I worked really hard to find my ancestors at Ancestry.com a while back. Here is a link to the Erb/Clark/Hayes family tree I created. I was able to go all the way back to William the Conqueror, King of England, circa 1066. Along the way, there were many interesting people on my mother’s side (both my grandfather, Founder and Dean of Forestry at LSU in Baton Rouge, and especially my grandmother):
- a signer of the US Declaration of Independence
- Cotton Mather, the Salem Witchcraft trials attorney
- many Minutemen in the US Revolutionary War
- several people on the Mayflower – one was BORN on the Mayflower, en route to Plymouth Harbor, Massachusetts
- Anne Boleyn, the Queen of England who was beheaded by King Henry VIII (his 2nd wife)
- Catherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife – also beheaded!
You can see why my ancestors were in a mad panic to get the F out of England on the first ship to the Promised Land.
My father’s side is mostly German.
- his grandfather, William Brown Jr, was head of the 21st Mississippi Cavalry in the US Civil War
- the Prussian physiopsychologist, William Erb, after whom that reflex when you hit that spot on your knee was named
- A couple of German elites in the Prussian era
- several French nobility
By all rights, my family has a (backdoor) right to the Throne of England!
If you don’t have an account already at Ancestry.com, you can sign up for a free account so you can see my family tree. It’s an awesome place to research your roots. I found thousands of documents supporting the tree, and I discovered close to 2500 direct ancestors.
The system searches for pertinent documents, lets you study them, and then you can add your own supporting documents. I added pages from our Family Bible, which goes back to the 1800s.