• agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    What frustrates me the most is that I can trace parts of it back like 400 years, and others no more than a few generations. Like I understand it, but I’m still upset after literal days of chasing loose ends.

    • auraithx@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      My surname is fairly uncommon, all male descendants so far have the same YDNA results from a common ancestor circa 13th-16th C

      So I’ve had the luxury of being able to catalogue every recorded person with my surname and then I can slot people in based on location, naming patterns, etc. ^^

      But yes it’s wild how we have undoubtedly lost so much of our past. And how one guy being in the right place at the right time a few hundred years ago has resulted in tens of thousands of living descendants across the world.

      OpenAIs new ‘thinking in images’ tool can almost one-shot very hard to transcribe old documents in secretary hand, etc. So that should open up a wealth of hidden information very soon!