English Archives - Zalewski Family Genealogy

But, What Do Mayflowers Bring?

Posted on 1 October 2012by Brian Zalewski

Embarkation of the Pilgrims - Robert Walter Weir - Mayflower

It has been a bit quiet on the genealogy front. I haven’t had as much time to do any research, but recently I have come across some extra time and interest.

I recently added another individual to my “Everything I Know” site. This is the first person I did a site for on my wife’s ancestry. He is James COLLINS. I picked him because we previously had his information down and also information on his parents. Then we ran across a new census record that threw all of that out the window. I try to put together the info we have now (or lack thereof) and try to see if we can track down his real parents.

While researching James COLLINS and getting lost down other lines of my wife’s ancestry, I (tentatively) traced one of her maternal lines back to Plymouth Colony Governor and Mayflower passenger William Bradford. I say tentatively since most of the info I found was surprisingly located on Find-A-Grave entries (sidenote: glad they added those “Family Links” options.) Though, I did back a lot of it up using other sources. I just need to now source and confirm her line back to the more researched lines, though it looks pretty solid. This now adds the “Mayflower Descendant” title to her maternal line along with the other previous titles of “(Tentative) Royal Descendant” and “Daughter of the American Revolution.” All I have on my lines so far is “Sort Of Related to Robert Goulet.”

I’m hoping that if these connections stay true, this will hopefully help our children feel more connected to history. It’s a known fact that I’ve posted about earlier, I didn’t really enjoy History classes very much in school. Though, once I started genealogy and felt more connected to these places and events, I can’t get enough of it anymore. Now when my daughter starts learning about Thanksgiving in school (probably one of the first historical things kids learn) we can tell her that one of the Pilgrims is her 12th-great-grandfather.

Photo: Embarkation of the Pilgrims – Robert Walter Weir – Public Domain – Wikipedia

English Family Tree Site

Family Tree Update

Posted on 11 June 2010by Brian Zalewski

I thought I’d do a general post about recent updates to family tree research and the site itself.

I just updated the Family Tree section of the website to the latest release of The Next Generation of Genealogy Site Building (TNG) to version 8.0. I have yet to see all of the new features and changes, but if previous versions are any indication, it should be pretty nice. So far, there is now a Calendar on the Dates & Anniversaries area, a nice photo viewer and slideshow (example), and many other “under-the-hood” tweaks. I also changed the background image/color of the family tree site to be a bit lighter. I noticed, even for my young 30-year-old eyes, that some of the smaller text was hard to read. It seems better. As always, please let me know if anything is hard to read or broken on the site. More than likely I just didn’t notice it yet.

On the family tree research front, I’m still going back through every census record for our families and inserting much more detailed source information, including house and family numbers and exact pages, etc. My previous sourcing wasn’t too good and I had accidentally deleted a lot of the details when I merged sources in my software. Anyway, it’s good to go back through. I’ve noticed some small details that I missed.

I haven’t broken down any major brick walls on my family recently, but I have added more people to my wife’s family tree. They are temporarily inserted as I find more credible sources. For example, some info was only found in Ancestry.com’s family trees area and I don’t exactly trust it due to many problems/wrong info in the past. But, it’s good to at least get the data in there so I can research it more in-depth. Again, her family history is much more “exciting” than mine. I say that with much humor, because all family breakthroughs are exciting. Her’s just has a lot more history with it, especially early American history. This latest line ties back into the ROGERS family of Connecticut, which seems to be pretty well-researched and rumored to be both possibly connected to the Mayflower and John the Martyr, but more research is obviously pending on those. We’ll just add that to the list with her connection to English royalty. *sarcastic eye roll* All kidding aside, doing Colonial American research is fun for me since my family is basically all European straight from Wisconsin (and some Canadian.)

I plan on doing an export and updating the info on the online family tree soon.

English Family Tree Personal

The Royal Line

Posted on 4 January 2009by Brian Zalewski

Hello again! Been doing a bit more research lately, so I’ve stepped up my postings (which isn’t too hard to do I guess.) Just remember that even if I’m not posting regularly, I am always available for comments, emails, research questions, etc. I just may not be actively searching at the time, but I will respond.

I was in the process of cleaning up my wife’s family tree yesterday so that I could print out some information to give to her parents as sort of a secondary gift. She had two names in her tree that were missing information. Those were her great-great grandparents on her maternal grandmother’s side. She said she had issues finding any information. So, since it’s been awhile since either of us had done any research on that line, I thought I’d log into Ancestry and just do a basic search. This “basic search” lasted me over 3 hours and gave us some amazing information.

I started by searching for Julius BANNACH, who is my wife’s great-grandfather, and then I’d work from there. My first search brought up Julius in another user’s family tree, named “Shannon Family Tree.” Julius’ wife was named Marie SHANNON, so this was good. I clicked on this link and it brought me to the tree and then I hopped on over to Marie’s information. Right away I saw that it had her parent’s names listed as George SHANNON and Mary DAKINS, so this is good information already. I am always aware that a lot of these trees do not list many sources, so I did enter this info with that in mind and a note to double-check what I can.

I entered the info and then went off to George SHANNON’s information. Sweet! This also lists his father and mother as Nathaniel SHANNON and Rosina Winslow ARNOLD. This is getting good. I keep doing this with the SHANNON line over and over. One odd thing I noticed is that she comes from a line of Nathaniel SHANNON’s that goes for like 7-8 in a row. What are the odds of that? (I guess creativity doesn’t run in the family. I kid.)

The SHANNON line finally runs it’s course in the year 1655 in Londonderry, Ireland. Ok, so I started this, I was going to finish it and enter what I can. So I started by going back and running each line until it ends.

Long story short, I don’t think I’ll ever get all of this info entered into our tree since I’ve now connected my wife (obviously tentatively, need to check the sources) to multiple Dukes, Barons, Counts and Kings of England. Basically, once you break that seal you have access to so much information and connections since millions of people can trace their lines back here and thousands of people have done the research already. Fortunately, I have a copy of one of the Family Forest CDs, so I can see just how far back this line can go….very far. Sadly, my wife has cooler relatives than me, all I could connect myself to was Robert Goulet.

So, as I work my way through her line to double-check the sources and connections, it does give me some more interest in the Peerage and Royalty of England and also sparks my research bug again.

Has anyone else connected themselves to Royalty or other famous people?