Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

-


Calling all Genea-Musings fans:

It's Saturday Night again—

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission: Impossible music, please!):

  1. Our family trees contain ancestors who came from places all over the world. Every branch of our family tree began somewhere.
  2. Can you identify your Farthest-Flung Ancestor (FFA)? Who in your ancestral tree was born the greatest distance from where you live today? What brought them—or their descendants—to the place your family eventually called home?

My Farthest-Flung Ancestor

Although I have identified only a handful of immigrant ancestors, I know that my ancestry is primarily European. Using the FamilySearch Family Tree, I noted the birthplaces for several ancestral lines with known origins:

  • Crawford — South Lanarkshire, Scotland
  • Dutch lines — Friesland, Netherlands
  • Dutch lines — Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Briles — Baden-Württemberg, Germany
  • Hammond — Lavenham, Suffolk, England

Curious to see which ancestor truly lived the farthest from my home in Seneca, Kansas, I asked Perplexity AI to calculate the approximate distance from each location. When a range of distances was provided, I used the shortest estimate.

The results were:

  • Briles (Baden-Württemberg, Germany): approximately 4,800 miles
  • Crawford (South Lanarkshire, Scotland): approximately 4,300 miles
  • Hammond (Lavenham, Suffolk, England): approximately 4,300 miles
  • Dutch lines (Friesland/Amsterdam, Netherlands): approximately 4,200–4,500 miles

Based on those calculations, my Farthest-Flung Ancestor is from my Briles line.

That distinction belongs to Johannes Breyhel, who emigrated from what is now Baden-Württemberg, Germany, and arrived in Virginia in 1718. His decision to cross the Atlantic began the American story of the Briles family—a journey that, over three centuries later, eventually led one of his descendants to Seneca, Kansas.

Now it's your turn. Who is your Farthest-Flung Ancestor, and what path did your family take to arrive where you live today?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Not Indexed

-
Image
I've been watching my Blogger stats and have noticed that Google is not listed as a referring site. Thus, I began to wonder why. I've been thru the settings and Google's Search Console and I haven't found an answer. So, I'm going to document what I see and then reach out for help. This morning, I tried a Google search for 'briles pauline'. I knew I had several posts on my Wordpress blog about her and that I had re-posted at least one of those posts on my Blogger blog.
Read more

Conflicting Information

-
Image
Do you use Ancestry's 'leaf' hints? If so, do you occasionally find a hint or two that have information that doesn't fit with what you already know about the person or family? I usually find such hints among the multitude of hints for the people in my trees. Usually, those 'incorrect' hints are 'way off'. These 'way off' hints are for events in England when the person/family is living in the United States. Today, however, I came across a hint for a death date that was a few months off of the date shown on Find a Grave. The hint was and index record with reference to a film number on Family Search for District of Columbia Deaths and Burials, 1840-1964. Even though the death date was different, the family names matched.
Read more

Ancestry Hints: Public vs Private Tree

-
Image
I'm writing in response to Russ Worthington 's comment on the Genea-Musing's blog post, When Did Ancestry.com Last Index Ancestry Member Trees ? In the comment, Russ brings up the issue of hints not showing. Since I haven't noticed an issue with 'missing' hints on my un-indexed tree, Russ's post made me question whether I was indeed missing hints. However, I did notice one difference between my tree and Russ's experiment. I work with a public tree and Russ' test was with a private tree. Thus, I wanted to know whether public trees produced hints when the tree lacked Ancestry sources. Thus, I needed a public tree (small) without Ancestry sources. Since I've been searching for Judson Crawford to see if my tree was indexed, I decided to create a small public tree on Ancestry for Judson Crawford, his wife, children and parents.  My first attempt at creating the tree was to drag Judson and his family into a new tree. When I tried to use TreeS...
Read more