Your ethnic composition?

[ilikeverin]

Didn't we have a thread about this like... a month ago?

Anyway, my mom's side is from Ireland (both the Northern and southern parts) and my dad's side is largely Generic WASP.  My paternal ancestors, with the exception of the ones where I got my Y chromosome and last name from, seem to have been in the United States since the early 1800s, if not earlier.  That Y-chromosome-last-name couple, however, is from somewhere I thought was indecipherable:



However, upon looking at it again, it seems that they might be from "H. Cossell"; in other words, Hesse-Kassel.  I wonder whether Herr Trondheim approves of such a location   Of course, it might be entirely possible that the above couple are not related to me at all—particularly because their six-year-old son is named Lewis when he ought to be John or Peter—but the details fit too well with the 1870 family living in an appropriate part of Illinois with an appropriate child appropriately named "Peter" who was born at the appropriate place and time to be the same person as the 1880 "John P." living in the same Illinois county who I know for a fact is my great-great-grandfather.

Yay genealogy

[ilikeverin]

Verily, that's fascinating... whenabouts did they live?  I could try to find census records for you, if it's 1850-1930 (though 1890's were burnt to a crisp).

[ilikeverin]

Verily, that's fascinating... whenabouts did they live?  I could try to find census records for you, if it's 1850-1930 (though 1890's were burnt to a crisp).

Actually, they weren't burnt. Part of them were burnt, and the water that was used to put out the fire made the pages of the census stick together and then grew moldy. [/useless trivia technicality]

No genealogical trivia is too trivial

[ilikeverin]

Verily, that's fascinating... whenabouts did they live?  I could try to find census records for you, if it's 1850-1930 (though 1890's were burnt to a crisp).

Trust me, the family has tried. There are some very dedicated genealogists in parts of the Byrne line who have tried, but they all say things dead end with Peter Byrne and Bridget Heaton. (The rest can be traced at least to colonial America except the Feldts, who immigrated from Sweden in  the 1890s.) As I recall, Peter Byrne and Bridget Heaton would have been in the 1860s or so, with Peter Byrne abandoning her around 1870. And actually he must have been my great-great-great-grandfather, thinking about the dates. I get it all confused.

We do know that Bridget Heaton claimed to be a widow on her census forms even though Peter Byrne was definitely alive and well and filling out census forms in Alabama. The trouble is with finding out anything about their families; even if they weren't either of them orphans, both clearly came from very impoverished New York City families. But neither mentions parents on their census forms.

I see a Peter C. Byrne (b. c. 1810) in Baldwin, Alabama in 1850, 1860, and 1870, and a Bridget Heaton (b. c. 1839) in New York City in 1860, but I'm too lazy to check alternate spellings and such

Incidentally, it's impossible that they mentioned marital status but not place of birth of parents on census forms; marital status is only asked from 1880 on, which is when parental birth is introduced.  I suppose the only exception would be if the parents' location of birth were specifically listed as "Unknown" or "United States of America", which is possible.  It's also true that there are lots of mistakes in those two columns, including my great-great-grandmother who answered different states every time she was asked until finally she just ended up saying "United States of America" (even more amusing is that I tracked down her parents and determined that not only did she answer different states each time she never even said the correct ones!)