Heritage Album

Genealogy Question! What is the best way to find out if I have famous relatives?

I am signed up with ancestry.com and have traced my family name back to the early 1600's. I was wondering what the best way to find out if any of them were famous for something in their time. I know I can do individual searches on each and every one of them, but with more than 500 individuals that seems like it will take forever. Does anyone know of a way either on the website or a place I can import my tree into?

Public Comments

1. im not sure i wish i had the money to look up my ansester i was only able to trace back to my great great great grandfather and then i couldnt find anything but again i cant afford what ansestry.com wants for thier services. if you wanna help u can email me at serena20_03@yahoo.com.
2. Most people are pretty disappointed when they trace their trees. Families tended to marry into their social class - labourers married labourers daughters, miners marrried miners daughters, fishermen married fishermens daughters and so on. It can make many trees quite boring. One of my mums lines is a long line of blacksmiths, another is a long line of coal miners and yet another is a long line of fishermen. My dads line are almost all agricultural labourers. A pretty average lot really. After plugging away, I did eventually find one 2x great aunt (daughter of a labourer) who did marry well above her station into the eldest son of a Victorian Royal Physician. It didn't take long to find out that most of his other brothers and sisters had married into families of famous Victorian architects, politicians, doctors and early sportsmen, some of whom were pretty famous in their field. It also didn't take long to find the families of these people marrying into some of the minor duke and earldoms, which in turn led me to the Royal Family itself. All this makes me about six times removed by marriage from the current Earl of Belfast, but it's a tenuous non-blood link at best, and since I don't really plan on turning up at his country pile and asking to borrow £50, I don't boast about it. Still, I do have plenty of Victorian toffs in my tree, mainly just for a laugh and to see exactly how far I could go from the husband of my 2x great aunt. Many of them have articles in "The Dictionary of National Biography". Some online libraries have access to this database if you join. Certainly, the higher up the social scale you are looking, the easier it is to find articles. Some people left a larger paper trail behind them than others. Most poorer working class people like my mob didn't leave much of a paper trail at all, pretty much just standard birth, baptism, marriage, death and burial stuff. Hardly any of them had marked headstones, and to the best of my knowledge, none of them were ever sentenced to 24hours in the stocks for molesting a sheep. There are so many things about my ancestors lives that I will never know for certain, but I'm sure none of them ever amounted to very much. Someone has to be descended from the great and the good though, but it isn't me!!!
3. Tracing your family tree and their family tree is the only way you'll know. Now, Ancestry.Com is a great site. Be careful about information in family trees on their website or any website, whether you have to pay or not. The trees are subscriber submitted and mostly not documented or poorly documented. There are errors. You might see different info on the same people from different subscribers. Then you will see repeatedly the same info from different subscribers on the same people, but that is no guarantee at all it is correct. A lot of people copy without verifying. The information should only be used as CLUES as to where to get the documentation. Also, One World Tree on Ancestry.Com is nothing but trash.
4. Do a search on the web, everyone has a cousin that they haven't seen in years who has done some of the research already. in a search engine type in (your last name)+genealogy you can also try (your last name)+family Good Luck