MennoNet and Genealogy

[Ernie]

This past week, I've started digging into my genealogy for the first time.

I'm using FamilySearch.org and its sub-site RelativeFinder.org

[Ernie]

I just learned that my wife and I are seventh cousins.

I'm supposedly a descendent of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I of Habsburg who dealt ruthlessly with my spiritual forbearers. But after researching it more for a couple hours, there is really no good proof of this currently. He is supposed, by some, to be the great-grandfather of Bishop Hermann Isaac op den Graeff, who signed the Dordrecht Confession of Faith.

PM me your ID number from FamilySearch and I can tell you how closely we are related.
And I can even post the results here on Mennonet if you are fine with that.

[Ken]

I just learned that my wife and I are seventh cousins.

I'm supposedly a descendent of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I of Habsburg who dealt ruthlessly with my spiritual forbearers. But after researching it more for a couple hours, there is really no good proof of this currently. He is supposed, by some, to be the great-grandfather of Bishop Hermann Isaac op den Graeff, who signed the Dordrecht Confession of Faith.

PM me your ID number from FamilySearch and I can tell you how closely we are related.
And I can even post the results here on Mennonet if you are fine with that.

My daughter and I did our family trees on geneology.com and traced many of the threads back to the 1500s.

Do Ancestry.com and FamilySearch talk to each other or are they completely separate? I don't even know.

[ohio jones]

Many people who descend from 18th century Mennonite or Amish immigrants to PA are seventh cousins or closer.

Sunbeam and I are sixth cousins. Mike and I are fourth cousins once removed, fifth cousins once removed, fifth cousins twice removed, and sixth cousins once removed, depending on which branch you look at.

[Ernie]

Mike and I are fourth cousins once removed, fifth cousins once removed, fifth cousins twice removed, and sixth cousins once removed, depending on which branch you look at.

what site or page do you get this sort of info.

[Ernie]

I'm wondering how I can learn which of my ancestors were repeated the most in the past 10 generations.

[Josh]

My family is related to a specific Amish-Mennonite family line (Overholts) at about the 9th cousin level.

There was a lady who got married and moved to what is present day Germany. One of her children gave rise to the Overholts, who eventually all become Amish or Mennonites. Then her husband died so she moved back to England and married someone there. Those descendants generally became Quakers.

Interestingly, the descendants of them both migrated to America right at about the same time, and even to the same area.

My nephew (who has no plain background) is married to a girl from the Overholt lineage, so they are roughly around 9th or 10th cousins.

Upon doing some further research, there were a whole bunch of these Quaker-Amish/Mennonite "pairings" where people who were 3rd or 4th cousins or so would both migrate to Pennsylvania at the same time in the 1700s.

Of note is that the Quakerism in my family completely died out; my great grandma practiced it but my grandma did not. Whereas the Amish-Mennonite side, has been able to preserve Anabaptism to this day.

[ohio jones]

what site or page do you get this sort of info.

I have my data in RootsMagic. When I find a connection in Family Search, I add the relevant info and run the relationship calculator.

[Josh]

Russian Mennonites (or people married to one) tend to like to store their info in "Grandma Online".

[Neto]

Russian Mennonites (or people married to one) tend to like to store their info in "Grandma Online".

This is a site that is specifically about people from Dutch Mennonite heritage.
So also the Mennonite History and Genealogy FaceBook group, of which I am a member. I'm sure I have a number on GMOL (GrandMa OnLine), but I do not have a subscription. All of my ancestors are Plautdietsch, so as I say, "I don't have as man ancestors as most people". (Because a lot of them are the same people...) I reckon it's much the same for people of Swiss Brethren background. (Our daughter & her husband are distantly related to one another around 6 different ways, and not only am I not of any Swiss Brethren extraction at all, but this is only from looking in the 'Raber Book".)