I’m preparing a lesson on how to do genealogy for my ward (they’re having me train the FHE groups, two tomorrow and two next week, because our stake has a goal to have every member find two names and take them to the temple before August 4), and I randomly decided to look up Abram W. Houchins and Martha Sneed on Ancestry’s OneWorldTree. And holy toledo, there’s a ton. Hundreds if not thousands of names for their ancestors. How far? Back to, oh, 90 A.D. Yes, that’s not a typo. Now, I don’t know how much I trust it all — that’s 50+ generations and could all be completely made up — but it’s exciting to think that it just might be real. There’s royalty (King Aethelbert and King Egbert, for example), and all sorts of stuff. Towards the end of the line you get bogus information, though, like the “Sicambrian King of Canada” and Helen of Troy. Yes, that Helen, the daughter of Priam. Somehow I don’t quite think she fits in. :)

Anyway, it’s a ton of information. I wish Ancestry would let you download a GEDCOM, because otherwise it’s going to mean slowly typing it all in by hand so that I have it in my file, which will then allow me to verify it all. Beyond’s going to become really handy as far as that goes — it’ll automatically grey out any unverified information (information without a source attached), so I can throw in all of this potential material and see at a glance that it’s not verified. And then the work of going through it all will begin. But it’s exciting to see where our ancestors may have come from, in the different parts of England. There’s the de Aldithley family from Heleigh Castle (in Audley, Staffordshire, England), for example, and one of them was named Lynulphus. How cool is that? :) And there’s Margaret Downes, born in 1446 in Pott Shrigley (Prestbury, Cheshire, England). The royal lines come out of France and Germany and such. (Or “Austrasia” as it was called.)

So, where I thought we had no information on Abram W. Houchins and Martha Sneed’s parents, we have a mountain. A huge, veritable, larger-than-life mountain.

Here’s the OneWorldTree pedigree once you get back to the 1000s:

But of course the pedigree spreads out tremendously when you’re back that far. It would be really nice to be able to print an overview of it all, just to get a feel where the lines are, but PAF doesn’t let you do that (to my knowledge). And I haven’t entered all the information in yet. I’m thinking Beyond will have to be able to make supercharts.

So anyway, I’m wondering how much other information on our other lines is in OneWorldTree. No sense in reproducing work that’s already been done. (And for the research that has been done, it doesn’t hurt to verify it all and make sure we have valid sources, lest we seal ourselves to the wrong families.) I think I’ll start going through OneWorldTree and see what I can find. (I know, for example, that there’s a lot of info on Asberry Bailey and Mary Pauline Haire, on Broadus’s line.)

But at the moment I’m going to sit back and revel in the fact that I’m related to King Aethelbert, whoever he was. ;)

Posted in Houchins, Sneed
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