to, i would imagine i could get van Kessel back to the 1500s and then Kessel before the van was added back to earlier German territory.

I've been digging around doing genealogy for the last 10 years or so. It's just something that my mother had started and I picked up on later. I've managed to trace most of my lines back to 1600 or so with one line back to the early 1300s. One main line has been the stumbling block all along and I've been stuck with gr-gr-gr-grandfather that was born in 1818 but seems to have come from nowhere.

ehbeth has "suggested" a number of times that i should do some research on our families histories. i don't have any actual documents going back farther than my grandfather(father's side). there was talk in the family of some gypsi links ? might be interesting some day when i have NOTHING else to do. a few years ago we managed to get a copy of mrs h's birth-certificate; she was born in eastern-prussia and the family had to flee and leave literally everything behind. an official at the german consulate in toronto suggested that we apply to the german main registrar's office in berlin. lo-and-behold ! copies of the registers had been transferred to berlin and we got a true copy (fancy writing !) of her birth certificate. well, maybe, one day ... hbg

Lucky for me a distant aunt did all of the research and incorporated some help from Duke University somehow, so all of it is done back to Scotland around the time of Braveheart.



Billy Graham is a third or fourth cousin.


Also, Davy Crockett is in my lineage, though I'd never wear one of those coonskin caps on my head.

Whilst looking a bit around granmother's (gfahter's site) family, I found some really interesting facts:

this family immigrated from 'Germany' to 'The Netherlands' (meaning: what is now ...) in 14th/15th century.
While obviously the most part stayed in the Netherlands (the "van Homeot's" still are a very big family), in 15th century one married again in 'Germany', changed the "van" back to the original "von" and founded a small 'dynasty'.

On the www a found a notice on a school website, taken from a book from late 19th century.
The story there goes that only two single/unmarried brothers lived in this house


Suddenly one disappeared, and it was told that he immigrated to America.
So the other could get the house and all the land for himself and alone.
When he died, the -obviously murdered- dead body of the brother was found walled in the chimney.

Well, we have several copies of this house at home, two painted by my uncle (he was quite a famous painter), because he was born there and lived with my grandmother and their three brothers there until the late 90's of 19th century.

So, that nice "weird story from Westphalia" can't be true at all.


However:
there has bee a telling in our family that the house and the land had to been sold in the 1920's. They got on million Gold Mark for it. A sollictor told them, to investigate this money "in papers" - which weren't worth the paper they were printed on after the inflation.

So, unfortunately only a few historic antiques from this family are still here.

Nice sad story, isn't it?

The oldest sister of the mentioned siblings married a Dutchman, who owned a chocolade factory in Germany.
The family saga was telling that they had to sell the factory due to the Nazis. They immigarted to the Netherlands.

Sad story, too.

Both are untrue, however.

Whle I'd always been confused, why my aunt and uncle left Germany in the very early 20's (no one really noticed the Nazis at that time here!), the inernet helped me to find the 'truth':

there had been really two brothers: my great-granfather and his single brother. The latter often travelled in his young years to the Netherlands and .... visited casinos there. He lost and lost money. One night, he tried to make the bidg win and put all his eggs in one basket.
Result: his brother had to sell all his owings (house, land and more) to pay for the debts.

To get some of the personal belongings back, the chocolat factory was sold and these things were bought back from the new owners.


Great-grandfather's brother seems to have committed suicide, according to Dutch newspapers of that time.
And the "von" was 'deleted' from the family name then.

HI Squinney....

That is really neat!!

BTW Squinney, Davy Crockett is sopposed to be in my lineage on my fathers side, but I haven't gotten it completely started. We are Scottish on that side, McMullen's....once I'm finished with my mothers side, I'm headed in that direction.

I actually started this thread hoping that someone in A2K might have some help with the Douskurt name, or advice. ITs a complete brick wall. Seems like he just appeared here and that was it. Honestly, I don't even believe that Douskurt was his last name. There are no others.

The family story is that my GGrandfather, along with two sisters were stow-aways to the US. They settled in the Chicago area and he had ties into the Mob. The feds got after him and he fled to Arkansas. Married, had children and then disapeared back into the Chicago area for an 11 year period. It was told that he done time in the pen, but I can't find any records on it. Afterwards, he returned to Arkansas and died a few years later.

His name was spelled, Dascart...in his bible. Which his Bible is Lithuanian. Dauskurt in a Census and Douskurt on his wife's headstone.

I had a man from Russia contact me and suggest that the name wasn't Russian, but French. That many French families had migrated into Russia during that time period...
I just have no clue........

yes, if only grandfather had not been a spendthrift ... my dad's father inherited a small fortune when he was only 19 or 20 - an apartmenthouse, a pub and a destillery. as luck would have it , he found some good friends who helped him 'distribute' his wordly goods by the time he was 25 ! wine , women and song ! my father used to talk about starting schooling in a private school in 1905 and having to transfer to a public school two years later. ... grandfather never regretted having 'lived it up' - he lived well into his 80's and loved to tell stories of 'the high life' - but gradma was - understandable - a little sour. i could have lived a life in luxury, if only ... ! hbg (btw. before we got married, my mother advised mrs h to-be to keep me on a short leash - NO GAMBLING ! - and pointed out possibly inherited shortcomings - seems to have worked, so far.)