I am probably totally wrong, but I wonder looking at some obvious errors in judgment! (not by the saint!) in a few ancestors if that's at least a bit of the reason why I was warned against them by my respective parents, that it was some words of wisdom being handed down the generations: my dad and his dad warned against poorly designed or nonexistent wills, and an ancestor who was a shopowner in 1700s Boston had a bad will and it was contested so long that all the original inheritors died! Another ancestor, centuries earlier, helped against a king and oops lost his castles as a result, and I've always been warned to be very careful if/when one feels the moral/ethical necessity to rebel against authority.
I'm back to the 900s following one line and still have many other lines to pursue! Wouldn't it be fun if the documentation actually went back to when my Lifestyles in Ancient South Asia ends, 700?! I doubt it though, and most of my ancestors' documentation petered out long ago, even as early as the late 1800s.
Another wonder: the earliest ancestor whose documentation dies out was the one least loved of all I have heard of! He's said to have been a cruel man, and my great-grandmother left him though that was extremely frowned upon in those days. I was afraid to look at his ancestry but then thought Oh, I'd just worry he had a zillion criminals or something, and then there was NOTHING about him. Which may mean the very thing I was afraid of, but at least I don't know, which can be as in Ignorance is bliss.
But the brave great-grandmother's line is going on and on and is very interesting! Though isn't the royal line -- so far -- aren't all of us related to everybody else at some point? I did find where I share a very-great grandfather with George Washington!
a very-great grandfather's stained glass window;
he was born in Wales, died in England
a less-great grandmother who was a queen-consort of Sicily;
she was not Italian, though, but French
I also got confirmation of ancestors who were Native Americans, and another brave very-ish-great grandmother who climbed a mountain carrying my also-very-ish-great grandmother and very few belongings to escape the slavery of the American South in the Civil War era! So far no ancestors "owned" humans, but of course my line is not perfect -- and of course I'm not responsible for that!
But it's a very interesting feeling -- not only is the history fascinating, but I have a weird awareness of how VERY many people are back there! plus how very connected every single person is...
PS Btw, I'm mostly using others' work so far of course since I'm just starting, though when I run across a primary document it is so very fun....And NOTE by far the best information I have found is TOTALLY FREE online -- I got very short free-trial memberships elsewhere and found extremely unreliable information that wasn't even presented in a decent way and whose websites kept crashing! I just start with a google search now and it's going ever so much more quickly and reliably...I take my own notes in MS Word, with a separate doc for each generation; I gave up on writing it down as a graphic family tree, I'd need paper far larger than my studies' floor area...
