I'm Soooooo confused.... which isn't really astonishing....

[Pleater]

That is really weird.

I put in several family surnames and found that they are commonest in places I have lived in or been a frequent visitor to as an adult over many decades, despite there being no known family connection.

In one instance I found that the surname is really common in Australia - had my mother not married I could well have ended up there under the shipping out the inconvenient children scheme.

Anne the Pleater :ootd:

[Lyle1]

If you are really interested in tracing your family, check you local library to see what resources they have for you to use. Many public libraries have subscriptions to ancestry.com, which you can often access from your own home if you have a library card.

Good luck!

[Arlen]

Here are a few tips for you.
First off, on your Renfrew side, get your father's date of birth and your grandfather's full name and date of birth and death. Try to find out where he was born and where he was married. You can use these details to look at county records for those areas. You can also use those records to find out the names and details of HIS parents.
Use something like ancestry.com and you should be able to use census and country records to get back a far amount.

NOW... if you manage to get back to the point where they arrived in the US, you can go to scotlandspeople.gov.uk and use those details to find out things like what ship they left on etc. You can also look at births, marriages and deaths as well as census records and the like.

Using all of these things and with a wee bit of luck you should be able to get far enough back that you can find out a bit about the family before they left Scotland.


Good luck!
P.S. If you want some tips on places to visit while in Scotland let me know.

[ForresterModern]

One suggestion I would have is to trace as much of your line as you can, attempting to get full names (first, middle, last) as well as birth and death and marriage data.

On google and bing you can do specific word group searches by putting parentheses around the cluster of words you want to look up in that specific order. So if you have an ancestor "george foster" and his wife "margaret singleton" and possibly a county of residence you can do a search listing= "george foster" "margaret singleton" surry county virginia = and see what comes up with those names as combined search terms. This is especially help if you find a few unusually named ancestors----I have one named Bedford Addison Foster, not a common name except in our family (there happen to be three--a father, a son, and a nephew as BAF I, BAF II, and BAF III---talk about confusion). I was able to make a lot of links by searching "Bedford Addison Foster" with various other specific combinations of wives, siblings, parents, locations, birth or death years and dates, etc. Using the specific search terms (those in quotations will only be searched as they appear in the quotations) is much more fruitful and specific than just a bunch of names that are not order or group specified.

Also check with your clan association, or that of the family name you are searching for, as many have a compilation of known documented immigrations for some of the periods before Ellis Island----mine has a list of multiple variant spellings of Foster/Forster/Forester/Forrester/Vorster and all the known ships manifests which contained passengers bearing those names from the early 1600s to late 1800s, including ship names, ports of embarkation and disembarkation, and dates of passage and often more specific info about ages, locales of personal origin, and who else they may have had in their party (family, extended family, friends), if they were transported in exchange for ally recieved land grants/petitions, etc... Can be quite useful.