'whut?' ancestral names in your lineage

Dorcas Slade, born early 1852 near Melksham, Wiltshire - awesome name

I also like the surname Glyde, which is one of the main ones on my mum's side. I'd never encountered it before starting to look into my family history recently after the death of my last grandparent.

Dorcas Slade, born early 1852 near Melksham, Wiltshire - awesome name

Very West Country.

Direct ancestor Reverend Henry Loveall, aka DESOLATE BAKER, purportedly a con-man of some sort from Cambridge, who had been thrown out of the Church of England and came to the US under an assumed name and took up preaching, only to be excommunicated again for immoral behavior and eventually lived the end of his life as a hermit.

William Raymond (1722-1818), known as ROCK RAYMOND because he built his cabin against a large rock.

Wolphert Gerretse van Couwenhoven (1579-1662), a baker from the Netherlands, early European settler of Long Island, NY

Otis Manly Spaulding
Archelaus Coffey
“Glasgow Bill” Cairns
Maximilian Bates
Sturgis Morehouse
Carl Josef Ferdinand Blomberg
Louisa Adelaide Ferris Long Carnahan
Birger Thorbjörnsson

another xp i hope my now 90 mom doesn't find out i posted this story on the interwebs *guilt feel*

Dorcas Slade, born early 1852 near Melksham, Wiltshire - awesome name

Very West Country.

Yeah? My whole dad's side of the family comes from the west country and it turns out that a lot of my mum's ancestors do as well, which I didn't previously know. Not from the area myself - my parents were a good bit further north by the time they met and I was born.

It just has a very West Country sound to it, Dawwwrrrcas Slade. With Brexit looming, my sister had a look into our ancestry (father's line) in a futile quest for an Irish passport but the connections were too far back and Irish records often don't go very far back - depending on religion, of course. Anyway, as she put it, it was just an alternating set of Thomases and Christophers and they were all labourers :( She did find a great uncle who played football for Hibs - and has a wiki page - who we didn't know about, though when she mentioned him to my mum, my mum said, "Oh him? You mean The Footballer?"

I quite fancy doing my family tree at some stage but if I have to physically access archives then for the last 150 years id have to go to at least 3 countries, none of which I live in. so it's never going to happen

oh, that should be 4 countries

It’s amazing what you can find online now. Between Ancestry and Familysearch you can find quite a lot. Sometimes the searching takes some skill and detective work. This is like my #1 hobby, I spend way too much time on this but I like the puzzle solving aspect of it. And unraveling old family mysteries is rewarding.

Ha, I can hear it now Tom D, yes.

I really enjoy the puzzle sorting part too, epistantophus.

I spend way too much time on this but I like the puzzle solving aspect of it.

I can see that. My mom got caught up in it late in life and it occupied her thoughts and inspired several expeditions around North America over at least a decade. I inherited the fruits of all that labor, since not a single other family member had any interest. The main reason my interest is tepid is that as one digs further into the past, beyond great-grandparents, the exponential growth in family lineages becomes overwhelming, and one's personal connection to any particular individual grows more and more tenuous.

At that point the only reasonable strategy it seems to me is to convert it into a treasure hunt, where the treasure is any individual ancestor out of the teeming crowd who has a remarkable personal story. Thus, one gets to cherry-pick the best stories and say, "my great-great-great-great-uncle was one of he first ten people ever to ascend in a hot air balloon", when in fact he was just one of a mass of 94 other great-great-great-great-uncles, none of whom were of much interest at all.

Mehitable Buck
Micajah Organ
2 guys named Philander, which a fair number of people in 19th century America thought was a fine name to give their baby son, although dictionaries say the meaning of "to screw around" dates back a century earlier.

Means lover of men I think?

Yeah, derived "from Greek philandros ‘fond of men’, from philein ‘to love’ + anēr ‘man’" Beats me how it went from that to "man who has sex with lots of women".

Mine’s only interesting (and searchable) on my dad’s maternal side because Huguenots wrote EVERYTHING down (and this family were very active in the Revolutionary War). Less accessible are the Swedish, Polish, Canadian or Irish Methodist bits of my family tree.

The Swedes kept meticulous records, back to the early 1700s at least. Pretty much everything is available online, but it’s not all searchable and you have to pay for it, at least that was the case when I was doing my Swedish genealogy. I used ArkivDigital. The only thing is that you have to know what parish(es) to look in, and what year(s). Then you have to be very patient with scrolling through old handwritten church records.

Not sure if he was a Philander, but I have a Philo in my tree. Philo Tolbert, born ca. 1723. The tiny bit of African heritage I have comes from him.

when I was a kid I was struck by how rare my surname (O' Dowd or just Dowd with dropped O) was in England but then when I went back to the motherland every summer it was almost as common as Smith over there. I remember looking it up in the phone book and we were the only Dowd's in Hudds despite it having a big Irish presence and thinking it is probably more of an indictment on the family name than signalling that we are unique in some way! Anyway I find the idea of doing self genealogy absolutely abhorrent when you go past the parents of dead family, who gives a flying fuck what any of them did. it's quite safe to conclude that most of them were complete fucking arseholes whether they gained some peripheral historical respectability at some point or not is my blazing hot take on this!

Some good French-Canadian names on my mom's side:

Hermine Spenard
Rosalie Cayouette
Eustache Beaupre
Cyrille Thibeau
Domithilde Filion
Narcisse Boudreau

My mom's uncle traced one line all the way back to a 16th-century Frenchman named Nicolas Bonhomme.

no doubt a very cold and aloof character!