My family is descended from Rev. John Lothrop[0], who came across on the Griffin in 1634. The high literacy rate among Puritans and their subsequent notability through the colonial years left many, many records of them and their progeny.

He is also an ancestor of the Bush clan - among many others. At some point, everyone is related to everyone. :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lothropp

> At some point, everyone is related to everyone. :)

Good video from numberphile: https://youtu.be/Fm0hOex4psA

> I've always been amazed by this ability to track your ancestors hundreds of years back. Were the records that good back then?

"... between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 percent and 95 percent, quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time. The literacy rate for women in those colonies is estimated to have run as high as 62 percent in the years 1681-1697.

"... Since the male literacy rate in seventeenth-century England did not exceed 40 percent, we may assume, first of all, that the migrants to New England came from more literate areas of England or from more literate segments of the population, or both. In other words, they came here as readers and were certain to believe that reading was as important in the New World as it was in the Old. Second, from 1650 onwards almost all New England towns passed laws requiring the maintenance of a "reading and writing" school, the large communities being required to maintain a grammar school as well."

-- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Would the group of literate people contain enough people also concerned with accurate record keeping? They seem to be relatively distinct and not necessarily overlapping skills or interests. And plenty of record get lost no matter how well they're kept. Fires, floods, disinterest, etc.

But for some people such a lineage is like a vanity address. And they will go out of their way to dig up a connection like this and absent that they will create one. Throughout the world it's pure gold especially for politicians, it establishes the kind of historical legitimacy and connection to land and country that's far more exclusive than "just" joining the military (the other common vehicle for populist patriotism, even if one would never be exposed to any real danger).

> They seem to be relatively distinct and not necessarily overlapping skills or interests.

Actually, literacy is a prerequisite for record keeping.

I think what they meant was that having an interest in literacy doesn't mean someone is also interested in record keeping.

In the USA, 10-year census records since 1790 and immigration records are great resources. The LDS church has done a lot of work microfilming many church and government records that remain available, and has had volunteers transcribing and indexing them. For the British Isles, property records are a good resource - if the people being researched owned or bequeathed property. Research-sharing sites such as ancestry.com can help connect Nth cousins who may be looking for the same remote ancestors.

My wife has managed to track one line of her ancestry (the Swiss line) back to 985. Swiss church records (Kirchenbücher) are online and extremely good.

Wow, that's amazing. Come to think of it, many people were simply born at home and not registered with the state in the 1900's, but they would get baptised, so the Church should hold the record of that.

I think the Soviet Union's laws against the Church might've player a role in the loss of records.

Because Switzerland has been so stable. Records tend to get "lost" en-masse only when there's a genocidal army bearing down.

My grandmother traced her family back to the 30 years war. No records after that. Churches are a very good source for that in Europe. That being said, I never understood the obsession with lineage.

This is like the Christian version of tracing your lineage back to when your lineage was a liability. If you're Jewish or have ancestry in the Balkans the dead end when all the old records were burned might be far more recent. It just happens that the wars of the 1500s and 1600s was the last time being the wrong kind of Christian was a big problem.

why not? What's the harm in knowing.

No harm, it's more that after a certain amount of generations the information becomes pretty irrelevant. You arbitrarily choose to follow certain lines (for prestige or historical significance) and necessarily disregard others. Going back to the 1600s, you descend in equal part from one lineage you mention and many thousand others which remain entirely unknown.

No harm, I'm just not that interested in that kind of stuff it seems.

I understand your sentiment, but I gain humility and inspiration knowing how my ancestors lived and the sacrifices they made to have a better life.

To each his own.

There's also the reciprocal promise: we try to remember our ancestors and hope our descendants will remember us.