Geniaus is one of my favourite Australian bloggers and I can easily follow her posts on Twitter. She likes to issue challenges from time to time and here is another Meme challenge – The Ancestors’ Geneameme. This was issued on Friday and I notice that there is already a good response so time to add mine to the list.
The list should be annotated in the following manner:
Things you have already done or found: bold face type
Things you would like to do or find: italicize (colour optional)
Things you haven’t done or found and don’t care to: plain type
You are encouraged to add extra comments in brackets after each item
Which of these apply to you?
- Can name my 16 great-great-grandparents (only 15 as I have one illegitimate gg grandparent)
- Can name over 50 direct ancestors
- Have photographs or portraits of my 8 great-grandparents
- Have an ancestor who was married more than three times
- Have an ancestor who was a bigamist
- Met all four of my grandparents (I would have liked to have met Mum’s father but he died when she was only 3 years old)
- Met one or more of my great-grandparents (seven were well and truly deceased by the time I came along but my grandmother’s mother was still alive and she died when I was 7 years old – but I have no recollection of her – my granny didn’t get on too well with her family so perhaps I never did meet her mother)
- Named a child after an ancestor (my son after the gg grandfather allegedly eaten by a crocodile in Oxley Creek, Brisbane – just one of my family ‘stories’)
- Bear an ancestor’s given name/s
- Have an ancestor from Great Britain or Ireland (lots – Cornwall, Northamptonshire, Staffordshire, Wiltshire in England; Angus in Scotland; Cavan, Armagh and Wicklow in Ireland)
- Have an ancestor from Asia
- Have an ancestor from Continental Europe (my father’s family were Norwegian)
- Have an ancestor from Africa
- Have an ancestor who was an agricultural labourer
- Have an ancestor who had large land holdings (even small land holdings would have been nice)
- Have an ancestor who was a holy man – minister, priest, rabbi (does a lay Baptist minister count?)
- Have an ancestor who was a midwife
- Have an ancestor who was an author
- Have an ancestor with the surname Smith, Murphy or Jones (hasn’t everyone?)
- Have an ancestor with the surname Wong, Kim, Suzuki or Ng
- Have an ancestor with a surname beginning with X
- Have an ancestor with a forename beginnining with Z (strangely I do – Zenobia)
- Have an ancestor born on 25th December (not a direct ancestor)
- Have an ancestor born on New Year’s Day (no – but I did have ancestors’ who married then)
- Have blue blood in your family lines
- Have a parent who was born in a country different from my country of birth
- Have a grandparent who was born in a country different from my country of birth
- Can trace a direct family line back to the eighteenth century
- Can trace a direct family line back to the seventeenth century or earlier (several English lines and my Norwegian line back to 1688)
- Have seen copies of the signatures of some of my great-grandparents
- Have ancestors who signed their marriage certificate with an X
- Have a grandparent or earlier ancestor who went to university
- Have an ancestor who was convicted of a criminal offence (too many of them!)
- Have an ancestor who was a victim of crime
- Have shared an ancestor’s story online or in a magazine (Tell us where) – I have been blogging on my website and have been writing articles for genealogy magazines for years and it’s surprising how many other distant relatives have contacted me because they have read these mags or Googled and found my blogs
- Have published a family history online or in print (Details please) – still working on it!
- Have visited an ancestor’s home from the 19th or earlier centuries (have visited all the places my ancestors lived in Australia but no ‘homes’ still exist
- Still have an ancestor’s home from the 19th or earlier centuries in the family
- Have a family bible from the 19th Century (a cousin has the family bible on my mother’s side)
- Have a pre-19th century family bible
Thanks for the response, Shauna.
I like that you called the parent illegitimate rather than the child.