Tracing roots

[wtnhighlander]

No, not THAT kind, the other kind. 

I take an occassional interest in tracing my family tree. Not enough to do the research that used to be necessary, but the interwebs make laziness work. I happened across an entry in the LDS familysearch.org web site, for one of my paternal ancesters from about 5 generations back. From there, I was able to follow the line (same web site) all the way to a person born in Ireland in 1365 (with supporting docs), and on to a man born in 1280 (with sketchy docs).

Anyone know how reliable the LDS website actually is? This kind of blew my mind.

[Tom King]

I don't know about that website.  It's been some years since I spent a lot of time on Ancestry and haven't kept up with the advances since then.

If you went that far back, you must have a Gateway Ancestor that ties to royalty and you should be able to keep going.    I finally quit when I had over 6,000 ancestors and went all the way back through Roman history. There was no end to it that I could ever get to.  Royalty always came from royalty and there were some sort of records kept.  I learned a lot of history that means more now too.  If one branch ends there are many others so if you back up a generation or two and go again, you can probably keep going.

For every major battle in Europe in history, I had ancestors leading both sides.  If you read about one such leader getting burned in the field after losing a battle, that was my direct ancestor that got burned and also a direct ancestor that did the burning.

Some luck is involved though.  My 6th Great Grandfather had five boys. My 5th GGF was the only one that went South from Jamestown and then the family went very slowly West to here.  The other 4 boys had all their records burned during the Revolution so those chains were broken.  Only by good luck were all my family's roots not broken.

Also, when you go back not that many generations, the tree starts going the other way instead of continuing to spread.  I forgot how many generations you have to go back but by the time you get to twenty something maybe, if the tree continued to spread you get to the point that not that many people had ever been born in the history of the world so the tree starts narrowing back down.

[Beechwood Chip]

One evening my brother asked me if I knew where in Poland our grandparents lived before coming to the US.  I didn't, but I sat down with ChatGPT giving me suggestions and a few hours later had the town name, and the ship's manifest listing my grandparents and great-uncle Rudolph.  

[Coop]

A few years ago before AI, I would have believed almost anything I researched but nowadays, I wonder the accuracy, even and including documents. Even if the most recent is verified by what you already know to be true.  I’m not saying this to dispute anything that is found. 

[Beechwood Chip]

On 1/15/2026 at 9:07 PM, Coop said:

A few years ago before AI, I would have believed almost anything I researched but nowadays, I wonder the accuracy, even and including documents. Even if the most recent is verified by what you already know to be true.  I’m not saying this to dispute anything that is found. 

An excellent point, but in my case ChatGPT merely suggested how to search, and I found the actual documents in the Ellis Island historical archives.

[wtnhighlander]

@Coop makes an excellent point, but the validity of information from "the internet" was questionable long before AI hit the scene.

[Coop]

One of the reasons I read non-fictional or semi non- fictional novels. 

[Tom King]

I think it won't be long before it all just pops up when you ask.  Pretty soon the data centers will have everything and it will be accessible very quickly.  We just have to keep paying the electricity bill.

[wtnhighlander]

That electricity bill is starting to be astounding. A digital currency "bank" was recently built in town. It occupies maybe 2 acres, but required the municipal utility to construct a new substation to feed it, equivalent to a medium sized light-industrial factory complex. I hear the AI datacenters are even worse.

[Von]

My late father was heavily into ancestry research. He was fairly serious, traveling to find original documents in courthouses and the like around the U.S. As a datapoint, he mainly used ancestry.com. I've never heard of familysearch.org

What I understood from him is there is a lot of misleading information out there because people want to believe they are related to famous people or have otherwise interesting ancestry, and hence this incentivizes services to sell the most exciting story they can based on sketchy data. 

That said, he did come across situations where he connected to someone's validly researched family tree and got a trove of information all at once as you describe, so I believe it's possible.

If it matters, I would suggest caveat emptor.

 

[Mark J]

10 hours ago, wtnhighlander said:

That electricity bill is starting to be astounding.

I find it curious that data centers don't have, and aren't required to have, roof top solar.  It needn't power the center directly, but could put something back on the grid.  Seems like a lost opportunity. 

[Mark J]

We went to Ellis Island some time back.  We were able to find that my maternal grandfather had come over on the Olympic.  I thought that was brave, since it was a couple of years after her sister ship, Titanic, had sunk.

To be honest, I'm not so curious about my roots that I would do a full on ancestry search.  To quote Popeye, I yam what I yam.

Now I suppose if I found out I was a Nigerian prince....

[gee-dub]

@Mark J - Back in the day we did a lot to disguise data centers.  One did not advertise their vulnerable points.  We would hide locomotive sized generators under corrugated lean-to roofing that looked like a tire shop.  Centers were placed in "clean industry" business parks and so forth.  Of course when you got to the scale of Abovenet, GlobalCenter, or Exodus this kind of goes out the window.  One of the advantages to downtown San Jose was that you could have an Abovenet site on floor 7 and 11 in an otherwise innocuous office building.  Hiding in plain site as it were.  No data center up until the co-lo explosion had a sign out front.  They were meant to look boring and even neglected.  All this experience is from a has-been-used-to-be guy.

As to ancestry; we have records tracing us back to Scotland (on mom's side) and German / Irish (on dad's side).  With names like Glendening, Ó Brollacháin (Anglesized as Bradley), "Irish" (from when they just used where you were from as your last name), Dubh (Gaelic), and Schwarze (Anglesized as Black like the Irish Dubh) you have got a real Heinz 57 Sauce runnin' through my veins.

[Tom King]

I call BS on the conspiracy theory about ancestry.com lying about their data to fool people.  They have available what people put in.  If you get a clue about a previous generation, you can pull up what information there is available.  There were very good ship records kept before the Revolution because the King got a good chunk of money from everyone coming in or being sponsored.  You can use that to get to the Christening church records in England.  You might not find the exact date of birth but you can get pretty close by Christening records.

I'm sure once you get back before William the Conqueror the records get harder to find if there is no royalty.  He took a very thorough census even including what farm animals anyone owned.  But if you have direct royalty information any time before the Revoluition, the Y chromosome line is pretty easy to follow.  It was said that Charlemagne was the Father of Europe, and that is not far from the truth.  He married his Granddaughters off to royalty all over Europe.  He is my 39th through 46 GGF probably thousands of times.

DNA will tell you what percentage of your makeup came from where.  Mine and everyone I went to Elementary School with is 100% or close to it DNA from England.  I grew up in a county not 100 miles from Jamestown.  In 1720 the King started giving away a thousand acres of land to anyone that wanted it here.  There were no Western boundaries to the newly formed Brunswick County, Va. because they didn't know what was out there or even how far it went.  It was wilderness.   

At least half the kids I went to Elementary school with in the 1950's were descendants of people who had taken this free land.  All the wives of my ancestors on my Y chromosome line were from these families and I can see others on all the branches off from those.

Your Gateway ancestor from the pre-Revolution days here did not have to be the King himself.  If you were not the first born, you had to find something else to do.  My 7th and 8th GGF's on my Y chromosome line were ships captains.  One was the one who brought Smallpox into Jamestown on his ship.  There are plenty of records for these people.

My fourth GGF on my Y line came here from 50 miles East when his Father died to go to work for an Uncle who was a builder.  The records of that Uncle were broken for a couple of generations because of fires burning up records, so we don't know exactly his line without a couple of skips.  I was just lucky to have an unbroken line.

I didn't know any of this before I started spending time on Ancestry.com over a decade or so ago, and I expect there is much more information available now.

Before then, I didn't know anything before my GGF that had been passed down by word of mouth.  He was one of three boys that went to fight with Stonewall Jackson in the Civil War.  At the first battle, one brother was killed and they thought another one was killed.  Stonewall Jackson put my GGF at the back of the line to take care of the horses since the other two out of three had been killed.  After the war was over, the second Brother walked up to the  home house missing an arm.  I might not be here today but for good luck by the skin of my teeth.

When I joined Ancestry.com, all the other generations behind him started coming up one at the time.  My second GGF was born the year my third GGF died after his record as a hero during the Revolution, all well documented.  We're all here just by a lot of good luck.

 

[wtnhighlander]

@Mark J, my region is pretty poor for gathering solar energy. There is a rest stop on I-40 near Ford's new 'Blue Oval City'. It has nearly 10 acres of solar panels just to power the rest stop building.

Side note: Blue Oval was going to be producing F150EVs, but has recently dropped that plan in favor of ICE-powered pickups. I think they realized the EV trend was not quite ready for prime-time when applied to heavier vehicles. At least, not from the viewpoint if cost effectiveness.

[legenddc]

On 1/16/2026 at 9:15 AM, gee-dub said:

@Mark J - Back in the day we did a lot to disguise data centers.  One did not advertise their vulnerable points.  We would hide locomotive sized generators under corrugated lean-to roofing that looked like a tire shop.  Centers were placed in "clean industry" business parks and so forth.  Of course when you got to the scale of Abovenet, GlobalCenter, or Exodus this kind of goes out the window.  One of the advantages to downtown San Jose was that you could have an Abovenet site on floor 7 and 11 in an otherwise innocuous office building.  Hiding in plain site as it were.  No data center up until the co-lo explosion had a sign out front.  They were meant to look boring and even neglected.  All this experience is from a has-been-used-to-be guy.

I'll try to grab some pics of all the data centers around me next time my wife is driving and we go by one. They're not hidden at all anymore. Right next to shopping centers, highways, etc. 

[Chet]

On 1/15/2026 at 3:31 PM, wtnhighlander said:

Anyone know how reliable the LDS website actually is? This kind of blew my mind.

I grew up in Utah until my Sophomore year in high school and even back then the mormon church was known for the depth and accuracy of their genealogical records.

 

On 1/16/2026 at 8:44 AM, wtnhighlander said:

Side note: Blue Oval was going to be producing F150EVs, but has recently dropped that plan in favor of ICE-powered pickups. I think they realized the EV trend was not quite ready for prime-time when applied to heavier vehicles. At least, not from the viewpoint if cost effectiveness.

I just read an article the other day saying Ford was getting rid on the EV F-150 because even though it was popular they weren't turning a profit on them.  They are keeping the Lightning name but moving it to their plug-in Hybrid pick-up

[fcschoenthal]

I just read that the Meta's (Facebook) new Hyperion data center in Louisiana is 5 miles long by 1 mile wide. Kind of hard to hide that one.

[Mark J]

Dats a lotta space for solar, just saying .