Nothing too unusual in my tree. About the closest was that my paternal grandmother's name was Celestine. When I first learned her name I thought that unusual because I thought it was usually a man's name but it's not all that uncommon for women to be named Celestine. The Filipino entertainer Toni Gonzaga's given name is Celestine, and it's also the given name for businesswoman Tina Knowles. One thing I did notice in researching my family history was that for the first generation or two after arrival they tended to use the German spelling of their names instead of English. Same with some of their graves. The inscriptions would all be in German and not English. Where I lived in Iowa a lot of people came from the German speaking regions of Europe and continued in using the language for some time after the arrival while learning English and assimilating into American society.

Lol, that's how I came across the William the Conqueror rumor. The rest of my people seem to have been just regular folks, even Thomas and Jane Walford, who founded Charlestown.

Some. Mainly following work of others. But occasionally I get a record hint that will give things like descendants of Charlemagne or Manga Charta families. Families descended from royalty that will trace back generations.

Have you traced relatives in England? I've never gotten that far. Maybe someday! I really should follow up on the "illegitimate son of William the Conqueror" rumor that would make me a princess of sorts (a bedraggled, wild-haired, barefoot princess, but still! lol).

Probably, especially as inter related the witch trial folks seem to be. And yes, I’ve gotten side tracked into that a time or two. (Tudor England is another inter related rabbit hole I fall down on a regular basis)

I've had a lot of fun over the years on ancestry.com! So are we distant cousins lol?

@Kiki03910 I just checked my tree because the name Proctor is familiar, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the witch trials or my tree. Turns out both. Direct line Proctors on my tree but they’re from Virginia. However, John Proctor from the witch trials turns out to be an uncle by marriage to Elizabeth Basset (apparently his third wife) and oh, hey I think she was in the accused list too.

I'm a descendant of John Proctor! My maternal grandmother was a Proctor and grew up in Danvers (formerly Salem Village). I have a handful of early New England ancestors who were accused of witchcraft. Apparently big mouths are hereditary.

Me Me! I just discovered my connection back to John and Sarah via Wildes/Rust. When I was in Jr. High we did a reading of The Crucible in english class, and it all came rushing in.. So I started researching the inspiration behind it. It looks like the Rust line mingled with several of the families in Topsfield over the generations including Perkins and Towne so far. It's a work in progess. Further back on the Rust line was Henry who helped settle Hingham. Wonderful hobby, but not helpful for maintaining any sort of reasonable bedtime. (on a side note, a Google search for Sarah led me to this forum!)

The name that comes to mind wasn't part of my family tree: Sylvanus. Seriously, any name with the word ''anus'' should be banned. It was for a university reaserch paper on early 20th century French-Canadian communities in Massachusetts and Maine. Still haven't forgotten the name, even if my B.A was almost 10 years ago.

Me too! My grandfather's name is unique; I can just Google it and find all kinds of interesting things.

Grandmas Louguardus and LaVaJa. The first one went by Lou. The second one didn’t like her fairly common first name, so actually went by LaVaJa. My own grandma didn’t like her first name, Myrtle, so went by her middle name, Ann. This caused hard feelings, because she was part of an “M” naming scheme (like the Duggars “J”).

I have a grandmother named Erda. She died long before my parents even met.

I know this is ancient but posting because I'm going through things again and finding some fun names. First is my grandmother, Zellaweze. It was her middle name, and she went by Zella. I did not know her name was anything other than Zella until I was an adult. There's also a Ponina, Leathy Mozella (not related to Zellaweze), Hazeline, Vardrey, Madgeline, Losey, and at least two Levinias. And I traced one part back far enough to get the really odd old celtic and pictish names! I'm sure part of that line is just legend, but hey. They didn't really keep records back then. I like the odd names. Much easier to keep up with than the long strings of "John Smith" and the zillions of Sarahs and Marys.

Yeah that was one of the things my sister and my mom liked were all the wineries around St. Louis.

Methodist Episcopal eventually became United Methodist minus some splits along the way.

I think I may have found the answer. Her mother who died is buried in a family cemetery with a Methodist-Episcopal chapel and her mom's brother was a minister of that sect. The grandma who raised her was her Dad's mom and since my gramma didn't care probably just named the first religion that sprung to mind. Read up on all the denominations and no wonder she was willing to "marry the devil himself" to get the hell out of town and not end up a farmer's wife. None of those churches look like pleasant places for someone who gives very few f's about religion.

Google says you can make wine out of those, too!

Depends on the part of Missouri. We do have wineries here. As far as the religion, sometimes people don’t really pay attention to what someone’s denomination is when passing information down. Maybe she changed churches? If she moved from one town to another the new town may not have had the same denomination.

I don't think those are grapes. They could muscadines.

Someone on Reddit was asking for info about an ancestor who happens to be my 8th g-grandfather so I shared my info with him, kind of excited to be able to help, but he's just a mess and has no idea how he's related to this ancestor, just sure that he is because "he's the originator of all the Boh annon families in the US." Uhm, no, there were at least two others who came over in the same time frame who appear to be completely unrelated so I'm kind of annoyed I went to the trouble of renaming my tree (to remove my last name) and mark last two generations over me living so he couldn't see my parents/grandparents. (This is an open club so I split the name so this page won't turn up in a Google search.) Anyway, the TLDR is in doing this I looked at my mom's lines which I haven't done in a while and revisited my great-grandmother. She died when my grandmother was four, so all I know is she had her third child December 1910 and died May of 1911, and that baby died the next month, June 1911. The county has death records for all my other relatives except her. There was no epidemic noted in the local area in 1911 so I'm trying to brainstorm how she and her baby may have died? It could have been unrelated, but him dying at six months old only a month after her makes me wonder if their deaths were related. I never thought to ask my grams about it when she was alive. I know post partum infections can take a few months before becoming fatal, but that wouldn't explain the death of the baby. So this lead me to looking again at my 2nd great grandmother's obit (her mother in law took the kids in and raised them since my grandma's dad was a shit person.) The wording of the obit says she was a "consecrated Christian" who was "converted at a young age and joined the Presbyterian Church." What is a consecrated Christian? By convert do they mean baptism? Because the family is various flavors of Protestant going back hundreds of years so it's not like she was coming in from an entirely different religion. It said she joined the Presbyterian church, but there are also records of her being on some ladies committee at a "Congregationalist church" and my Grams said she was raised Methodist, and this is the woman who raised her. I have no idea what a congregationalist is, but I didn't think Presbyterians and Methodists were interchangeable? Am I wrong? Google says they are very different, but protestants confuse me because there are so many variations within some denominations. She married a Baptist. Does that mean anything? Do Presbyterians and or Methodists consider Baptists to be of like mind enough to marry without needing to convert? (Is my lapsed Catholicism showing in my ignorance?) My Grams wasn't a stupid woman, so I assume she knew what religion she was raised in, but she's also the one who said, when asked why she converted to Catholicism for Grandpa, "Simple, honey. He cared and I didn't." so she was not a religious person, but she was raised with mandatory church attendance so you'd still think she'd know what religion she was. And she wasn't a devout anything so I can't go by her beliefs, since the only thing she's ever said to me about religion I quoted above. I assume she believed in God as the Godbotherers in the family think she's in heaven. Pic of 2nd great grandmother in the spoiler. I think those are grapes? I'd like to think she's making wine, but in Missouri?

I’m watching a things out the Salem Witch Trials from The Travel channel that’s on Hulu. (This one is okay, but they skim the details and don’t go into more than some of the highlights of the accused). This is a subject that I now will usually stop and watch documentaries on due to the genealogy work I’ve done. I’m a direct descendant of Mary Perkins Bradbury (accused, convicted was supposed to be hung but somehow escaped from jail.) I’m also descended from Phebe Wildes Day. (Accused, arrested, but was not taken to Boston/Salem but to a different jail because of where she was arrested. Likely saved her life). Also accused was her sister Sarah Wildes Bishop and Sarah’s husband. They both escaped and went into hiding. The interesting to me part of this was accused, arrested, convicted, hung their stepmother Sarah Averill Wildes. John Wildes first wife died. He remarried. But his late wife’s family (the Goulds) thought he remarried too quickly and didn’t like the new wife. Also John Wildes was a magistrate and I believe there was a whole issue with him not helping his brother in law out of a jam in some legal issue. Turns out the Goulds are related to (a couple of generations up back in England) the Putman family. Ann Putman Jr was one of the afflicted girls with her father giving names of suspects to be arrested. so, any other very distant cousins here on FJ?

I have that too and for the last couple of months had been on a quest and I finally found the common ancestors this weekend. I was so excited to solve the puzzle I forgot how none of this matters irl Turns out in 1512 and 1518 a Swiss couple had two sons amongst their kids. The descendants of one (my 10th g-grandfather) went to Germany and stayed (my dad was born there) and the other's descendants (my 11th g-grandfather) also went to Germany and then to the US in 1717. Pedigree collapse doesn't bother me when there's almost half a millennium in between. I've been working on this for months, cross referencing DNA matches from various sites, their trees, shared matches....so satisfying to finally find them. And fun fact, my 11th g-grandfather noted above - his middle name is the same as my youngest son's first name. I didn't know he existed until recently, but that was fun for me. I mean I didn't know about this g-grandfather, I definitely knew my son existed. Since he's lived in my house since I expelled him from my body he's kind of hard to miss!

I’ve had limited results in using dna matches (mainly on ancestry) to figure things out in my tree. This usually involves practing what I refer to as bad genealogy, following so,e of the suggested parents (which is pulling from other people’s trees and those are often not sourced) and seeing what happens with my dna matches at that point (using through lines). I have backed into a correct sort of parents for a 2x great grandmother this way. Most folks are using something else and the suggest parents for that give me nothing. While the other one (which does have a basis as I’m discovering) has given me some matches. I have a couple of other branches where I can tell there are ties to a particular family. But the extract connection has yet to materialize. One of those I have given up using dna matches to figure out because of a phenomenon I’ve learned is called “tree collapse” and happens when you end up with first/second cousins marrying each other, (in my case, the descendants of multiple cousin marriages pop higher than they should on my dna matches and obscure the results. in the realm of fundies, would it count if I tell you that I have a branch of Spurgeon (Or Spurgin) dating back to colonial America (and involved an ancestor arriving here as an indentured servant that I think was in prison/jail)?

Spending another weekend deep in cross-referencing my families based on DNA to try to break a few brick walls and have to add another fundy adjacent name - Keller in Germany. I think it's so weird I'm into this as I have no contact or interest in living extended family. If I wanted to get all navel gazy about it I'd say it was very telling of my need to keep relationships and connections superficial. You don't get more superficial than "family" that only exists as names, dates, and positions on a tree. It's a nice way to feel a sense of family while still respecting my aversion to intimacy. ? If anyone has any tips of how you compare DNA to your tree to confirm stuff I'd love it if you share. The strict believers don't last many generations in my family. I mean my g-whatever grandfather was a Mennonite minister who fled religious persecution to the US in 1717. If the reason he came here with his children was true, then he must've been disappointed that so many of them married into local Lutheran and regular protestant population first generation. Yet the Bontrager's had some of their people carry it until ....is it Pa Bontrager's parents or grandparents who were still Mennonite? If we get a time machine perhaps I will go back and let my ancestor know the Bontrager patriarch was better at being Mennonite than he was. I mean why time travel if not to troll your ancestors?