sadly, she could have also given birth prematurely (common with twins) and one twin was weaker than the either. But you are right that we may never know for sure. Loss at the time was rarely an open topic.
Twins can become growth restricted in the womb causing premature birth, stillbirth or miscarriages. It’s more likely that the twins were premature as one passed away.
Exactly this! I had similar questions when I realized my father was born only 7 months after his parents' wedding, but my dad and my grandma both confirmed he was born 2 months early after a very difficult pregnancy and traumatic delivery, and almost died as a newborn because of it.
I just came from Max's video. This is interesting. I'd love to do my family. Me & my cousins found out that our paternal great grandfather changed the family name but nobody knows why. Our grandmother spoke Polish at home but insisted that we were NOT Polish but German. We were all confused when we did our Dna tests around the same time and there was zero German ancestry. Which is doubley weird because her first husband, our dad's father, was supposed to be German too! He even had a German name. My mom's mom's side gets stuck because of the name Smith.
Given the generation and the Polish vs. German debate, it is likely this is almost certainly mixed up with WWII (although, depending on your age I may be off by 20-30 years). Is there any chance an ancestor was stolen as part of the Lebensborn program? Was someone in hiding to avoid being found by the authorities, and had to take on a new identity and nationality? It is even possible that you have pro-facist family members who needed to escape from the approaching Soviets, hoping for more lenient dealings from the Americans. As I said, I can't say for sure without knowing the age of your relations, nor more specific information from the DNA tests, but whenever there is any confusion in Europe regarding recordkeeping pre-1948, there is a good chance that WWII is the cause (either as an attempt to hide existing information, or as the result of combat destruction).
I find this one interesting because my mom always led me to believe her father's parents were Germanic, but when I did my first DNA test, I had more Polish than anything, and when I told my mom, she said yes, her dad's parents were both Polish [my mom has like 0 interest in this sort of thing, so its no wonder] and well, her maiden name sounds German [technically, her paternal grandparents were from AH empire and Russia, but well, both were Actually Polish]
The probable scenario is that she was Prussian. Until the 1870's, there was no "Germany." And when Germany did appear on the map, a good portion was in modern day Poland. (And for MANY years, there was no Poland either, which had changed hands (and I am really simplifying things here) and been divided between Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia. In Prussia, there were many ethnically Polish people, but there were also a good number of Germanic people as well. (And yes, they DID intermarry.) In my own family, which was from Prussia, but all from within modern-day Poland, there were ethnic Poles, but there were also ethnic Germans. These Germans, however (in my case) had become a bit Polonized. The German men had married Polish women, and in most cases were Catholic rather than Protestant. (Not the case for everyone, and there were plenty who remained Protestant. ) And in any case, yes, they too spoke Polish. The Poles were their neighbors, friends, and in many cases family, despite many tensions between the two groups over the years. When you look at our DNA, we do not resemble modern Germans, despite definite "German" ancestry. Rather, we resemble most the people of Poland, among whom we lived for hundreds of years. (In some cases, Germans were inhabiting the area since at least the 1300's. My guess is that your Grandma was right, in that she felt and identified as a German. But most likely, the family did not originate in the modern borders of Germany, but in the former Prussian areas of modern-day Poland. If you look at the vital records of 1874 onward, you will see that these "Polish" records are actually written in German.
The border between Germany and Poland switched or became muddled multiple times in history, so it's possible her family lived in one of the contested border regions that considered themselves culturally German, but were native Polish.
@@MR-or6yvit’s also possible that they arrived in the US at a time when Poles were discriminated against. Claiming to be German would be more socially acceptable. That presumes they arrived after 1871 when Germany formed of course.
Oh, the hidden family secrets, especially on my grandmother’s side! Her mother, my Great grandmother Alida, never talked about her family to her children at all. Somehow, my great aunt Dorothy did find out why and shared it in a letter to a cousin’s son that he has since posted on Ancestry decades after Dorothy passed. When Great Grandma Alida was 12, her mother died of appendicitis at just age 31. Her father tried to keep the family together, but gave up after a year, farmed his three eldest daughters out to his in-laws, put his only son Bill into a Chicago orphanage, and took the baby with him when he moved hundreds of miles away from the rest of his kids. It seems that all of those children resolved to forget everything about their family history because absolutely nothing was passed down to any of the descendants. I connected with Bill’s granddaughter through Wikitree, and she said her father told her that Bill took all of his family photos when he had his first house built and bricked them up behind the fireplace-he never wanted to see his father’s face again, understandably so, imo. My Great Grandfather Jesse had a few stories to pass down, but just some vague details and one specific “fact” that my 6th great granduncle was Alexander Hamilton. (Turns out my research revealed that while I do have AN Alexander Hamilton in that spot, it’s not THE Hamilton. When I connected with a grandson of Jesse’s brother last month, I had to break that news to him, since that was the only story he had ever heard about his grandfather’s family. Bummed him right out.) However, I did find out why Jesse might not have talked much else about his family. His mother, my 2nd great grandmother Carrie, walked out on her marriage when Jesse was just five. She took the girls with her, but had to leave the boys behind with her ex. It took her five years to get all four of her children back with her. She did (and paid) everything to do so, but I imagine a young Jesse just being really confused over why his mom was no longer with him. Then she went on to become a real independent woman with no interest in following society’s rules, which I can imagine that, if he even knew half of what his mom did in her 50s and 60s, Jesse was not interested in sharing with his impressionable daughters. (She spent the 1920s as a trance medium and Spiritualist pastor in Oklahoma City, and her third husband was a “divine healer.” She was arrested for illegal fortune telling and her appeal was reported in papers across the country, since she and her lawyer were trying to get the appellate court to rule on whether Spiritualism was a religion.)
A crossover I didn't expect! But absolutely love. Sometimes it can be really hard to trace people and this was one of them. The oyster pirating bit was really interesting to me.
Being a genealogist really is like being a detective, isn't it!! Complete with some of the same digging up of unexpected secrets 🤯Loved your explanation of your research journey, and the interesting historical side notes (like the oyster pirates! 🏴☠️) Max's genealogy is a great example of how basic demographic records like censuses can bring to light some pretty unexpected family stories...? And how much lateral thinking is needed to reconnect the gaps caused by records loss, war, scandal & just plain typographical errors or phonetic spellings!
I have been working on my family tree for the passed four years and am glad I’m not the only one who ran into those issues! Genealogy is a fun rabbit hole to fall into ❤
Did you look on Arkivverket for the guy in Arendal? I've discovered that many Norwegians who emigrated were tracked, from their home municipality, in the new land, for the purpose of local histories of the Norwegian community.
Oh yeah, those Scandinavian Parrish registers are wonderful aren’t they? Reading the handwriting can be a challenge and then you’ve got to translate it. I discovered that when I went looking for my Swedish ancestors in them.
Interesting, I have zero experience with serious genealogy. I did try to trace back my family history to the early 1900s at one point, but I think the issue you mentioned, of names getting tweaked, became my stumbling block. So interesting to see how much work goes into this process.
If it's just tweaking, you can try to go by sound, let go of the spelling of names. It's really about the 'sounds like' factor. Oftentimes the person who wrote the name down didn't hear it well and just made something up he/she thought they heard. Also take into account that some languages change certain letters, like in Spanish a W is pronounced like a B (example: Willy becomes Billy) When in doubt, Wikipedia has excellent pages on languages and can sometimes help you further.
@@micahphilson - My German immigrant relatives named "Ewert" ("w" pronounced like a "v") changed their names to Evert and Everett in order to get jobs on the lead up to WW1 with its anti-German sentiment. However, I do not know what they did about their accents! ^_^
My German grandmother met my US grandfather in WWII. When she came to the US she forgot her German life. Said it wasn't worth worrying about. She still had her accent but never spoke her 1st language anymore. She didn't even like us to say we were German. I've always wanted to know more. At the end of her life, she would let things slip here and there but when she realized she did she would quit talking. I tried to get her to fill out one of those grandmother books and all the answers were barely a sentence. I feel like I lost out on a lot of things one does with their grandmother because of this. Don't get me wrong she was a wonderful woman. I miss her dearly and would give anything to have her back but sometimes when I see things like this I just wonder.
@R.P.-hw2rq we are Czech to be more accurate. She was born in 1928. When we asked about history she told us the here and now we live in is what is important.
I know, searching for census data in Germany is hard, two world wars and Soviet occupation will do that. I do suggest trying though. A place to start is if your Grandfather was in the military, he’d have to get permission to marry a foreign national and that form would have a lot of potentially useful information. If nothing else you might learn some German as a result, viel glück.
@CAP198462 that's great info. Thank you! They've both passed but I'm sure I can find something online now that I have a starting point instead of blindly going into it especially not knowing the language. Knowing "I love you" & "goodnight" is not going to get me to far lol.
While it's certainly possible that Florence was expecting at her wedding it is also possible that she wasn't. She gave birth to twins and twins often come early. On top of that one of them died within a month so it is possible that the twins were quite early and the small twin had failure to thrive. Must have been so heartbreaking for the parents to lose the baby.
At around 4:20 you suggest a shotgun wedding, as the person mentioned would have been 2 months pregnant at the time. You do realise that it isn’t unusual (especially at the time of these births) to give birth to twins prematurely. After all, it’s a lot of extra baby for the uterus to carry. So perhaps the babies in question weren’t conceived out of wedlock at all. It’s just speculation either way this far down the line.
Good point. That could easily have been a Wedding Night pregnancy, or even a couple with an already planned wedding jumps the gun a little, thinking it won't make a different, only to end up with twins that come early. Eight weeks preemie is a little early to survive in those days though, but not impossible. I suspect she was 3-4 weeks pregnant at the time of her wedding, and likely didn't even know.
I've had a few people mention this and it isn't something I had realized previously, but it is definitely a good point to consider when analyzing the story. A perfect example of how each little piece of knowledge can help reshape a hypothesis. When I first realized the 7 month difference while researching, I researched how likely someone might know at 2 months pregnant but didn't check twins might be born at 7 months (didn't really even think about that). So I did have a bit of confirmation bias in the research for this hypothesis, but I also realized I didn't have true confirmation and that's why I made sure to say we may never know.
This is an excellent concept Jarrett. May I suggest you spend a little time on presentation quality (see Simon Whistler 3 year changes as example) to induce some prospective guests to participate. Also include a quick blurb at the beginning to ensure there is permission for disclosure etc. this builds confidence in both potential guests and our view of your professionalism and integrity. Becomes part of your YT story. Good luck and a great concept rather than the earlier Impressions.
@@GeneaVlogger you and your site have enormous potential. Be uncompromising in your integrity, consistent in your delivery times, incorporating tight relational historical events and reflect to your audience the compassion and excitement of your findings. Max can give you the feedback better than I can.
You can thank Max for sending me and I thank you for a very interesting look into Max's family tree. Never did I think when searching for a recipe would I enjoy these little snippets of history.👍
I had a funny (to me) conversation with a distant cousin who couldn't imagine why the paternal line DNA test for one of our our officially-named great-great-great-grandfathers didn't match that of one of his middle son's branches of the family, from which my cousin descended. There was dead silence on the other end of the line when I suggested to my cousin that someone else could have fathered that son. I think his head finally exploded when I went on to suggest that the encounter might have been consensual, or not, from g-g-g-grandma's standpoint. We have several instances in both sides of the family where women identified on the census as widows when their husband had been committed to an insane asylum, or after a divorce, or as head of family with an out-of-wedlock birth. In another case, a great-grandmother in the old country worked as a household servant in a town several valleys away from her hometown and bore a son to whom she gave her own family surname--the biological father not documented in Church or government records. A few years later, she had returned to her hometown and married a man with a different name, but our grandfather kept his mother's family name, which we have today.
@jomercer21113 - I have family in Iowa where a boy born in early 1900s is listed as the son of his mother's husband who had died TEN YEARS before his birth. Stretchy!
WOW very interesting. I love Tasting History. I also love genealogy which I am daily involved in for my own family tree. Have been watching this channel for genealogy discovery and greatly enjoy your research.
So fun when two subscriptions collide - what a story there is all twisted up in there...hope you can share the results if any more facts come to light!
What a stirling piece of research! Hope you will update us if DNA provides further clues. I'm here from Max's channel, but you've just gained another subscriber.
Oyster Pirates! I had no idea this was such a thing. My family settled in an oyster area in Cuba coming from Portugal in the late 19th Century. It would be interesting if they had any dealings with Florida and bringing oysters to the states.
Fascinating history and intriguing mysteries. It seems that many families have similar unexplained elements because they were topics not discussed openly even within the family. So such details are forgotten over time. Thanks for the research and sharing this part of history.
love seeing how people trace their families back! both sides of my family have been doing research--i seriously need to get copies!--so i know some bits of history. however, i don't know much beyond my great-grandparents and where they lived in kentucky. did learn some interesting history regarding my maternal grandparents and how my mum was born 5 months after they married, and my great-grandparents on mum's side eloped when he was not given permission to marry grandma. from what i was told, he showed up on either a donkey or a mule and they snuck off to the next county over to get married :D
Yes! I will also be doing other episodes exploring other lines of Max's family tree as well! For each guest on my RU-vidr Family Trees series, I plan to multiple videos on their families.
People change their names for all kinds of reasons. When my dad was a child, in southern Russia, his name was Johann, but he was variously called Hans, Vanya and Ivan, depending on who he was talking to :) When he came to Canada in 1925, he kept the initial H for his first name, and picked Howard. I have no idea where that came from. He chose John as his second name, because that's the English version of all the other names (except Howard). He kept his last name, but his grandfather had long before changed the spelling of the name for business reasons. So he was known to all in Canada as H. John ... :)
Interesting. Was your dad Volga German? Because there used to be German communities in what was the Russian Empire up until the mid to late 1930s when the Soviet Union committed several attacks on the Volga German communities which resulted in many dead and many more exiled from their homeland. That would explain why he was called Johann when he lived in Russia. If you want there are several resources online covering the Volga Germans but I have to warn you the article on the Great Purge is sickening. A lot of lives were lost because of suspicions held by the Soviets about the intellects and Bolsheviks as well as those who protested the government at the time.
@@mirandagoldstine8548 My dad was born and raised in Molochna colony, the oldest of the Mennonite colonies in that area, closest to the Black Sea. Two of his uncles were executed by the bolsheviks for ... being alive? They fled to Germany and sailed to Canada in 1925. The stories of that time are horrendous, especially those told of a man called Machno, who was one of the thousands released from prisons and asylums as the bolsheviks moved south. He gathered a gang around him, and was responsible for many atrocities. The Volga Germans, who suffered similarly, were a more diverse group, mostly Catholic and Lutheran, I think.
My mother's maternal grandparents also changed names when they arrived in America but in their case they were Austrian Jews and had been chased out of several regions due to changing attitudes about Jews. When they came to America they decided to give themselves a French last name and claimed they were Catholic. They were just tired of the persecution.
@@meedwards5 The desire to fit into a new community is probably a really common reason for people to change their names. I hope they found the better life they were seeking.
Lovely to share this as an admirer of Max. I am very fortunate as a Brit because records go back a long way and indeed my own family tree extends to 1208 when I think the family came from France.
So happy you enjoyed it! I was going to include a little blurb about the 1979 teachers strike but decided to cut it for time. I did see the photo you have of your grandmother at the strike and holding a picket sign!
Very interesting! I hope to see a part 2 with more information someday. I spent some time researching similar strange name inconsistencies in my own family tree. This was from the late 1800s. The names were similar, Olridge, Aldrich, Ullrick, etc. but I couldn't figure out why the records didn't match up. The story I discovered was absolutely fascinating. Turns out my 3rd great grandfather was kidnapped in New York around the age of 5 or 6 and was made to be a traveling street performer by his kidnapper. Several years later the kidnapper fell ill and died, leaving my ancestor stranded in Salt Lake City with no family at approximately 13/14 years old. Being so young when he was kidnapped, he didn't know how to spell his surname, so he just guessed on spelling whenever it was necessary. He got a job as a cattle herder and eventually settled down and married. Years later a traveling salesman came to the door and hearing my grandfather's name said that his wife had a younger brother with a similar name who was kidnapped 30 years ago. They put the pieces together and discovered that this traveling salesman was in fact his brother-in-law. My great grandfather was able to reconnect with his family and learned the true spelling of his name. However by that time he had already married and had children under an assumed spelling. So that is how the family name went from Ulrich (to Alrich to Ulrick to Oldridge) to Allridge.
What an interesting tangle of mysteries! I’d done the tip about the name with family names before but never thought to try it on given names- I’ll have to give that a go for folks with more unique given names in my research!
@katharinegarrison2568 - Or, if the woman WAS pregnant at the marriage, it doesn't mean it was a "shotgun wedding". The two people make have truly been in love and wanted to marry.
I just started following Max's channel, so I'm really looking forward to finding out where DNA leads you. And here I thought MY family history was convoluted!
Twins are often born early. A single pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks, but a twin pregnancy often lasts between 35 to 37 weeks. More than half of all twins are born prematurely (before 37 weeks)
Maybe not a shotgun wedding. Premature births are not uncommon with twins. Still... Those who study DNA and family trees say that somewhere around half of those who take the test find surprises and shocks.
I noticed something that looked weird to me at 17:59 In the birthplace section it has the following listed: (City or town): Norway. (Country or State): Sweeden. I noticed this because Sweden is misspelled and as far as I know we don't have a small town named after our neighbor country. Neither do I believe that we ever spelt Sweden with two "E". Figured it would be worth pointing it out in case you think there's more to it.
My paternal grandmother's maiden name was Hulse. I had never heard that name other than related to my own family tree until now. I always wonder about that family. Twelve kids with only two male. The two men married as did two of the women including my grandmother who didn't marry until she was in her thirties. The rest of "the aunts" lived together in a big family house, remaining unmarried their entire lives.
Here from Max's video. This is all so interesting. I'm curious about my family genealogy. I have someone on I think my mom's side who's traced one of the branches back to WWI, Then he lost the trail...
I would probably try putting the oysters on a muffin tin, so the muffin spaces would hold the shells more or less upright… no idea if that would work, though.
@jennypaxton8159 - I tried that recently when I was out of Kosher salt. It did not work for me. I ended up putting the oysters in a cake pan, balancing them on the top of their shell "lid". It worked okay, but not great. The wet salt works well as the shells can nestle down in the salt without tipping.
My husbands’ family shortened their last name to Gatt in the 1800s… no one knows what it was originally. But we know it changed! They did some interesting things back then to avoid societal issues!
That was interesting. I wonder if Lyle would do a calibration of doing a genealogy with you? Lyle, is from Scotland but grew up in Australia. He also is a YTer. His YT channel is Patrol Nation.
One thought about Florence and the timing of the birth of there twins: it MAY have been a shotgun wedding but twins are usually born earlier. Research shows that half of twin pregnancies are 37 weeks instead of the usual 40.
Some of my ancestors were oyster planters down in the Chesapeake Bay, in Virginia :) I wonder if the cultures were similar or different between oyster planters in the south and north
My cousin and I are trying to uncover something too 😳 my first cousins are each others second cousins makes our aunt her first cousin. Our aunt comes out as unassigned to me on ancestry.
My grandpa did our genealogy waaaay back to the time of Charlemagne. I'm related to Guilford Dudley who married Lady Jane Grey (queen until Bloody Mary had her head and Guilford's heads chopped off), the "special friend" of the virgin queen, 2 very famous criminals, Martha Washington, and more. The most recent slightly famous is my great aunt who is considered the grandmother of the art of chainsaw carving. Also, 2 months early is not shocking for twins especially back then, and if they were premature one dying so young would not be at all shocking either.
While each episode will be coming out months apart, there will likely be many episodes just on Max's family tree. For the Miller side, we had Max take a Big-Y DNA Test from FTDNA 😉
An onscreen graphic of the speculated family tree every now & then as you go along would be such a help, if it were not too much extra work to edit in...? I was definitely getting a bit lost towards the end there...although it sounds like that was more or less your team's experience, too!! 🤭 Amazing to know how just following one person's ancestry can bring so many apparent mysteries to light - intrigued to see what new leads the DNA testing provides you all.
