Fundy adjacent family trees - anyone want to share?

[HerNameIsBuffy]

Let me preface this by saying I have no knowledge and even less interest in the family trees of the fundies on here so I'm strictly going by name but in the last few months I've made some progress on my trees and discovered that I am both Bontrager (Penna Dutch US line) and Arndt (Germany) adjacent.  

But the reason I am posting this is last weekend I found a Gotthard.  It was a first name, not surname and had the extra T....but if any of my kids ever go mining the old family tree for baby names I will delete that one before letting them log into my ancestry account.

Fun fact....my Gotthard was Catholic.  I bet David Waller felt a shiver right down the pleat of his carefully pressed khakis at the thought of a Catholic Got(t)hard.  

 

[Bethella]

I'm distantly related to David Daleiden, one the guys behind the Planned Parenthood Sting Videos from a couple of years ago. Prior to all of this he and his family were invited to a big family reunion but luckily none of them showed up. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Daleiden

[WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo?]

Some of my ancestors came west to join Horace Greeley's utopian Union Colony of Colorado. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Colony_of_Colorado

I haven't investigated it very much, but I don't think it was exactly fundy. Just Utopian and big on no drinking aka the "Temperance Movement". Of course, a few generations later, my grandma from that line married my alcoholic grandfather. I guess he might not have been obviously alcoholic yet when they married?

[HerNameIsBuffy]

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.  

 

 

On 5/27/2021 at 7:05 PM, WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo? said:

Some of my ancestors came west to join Horace Greeley's utopian Union Colony of Colorado. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Colony_of_Colorado

I haven't investigated it very much, but I don't think it was exactly fundy. Just Utopian and big on no drinking aka the "Temperance Movement". Of course, a few generations later, my grandma from that line married my alcoholic grandfather. I guess he might not have been obviously alcoholic yet when they married?

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?

 

[clueliss]

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)?