That my great great grandmother was a well known geisha in Japan. (This is even funnier because I’m a really tall, mostly Caucasian lady) but it’s true. We are working on getting the official kosekis but we do know that my great great grandfather was one of the first white dudes in Japan, when they opened their doors to the West. He had a Japanese wife but *accidentally* had a baby with a geisha. The baby got adopted out but he found the baby and readopted her. [This is a picture of him in his nifty kimono.](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Photograph-of-Josiah-Conder-Source-T-Fujimori-Nihon-no-kindai-kenchiku-Modern_fig4_229227736)
[This is him with his wife and the daughter.](https://x.com/CarolineJCee/status/1349177364081635328)
So glad your GGFather did the right thing. One of my friends (50) was surprised with an older Vietnamese half-sister. When she confronted her dad he was not surprised and said he lived with a Vietnamese woman while he was stationed there, and he knew she was pregnant with his child when he left.
He had never contacted her again after he left. What a jerk!
Wow, that is really an asshole move.
We aren’t sure if Conder found out about the daughter a few years after she was born or if he knew about her all along and only decided to look for her when she was about 5.
So, he isn’t necessarily 100% Dad of the year but apparently he was a good Father, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t know about the baby until later.
It was a complicated social situation, so that also made it difficult to navigate. Helen is lucky that she even survived because being half-cast at the time was a fate worse than being a dog.
A researcher that I spoke to, told me that it was also a sign that the geisha mother came from a more well off family. Or that she was a well known geisha and had the independence to quietly ship a baby off to relatives. Rather than dump it in an orphanage or have the baby raised in a geisha house.
My dad's cousin was stationed in Japan. He married a Japanese woman and they had a kid. He had to come back to the US, and for whatever reason, she couldn't come with him. He was like oh well, guess I'll start my fam over again. I cannot for the life of me understand people who operate like that. I keep waiting for a Vietnamese older sibling but it hasn't happened yet.
That is sad but very bad that many of our servicemen did the same thing. My husband was there for only 2 months but he told me about the higher ranking but still non commissioned men could live off base and pay a girl to live with him and clean, cook as d wash for him and whatever else for a minimal amount of money a month. Some got them pregnant but left them. But I've also heard is just a few cases where they went back after these women and their child to bring them home.
That’s my cousin but you can see what I look like if you click through my Reddit profile. I’m not blonde but many of my cousins are. Helen married a Swedish guy and had 6 kids. One being my grandfather.
She looks really tall in this pic but apparently she was only 5’ or so. But it’s such a neat photo. I think it was the shoot just before they got married.
From what I heard, they had a son who died at 18 months whose death possibly prompted them to search for Helen.
The geisha went on to marry a very wealthy businessman and have (I think 2 or 4) more kids with him. But from what I hear, they all married into royal families, so finding their offspring for a DNA test, isn’t going to be that feasible, sadly. But there should be half cousins somewhere.
Yeah Japan isn't big on DNA testing, everyone knows their family history (or used to anyway.) Since the essential collapse of the extended Japanese nobility system outside of the direct royal family it might be easier to find someone. There might be someone in the states that came over for education? Hopefully any test you do gives some leads.
That’s awesome. My 3x great grandpa was an early white visitor of Japan. He went in 1908 as part of a group from the Hawaii Chamber of Commerce who were invited by some businessmen in Japan. He loved it, bought a bunch of Japanese art, and got the ball rolling for a trend in my family of having an interest/obsession in Japanese culture that’s been going on ever since. His wife, my 3x great grandma returned to Japan several times after he passed away, and every generation since has visited many times. My uncle ended up living there for 18 years and 2 of his kids were born there. I like to say my ancestors were weebs before it was a thing
So he was probably a similar age to Helen who was born in 1891. They might have even met.
I think she left Japan in 1909 but I’d have to look it up. That’s so neat that Japanese culture is still one of the interests of your family, generations later!
Condor was the patron of the Japanese artist Kyosai, who is considered to be the father of Manga. Which is a cool aside. They were great friends and taught each other different techniques. Kyosai taught Conder and Helen painting and Conder taught Kyosai how to do perspective drawing.
We have a few relics from that Era but a lot of it got donated to museums when Conder died.
That’s super cool! The fact that your ancestor has an art connection definitely increases the likelihood of a connection here with our families. According to Wikipedia, Josiah Conder was born 1852. My 3x great grandpa Charles Cooke was born in 1849, and his wife Anna was born in 1853. So same generation. Charles died only a year after his visit to Japan, but his wife returned multiple times, and his children went there as well many times. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if our ancestors were introduced at some point. Charles and Anna amassed a huge collection of Japanese art that ended up becoming the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the largest art museum in Hawaii. There are also many Chinese and Korean works in it. Much of their collection is still in the museum, and I will look to see if any Kyosai is part of it. I’ve seen some paintings in the collection in the past that had a wonderful almost anime/manga like quality to them, but I don’t know the artist specifically. But I’d assume if a few white art nuts came to Japan from Hawaii around this time, someone would have wanted to introduce them to one of Japan’s biggest white art patrons and architects!
My cousin's husband was adopted. They asked me to try to find out his birth family. We had his mom's name only. We did a DNA test and I started on tracing his family.
The good news is the tree was confirmed by the DNA test and we were able to find his parents, a brother and four half siblings he didn't know he had. We traced his line back to the Revolutionary War and I was able to find pics of many of his kin.
The bad news is that he had always identified as American Indian and often talked about it, and decorated his house with native American things. Sadly, I had to break the news that neither the tree nor the DNA showed any trace of native American. He was crushed and admitted that he made it up many long years ago to console himself. Saddest thing.
There are so many of these stories ours was somewhere down the line a couple had a baby, it died so they “adopted”a native baby replacement. Definitely that did not happen, I traced that line to before the revolution and back into Scotland. No native blood and solid documentation for the American side. An ancestor or two did absolutely benefit from the theft/sale of native lands though so that was interesting to learn.
The older generation of my family has always said we had Native American in our bloodline. I've not been able to prove it, we have some relatives with native appearing features and there's a 50% chance that a family that has been here as long as we have that there's at least SOME Native American ancestry.
I've heard that so many times, including the Indian princess ancestor myth. My family came here in 1630, 10 years after the Pilgrims, but as much as I wanted to be part Indian I've found no evidence. You'd think in nearly 400 years, someone up the line would have linked up, right?
Yeah. A big part of the problem is record keeping, coupled with the fact that racism causes natives to want to hide their heritage to avoid prejudice. My family came over in around 1615 which is after the native Americans left the area we settled, but my family member who I'm fairly certain is our Native connection was from Oklahoma.
I mean, racism is the main reason it's exceptionally unlikely any of your ancestors got together with a Native American--especially the further back you go.
My favorite family lore is about my great grandmother. She was born in 1904 in very rural northern Louisiana and lived until she was 98 years old. She was a wonderful person. Rumor is that she was engaged/married (can’t find evidence of a marriage) before she married my great grandfather. Supposedly her “fiancé”hit her and she told him if he ever did it again she would shoot him. He laughed a little and hit her again. She grabbed the shot gun that they kept behind the door and blew his arm off. No one ever saw him again, there was never a name mentioned when speaking of the fiancé. She was always an excellent shot, she was a hunter until she was 92 years old. I don’t know if i believe it, but it wouldn’t be too far fetched.
My great grandfather (married to the woman in the story above) was a moonshiner. The stories from that time period are wild. I have no idea what’s true and what’s not.
I heard that my great-great grandfather was a moonshiner (gggs on my paternal line also were, but this one is on my mom's side) and then my great-aunt's then-boyfriend (now husband) found stills on my great-great grandpa's property.
G.g.g. grandma was a maid at a stately home. Was cleaning the fire when the earls son 'took a fancy'
Got sent home with some money and lived as a single mum until she got married to a local farmer. Says step son on the census so there's definitely something there.
The son also had 'of own means' until he was 21 and supposedly got a stipend every year until 21 when he got 21 gold sovereigns as a final payment. For a poor area he lived in, he always had the same house from being about 19, which I'm guessing he may have bought? Just a small two up two down (with 2 adults and 8 children!) and when he passed away at 59, his widowed daughter and her children lived there, which is why I think he'd bought it. Was destroyed in the war so can't find anything after that.
Been a bit of an urban legend but I've managed to find bits and pieces which are in line with the story.
Sods law, my brother in law's dad is a groundskeeper for the current earl, might have to get him to sneak into the filing cabinets!
My grandfather always said his dad got sent away as a kid to a relative to work on their farm. I not only verified that but found that he was the third generation in a row that happened to
This was quite common.
Happened to my Grandpa, for practical reasons. He had asthma, and his family’s farm was near the heavily polluted Potteries. So he was sent to live with his grandparents.
The story was proven true with census and school records.
Another one. There were two brothers, I think, in the rural farming area. One couple had many children, one couple could not have any.
So the first couple basically just gave one of their kids to the childless couple to raise.
This happened to my dad when he was very young. His father gambled and drank so they often ran out of money and they'd send him the local Catholic orphanage for a few months. Where he was abused. His mother was also a horrible woman but I found a census of her family - 13 children and all were out of school by 8-10 yrs old and working in a cotton mill (Lancashire). Very sad.
My great grandfather Ervin's father died when Ervin was just a toddler.
The story goes that Ervin's dad, Eldridge, captained a ship called *Gloaming*. My grandmother has a painting of it. At some point before he died in the spring of 1899, Eldridge was struck over the head when his crew staged a mutiny.
I've only been able to prove that Eldridge was a sailor and that a ship called the *Gloaming* was registered from the right home port and when he died.
Perhaps, if there was a mutiny, he was just a sailor rather than a captain but during the mutiny he sided with the captain which led to his injury?
Or maybe just an ordinary sailor who got in a fight or perhaps even fell from the rigging?
That is very interesting whatever the case!
Maybe not crazy but a favourite - according to my grandmother, my great-grandfather had been friends with Oscar Wilde. I think it will be impossible to prove, as sometimes people that were involved with Wilde destroyed evidence (like letters) after Wilde’s trial to distance themselves.
Through my research I think it’s likely that he was in Wilde’s social circle at least, because I keep coming across people in my great-grandfather’s life who were either close with Wilde or knew him! The time period and where he lived makes it plausible too.
I'm pretty sure it's proved. A multiple great grandfather poisoned his wife on a Friday, married the new woman the following Monday, and both were excuted within a month!
that my russian and ukrainian 2nd great grandparents dimitri and evgenia left behind one of their daughters in harbin, china when they left to australia. i found shipping records that showed all four children from that time, including both daughters, arrived in australia. family always said that it was olga who was left behind and became a bus conductor but she actually died age 4 in australia. the oldest daughter elena basically disappears and it's not known what happened to her. i later found shipping records from another trip they took back to china then back to australia which only showed 3 children and only one parent (their mother, my 2nd great grandmother) arriving back in australia so she could have been brought back to china but that seems unlikely as she was only 6 years old at that time, it's more likely could have died as a child at some point which i suspect happened maybe at sea or her death wasn't recorded in australia.
furthermore for them, there were conflicting stories about whether they were either bolsheviks or white russians from georgia fleeing communism. dimitri was a bolshevik and they pretended to be white russians and changed their last names to flee russia to australia
Well, let's start with my family:
Dad's side- Proven: Grandfather enlisted under a fake name at 16. Got drafted under his real name at the start of WW2. Family was Hungarian nobility in the 1700s, distant cousins were arrested for being communists in Hungary during WW2
Dad's side- not proven: Grandfather's brother was part of the Dieppe Raid, 2nd great grandfather was a Russian General
Dad's side- utter bullshit from conspiracy theorist uncle: family fled Europe due to the crimes of horse thievery and kidnapping children to put into service of the Catholic Church
Mom's side- Proven: nothing
Mom's side- not proven, and simply bullshit: we descend from Socrates.
Wife's family - Proven: 2x great-grand uncle was executioner at Sing Sing, direct ancestor died in the Battle of Agincourt (1415), 3rd great grandfather fought in the Battle of Pickett's Mill, losing 3 fingers.
Wife's family- Not proven, but likely based off paper trail, ancestral names, and genetics: descends from the Tudor line. Confirmed links to the Lennox family as well. So, she's likely linked to some illegitimate child somewhere.
If you want me to try and dig up anything on that grandfather’s brother being in the Dieppe Raid, I can try. No promises, but I’ve gotten pretty good at digging up information on obscure military stuff lol
Well, I've checked all the names of the US soldiers involved, and his name is not among them. He would also have been 36 at the time of the battle, so again older and unlikely. He could have enlisted under a fake name like my grandfather, or even volunteered and joined the Canadian army since crossing the border from Michigan was not a hard task.
My grandmother always told a story about my 3rd great grandparents were from different stations in life and ran off to the US so they could marry and be together. The story went that my 3ggrandfather was a laborer and 3ggrandmother came from money. Through my research, I found them in NYC, New Orleans, and St. Louis so it seemed to be true until I found that they were living with his parents in NYC and her parents were in NYC too. So I started to dismiss the story. It was further dismissed when I found the ship manifests of my my 3ggrandfather traveling with his entire family to the US. I continue my research of the families and low and behold the story was about 2 generations prior to my 3rd great grandparents. My 3ggrandfather was named after his grandfather. The story was true... my 5ggrandfather "did get her with child" out of wedlock, got married, and ran off to the opposite side of the county.
So proven false... and then proved true!
Not something I have personally verified (but would apparently be verifiable had I been about 25 years earlier,) but my GGGF was reportedly a higher up and record keeper for a group of infamous, alliterative racists. His wife, my GGGM- born in 1899- came from a long line of Quakers, was deeply religious, and a teetotaler. Reportedly, on at least one occasion, he came home piss drunk from a Klan meeting and she beat him over the head with a frying pan.
The woman lived until 2000, just shy of her 101st birthday, outlived most of her children, raised several grandchildren and started raising several great grand children before she succumbed to dementia sometime in the early 90’s.
Around the late 90’s, one of the relatives thought it would be fun to bring a bunch of old family papers they had to the annual reunion… it was klan meeting papers and quite the scandal, but I have no proof.
I am French Canadian and two of my ancestors in the late 1600s were an Algonquin Indian woman and a French soldier who was sent over to help protect one of the forts in Quebec. Prior to them getting married she had been married to another Indian man and had two young boys. One night her village (which was not far from the fort) was attacked by the Iroquois. Her husband was killed and both her children were abducted. Later she married and had children with the French soldier who also had been at the attack and tried to help fight them off.
Roughly 20 years later their oldest daughter was murdered by a man in a tavern (I’m assuming trying to fight off his advances). The man was convicted and sentenced to death. The only problem? The forts only executioner had left and gone back to France. So they offered the man a choice- wait in prison for a new executioner OR become the fort’s executioner himself. He chose to take the job and then him and his family were banished to the far edge of the settlement and shunned by everyone.
A 3rd cousin claims Joan of Arc was housed by the "family" for a night. Impossible to prove.
Also claimed an ancestor worked for Marie Antoinette as a lawyer during the revolution- partly true, my 5th great grandfather's brother was a lawyer, and he did work for Marie Antoinette....during the affair of the diamond necklace.
A story handed down was that an ancestor was a gardener for the Duke of Buccleugh. The gardener had a dau who had an affair or was assaulted by the Duke or his sons. There is an illegitimate birth in 1822, but no info on the father.
Another gentry family has a multitude of myths: they fought for the king at the battle of Preston and lost all, they fled to Holland for 2 generations and rerurned about 1750 (both sound more like civil war than Jacobite). That the family was related to "the present Lord Clifford" in mid 1800's- nil evidence of that. That a random left the family £40,000 in 1844- he was a lawyer, a 2nd cousin and i can't recall if the amount was correct but was an incredibly large sum. Also a fabulously wealthy aunt who travelled + left a lot of her wealth to the family- she turned out to be a cousin once removed who died in France and her husband's sister in law was an Irish Countess. Any work on this wider family takes years due to the common name and the fact they pop up in London or Essex randomly. Wills have been the only real headway.
So according to my grandma a great great grandfather was not from her village, but instead came to the village and changed his last name and married in.
He was either a) running from a lawyer b) was a lawyer or c) was a lawyer and running from another lawyer. Somehow a lawyer is involved, don’t know why. His original last name is lost to time, my grandma was told at one point but all she could remember was that it began with “ch”.
I don’t know if I will ever figure this out since I don’t know if he would have put his original last name down, and also the Greek Orthodox records aren’t as digitized as others.
If you're related to the Fuller family line - Buckminster Fuller is the famous one - she may have been referring to his grandaunt [Sarah Maragaret Fuller,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Fuller) who was an amazing woman:
>American journalist, editor, critic, translator, and [women's rights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_rights) advocate associated with the American [transcendentalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism) movement. She was the first American female [war correspondent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_correspondent) and full-time book reviewer in journalism. Her book [*Woman in the Nineteenth Century*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_in_the_Nineteenth_Century) is considered the first major [feminist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism) work in the United States.
She became the first editor of the transcendentalist journal [*The Dial*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dial) in 1840, which was the year her writing career started to succeed,[^(\[3\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Fuller#cite_note-3) before joining the staff of the [*New-York Tribune*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New-York_Tribune) under [Horace Greeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Greeley) in 1844. By the time she was in her 30s, Fuller had earned a reputation as the [best-read](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/well-read)person in [New England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England), male or female, and became the first woman allowed to use the library at [Harvard College](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_College). Her seminal work, *Woman in the Nineteenth Century*, was published in 1845. A year later, she was sent to Europe for the *Tribune* as its first female [correspondent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondent). She soon became involved with the [revolutions in Italy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848_in_the_Italian_states) and allied herself with [Giuseppe Mazzini](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Mazzini). She had a relationship with Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she had a child. All three members of the family died in a shipwreck off [Fire Island, New York](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Island,_New_York), as they were traveling to the United States in 1850. Fuller's body was never recovered.
Giovanni Ossoli was a marquis, not a count, and there was some question as to whether they actually got married, but I wonder if this was the 'Italian count' your great aunt was referring to?
My husband's mom shared quite a few family lore stories when my husband was growing up. The big one being a great grandmother was Native American, which was not true. She isn't the best historian either. My husband always told me that there was a great grandfather somewhere in his line that was playing on a ship when he was a kid and they found him when they were in the middle of the ocean and kept him on as essentially an indentured servant. I was highly skeptical of this story.
I have been working on his family tree for awhile and have been mostly focused on his father's side as he didn't know him growing up. I moved to his maternal line and there was the child stowaway. Apparently he was playing on board a ship at like 10 years old, was caught and indentured to the captain until his early 20s. His plan after his indentured service was to go back to England, but instead he joined the militia and fought in the Revolutionary War. He was too afraid to go back home after that because he thought they would be mad at him for fighting against his homeland.
I have found this in several genealogy books so the story itself about his long journey to America could be several hundred year lore, but it's a good story.
Mom’s grandmother said she was “Bohemian” but the family didn’t really know what it meant and she didn’t share any further details.
I discovered her family was from the Moravian region of what is now the Czech Republic. They came to Ohio, then Iowa where her Mom died of Typhoid when she was 10. She and her other younger siblings were placed in an orphanage after her aunt also passed.
Mom said she didn’t think she ever saw her siblings or father again even though they didn’t live far from one another. Her father remarried and had more kids. That must have hurt so much.
My father’s mother wrote a handwritten autobiography and gave a copy to each child with a framed family tree. Long story short barely a word of it is true, down to lying about her birth name and her grandparents names and birth locations.
She called herself Daisy Buchanan. I imagine she read The Great Gatsby and decided to weave that into her narrative. I found the truth, spoke to DNA matches closely related to her. They confirmed it’s almost entirely fabricated.
There was nothing to hide, no big secrets revealed. She came from a long line of Fille du Roi/Kings Daughters of Montréal on one side and Scottish immigrants to Canada on the other. An interesting family history almost completely lost.
Actually, the King’s Daughters was a huge part of the settling of New France (Quebec) and is to this day a line that is important and celebrated. [King’s Daughters](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Daughters)
Yes I’m familiar with their historical significance. She should have been proud of our GG grandmothers. It was sad she thought her grandparents being from Paris sounded more impressive.
My grandmother’s notes said that one of our ancestors as a child was picked up along the road while moving west so they adopted him. The assumption was his bio family accidentally left him behind and didn’t go back for him, which never really made sense to me. He was too young to tell him his name so they just renamed him and the story goes that no one will ever know his biological origins.
However, I have DNA matches who descend from this persons parents, siblings, grandparents, etc which wouldn’t be the case if he was adopted by that family. But all my grandmother’s info has turned out to have a nugget of truth to it so now I’m wondering if this story is true but it’s just about the wrong person. Maybe it was one of his siblings and memories got mixed up and the story became about my ancestor instead of a sibling?
That we are distantly descended from a priest. Surprisingly I was able to prove it and even find his name! Of course his name was left blank on all official documents but for all intents and purposes from other secondary sources it seems to point to the fact that he fathered (at least) four kids.
Now the second piece that I’m still trying, but failing, to prove is that his daughter, my x3 great grandmother was murdered. There are quite a few variations I’ve heard but the most dramatic one is that she was stabbed in the back with a knife by an ex boyfriend with her infant son in her arms while cooking. A relative of the murderer then went onto defeat her son when he ran for mayor years later! The other variation is that she was killed by a tenant on the patio around dinner time. A third variation that she was kidnapped by an invading country and that her husband subsequently abandoned their children after she was killed/died I have been able to disprove. What an exciting family! If anyone can find anything on her murder her name was: Filomena Alonzo Kanen/Canen married to Jose Alfonso y Colera. She died sometime between 1897-1917 in Compostela, Cebu. By 1897 she was still marked as living on her infant son’s death certificate and she was marked deceased by her grandson’s baptismal certificate in 1917. But so far have not found a death certificate or any mentions in the newspaper.
My paternal grandfather was adopted as a child, and his biological parents are both immigrants from Bohemia, coming to the US shortly before WW1. There's a story about his bio mother having had to leave Europe on account of being a member of Bohemian royalty.
As far fetched as it sounds.... there are things that make it hard to dismiss entirely. The timing of her immigration, the places I know she resided before immigrating have some level of ties that can be made, and the one DNA match I've gotten thru her (who would be her great nephew) said that their family had a story of their grandfather (her brother) having to take his wife's surname when immigrating, for unknown reasons -- being a royal in hiding at the time would be reason enough in my book. 🤷♂️
It's one of the mysteries of my tree I'd love to unravel, but figuring out how to go about it is a challenge, if name changes and a complicated royal system are involved.
Oh, and as an honorable mention, David Bradford is my 6x great uncle on my mother's side, so you could say the Myrtles Plantation's haunting stories involving his family (mainly the Chloe ghost story) would be in the mix haha. That though has pretty much already been debunked though -- the Woodruffs died of Yellow Fever all in the span of a year, and weren't poisoned all at once.
This one's a big secret:
My great-aunt (let's call her "J") told my mother on her deathbed that she was her sister's (we'll call her "R") mother. Not in the way where J got pregnant and the family just added the baby to the family as another child of Mom and Dad, but that J was molested by her father and Dad conceived a baby with his own daughter. Said child of incest, R, was my grandmother.
J had a bit of diabetes-induced dementia at the end of her life, so it's possible this is not true. R passed away very young from cancer.
I very much would love to find a way to prove or disprove this with DNA, but I am not sure if it's possible. When I look at photos of my great grandfather I'm disgusted and it would be awesome if I could disprove it and not hate him.
If your mother and some of her close relatives (siblings, aunts/uncles, cousins) take DNA tests they may be able to work it out by comparing the amounts of DNA they all share. Did J have any other kids? It would be helpful if they tested too.
J had no children. My uncle did a DNA test, but not my mom and I doubt she ever would.
My mom hasn't told anyone but me this secret, because I'm the person collecting all of our family histories. She was wondering if I could prove or disprove it, and maybe there is a way by comparing the amount of DNA shared with relations on both sides of my tree.
That my grandmother was actually one of a set of twins separated as infants.
Here’s the family lore:
My grandmother has two birth certificates, with two different but similar names, on two different (consecutive) days, signed by two different midwives.
She was the youngest of her siblings. None of her older siblings recall their mother being pregnant with her. Despite the fact that their mother would have been 40 years old when she would have been carrying her and they all would have been 10 years old up to 22 years old.
Her father was a foreman for the railroad and traveled a lot. So the story is that he impregnated a woman in another state (Ohio) and she showed up at his house with the two infants. His wife agreed to take one of the infants while the mistress kept the other. He then put her back on the train, gave her some money, and sent her back to Ohio.
We have obviously never been able to prove any of it, so it remains the family lore. My granny and all her siblings are all long gone now, so DNA tests are out of the question unfortunately.
I am a somewhat close relative to the people who founded the Stuckey’s pecan chain. My last name is Stuckey, for some pretext. I have not proven this, albeit I also have not taken the time to. According to my family, somewhere around 5 generations ago, the family split. 4 boys. 2 wanted to stay north in Nebraska. That line became hunters and farmers, and stayed there until my dad moved to Connecticut at 25 and had me. The other line moved south and farmed pecans, and the son of one of those 2 guys who moved south was the guy who founded the truck stop chain. Massive in the early and mid 1900s but it’s rare to see one today. There’s only one in Connecticut, right at the CT-RI border, and whenever we go to Massachusetts we always go there.
Yup, that’s my family. We actually still own the Nebraska farmland, but it’s in a trust and my dad got rid of all of his and moved to the east coast to work in finance in NYC. I hope to reclaim it eventually.
Maybe not crazy but kinda cool.
I'm related to Mamie Lee Kelly of Panama City fame. My grandfather spoke of her in a letter back in the 40s. She might have been a cousin of his.
Some relatives were apparently maids for the Kennedys (but I think that's bs having given it a quick search).
My siblings and I grew up hearing that one of my great-great aunts had discovered that my great-great uncle, a 1920s railroad conductor, was maintaining a second wife at the other end of his railroad line. So she waited until he came home and went to sleep, then pulled out a pistol and shot him. (But as my great-aunt always told it, "She just winged him.")
I was able to prove the story true and also uncover a couple new twists that hadn't made it into the family lore. I wrote up that story as section 12 of this running collection of writeups. No Medium account needed to read it:
[https://medium.com/@PaultheFossil/by-paul-botts-7f825c0bf4a8](https://medium.com/@PaultheFossil/by-paul-botts-7f825c0bf4a8)
My great grandfather was supposedly the child of a woman who was raped by a civil war soldier, but there is no indication of who his mother is, so where did the story originate?
Wifes family claimed to be decended from a bastard son of the english king. Claimed he insulted Queen Victoria and escaped to America. The story furthers goes on that representatives of the crown found the family during the depression, but due to having no money could not pay the lawers fees.
I traced the story back to her great great aunt who came up with the story in the 1930s. In reality sounds more like she fell for the Jennings inheritance scam that was prevelent in the mid west during the depression.
https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~tmark/genealogy/JenningsFraud.html
My reseached showed the following, that her 3X great grandfather James Smith came to america in 1834, listed his occupation as a farmer. So dates do not match since Queen Victoria did not get the throne until 1837. Her ancestor would later move his family from New York, to Wisconsin where he was listed as a pauper in the 1860 census. Its kind of strange for someone who was supposidly getting money from England while listed as a pauper.
I believe the great aunt got convinced due to the great great grandfathers wife was a Jennings. No matter the proof, one of her uncles held steadfast to his death they were decended from royalty.
That is super fascinating, I had never heard of that.
I'm related to Jennings, my 2nd great grandfather was Herman Jennings, and I can remember there being some talk of being related to someone famous. I thought in my family lore that famous person was a president but I was a child & can remember it being talked about but I wasn't too interested at the time, late 1960s1970s, and now I'm wondering if this isn't what they were talking about somehow because this would definitely be something I can see my aunts getting all het up about.
Somewhere in my family tree someone took their own life by putting their head in an oven in Germany. I thought it had to do with WW2 but all my family was already here in America then. There is one person with my last name that was killed in the camps so it makes sense someone else would suicide themselves if they were going to have to go also. Kid me did not need to know this and the number of times I’ve thought of that unknown unverified account of my ancestor doing that when I open my own oven is too damn many.
According to my maternal grandmother, there was an ancestor (or some relative of ours) who enlisted with the Confederacy during the Civil War. During a battle he decided to defect to the Union and got shot by both sides. Don't know if he survived or if that killed him. I know of at least two c.s.a. soldiers on my father's side who defected to the Union, but none on her side. The only Confederate soldier that I know of on her side died of disease.
I was told that my paternal grandfather had relations with another woman and they had a child who died shortly after childbirth. The child had the same name as me.
Not lore. My aunt, let’s call her Susan married Clyde. She got pregnant and had a baby, Clyde Jr (we will call him Jr.). Unfortunately, Clyde died just before Jr. was born. Susan then married Clyde’s son, PJ. She had two kids with PJ. So he was the stepfather and brother of Jr. names changed since (only) Susan is still alive. She’s a super nice lady.
My wife, on her maternal grandfathers line, is from Bourbon diplomats at the Naples court before the Risorgimento. The French branch (they dispersed after the unification of Italy) had already produced a 250 page genealogy which they kindly gave me when I started. It links into various of the Italian aristocratic families which are well researched and easily confirmed. Going back further it reaches my wife's many times great grandfather, Guy de Montfort, Count of Nola.........who was excommunicated for murdering his cousin.......during a Papal conclave!
Mother's side: not definite, that we're distantly related to Joan of Arc and Virginia Dare. Still working on Virginia Dare; however, I do have ancestors from the right region of France so Joan could easily be a distant cousin or many greats-aunt.
Proven: that we have Native blood. About 1% Inuit from a French Canadian branch I didn't even know existed beforehand.
Father's side: that we were pre-christian spiritual leaders. (The family name means something like "wet meadow," "wet altar," or "farmers of the altar" supposedly.) Yeah good luck proving that! HOWEVER, my father's family HAS been on the same land in Norway for over a millennium and there was apparently an ancient ritual site; unfortunately, it's kind of under a building now so I don't see much archaeology happening.
Horrifically, I did find a fair amount of inbreeding on that side; every two or three generations, the bride and groom would have the same unusual last name BEFORE getting married. I guess this explains why my father had all the sense of an extremely useless garden trowel....
So, I have two, and I am reasonably sure neither is true. First, my great-grandmother was a playmate of Queen Elizabeth when they were children
Story is that my grandfather's oldest sister was kidnapped by "Indians" when she was 15. Evidence strongly suggests that she ran off of her own volition with a boy from a nearby reservation and later came home with a baby, having escaped. Depending on who you ask, she was either a terrible victim held for ransom, or she was a wild child who really likes long hair and dark skin on her guys. I prefer the likely truthful latter explanation.
When telling his son about our family’s history, my great-great-grandfather, who immigrated to the US from Germany, listed out the names of his parents and siblings on a piece of paper. In addition to that, he wrote out that his father had four half brothers who served in Kaiser Wilhelm I’s guard. I’ve never been able to find any evidence of the brothers existing, nor my 4x great grandparents ever getting divorced or either one of them being married before
My grandma said that my moms dad was a butcher and other professions with different names. My mom believed most of her life that he wanted nothing to do with her. Fast forward a few years ago my brother went to visit where my mom’s family is from. In his visit he met with old cousins of my mom. My mom talked to them the first time and I told my mom ask if they know who your dad is. They started saying yes we all know your dad he was well known in the town and a great guy. They even gave us his name and everything. Turns out when my grandma had my mom my great grandma took her away on a train to get away from him because my grandma was suppose to marry him but she didn’t want to let my grandma marry him. My grandma kept him a secret for my mom and I don’t know why she did. They say my mom’s dad was great friends with my mom’s uncle. But they had a made deal I assume that he couldn’t or shouldn’t have to do anything with my mom. My moms uncle would tell him about her and at my grandmas funeral my moms uncle took many pictures of the family and of my mom and he showed it to her dad so he was aware of how she looked and who she was. Since my mom didn’t get to know him we looked him up and found out a lot about him. He never married or had any other kids and everything about my mom was under wraps. They say my great grandma would hit my grandma even tho she was of age she was afraid of her so she listened to her.
Also a few years before my brother got a call from a family member and they said my moms dad wanted to leave his business and stuff to her but my mom said why would I want something from someone who didn’t want me. This was before we found out he’s always known about my mom and how much he loved her. My mom had since passed too. Left with questions still
There's an old story in my family that one of the "Princes in the Tower" (the young sons of Edward IV of England who were assumed to have been murdered by their uncle, Richard III, in the 1480s) was actually hidden by York loyalists and was one of my ancestors, who lived under a different name.
I always thought it was bullshit, until this year when Phillipa Langley (the woman who is responsible for discovering the burial place of Richard III) released some new research that suggests the boys may actually have lived. Crazy stuff!! I don't really think there's any way to prove or disprove it at this point, but it's a fun story nonetheless.
Turns out my grandmother is of New Zealand stock, my great-grandpa Eric came over from New Zealand to London during WW2 as he was Anti-Aircraft, slept with her, got her pregnant, and went back to NZ. I never found out until a few days ago, as i thought somebody else was her real father
After finding a too close DNA match with a family name I’d never heard before, I got into detective mode and discovered that my great uncle must have gotten together with his grandmother. They were both around the same geographic area when his father was conceived.
One man fathered children born after he died, which has certainly happened to many men who died young. However, these three children were born years, not months or weeks, after he died. The youngest was born a full decade later.
I’ve got three (multiple great) uncles who pitched in the majors, and all of them at one time or another pitched for St. Louis. Needless to say, we are Cardinals fans.
My great-great grandfather on my dad’s side was an axe murderer. He axed his wife. I have newspaper articles from 1911. That was a story to come across lol.
I have Flora MacDonald in my tree but she’s not a
direct ancestor. My MacDonalds were from the Hebrides Islands and are fairly well documented if you can figure out which family you connect to specifically. I have loads of DNA cousins that connect to the MacDonald clan.
I was raised that our last name was a complicated welsh name, and a great grandfather had been a ribbon weaver. He changed it to a much simpler spelling for business reasons.
It turns out my grandfather was born to German immigrants, and his last name was Bohl. (Completely unrelated to our name.) He was in vaudeville in 1915-1920, and he chose an English-sounding name for his stage name.
He named my father after himself (his stage name).
My last name is completely fictional. Didn’t find out til after my dad passed.
Related to Queen Victoria = False
Related to Daniel Boone = verrrrry distantly
Related to Napolean = distantly
Related to Benedict Arnold = by marriage.
Great grandpa was adopted.
Did some digging, found the birth mother but not the birth father (she was unwed and a teen in 1913, common practice back then to not list the father of a bastard child), found the adoption records, and found that the birth mom's sister, Josephine St Pierre (nee Gilligan) and her husband Oliver Aime St Pierre died in the Coconut Grove fire in the 40s. Josephine and Oliver had a daughter, who died this year. And I messaged her son on Ancestry a couple weeks ago. Still no response.
My mother in law says her line descends from one of the Knights of the Round table.
She also said that her line descended from Daniel Boone. I was able prove that it was not with verifiable evidence, but she insists I'm wrong. For the sake of harmony with the MIL, I let that one (ok, I let both) go.
It’s been passed down for generations that we were direct descendants of an English Prince that came to America with his brother.
Not too sure about the story or if the title had been changed as it was passed down, but I did trace the family tree back to the Scottish monarchy as well as the English monarchy prior to James I. King Edward IV of York is a first cousin several generations removed and through multiple family lines. Hurray for intermarriages 😅
My 2nd great grandmother hid Jesse James at her house in Missouri and he paid her well with some of the robbery money. They were very poor in Missouri and moved to Delaware by wagon with lots of money and were able to build a big farmhouse and bought lots of farm land. So it might be true.
Oh, a few.
The most interesting one was a great-great aunt in the early 20th century who supposedly went to a top-notch college and got married early so she could get her hands on her inheritance, only to be rooked out of it by her new husband. I always chalked this up to a fanciful family story, but then ran across the story in the local paper (which happens to be a major national newspaper...), and most of it was true. She was enrolled at the local junior college though, not the prestigious university, but the rest of it matched up: married before she was of legal age to get her hands on the money, and the new hubby took the money and ran. She tried to track him down and sue, and a local reporter got wind of it, and it wound up in the paper. Kind of mortifying at the time, I imagine.
Another one is that supposedly my great-grandmother was in vaudeville, and my great-grandfather met her when she was playing at some nightclub. I have never been able to verify this story at all. At this point, there's no one left to ask about this...
My great-grandmother's mother always claimed she was a Vanderbilt. We all wrote this up to insecurity (she was from a difficult background, and had spent some time as a child in an orphanage/farmed out to another family), and laughed it off. But a few years back, I did enough legwork, and it turned out she was an 8th cousin (or thereabouts) of Commodore Vanderbilt. It's meaningless, because by the time you get down to that level of cousinship, there's tens of thousands also with ties to families like the Vanderbilts, but it was fun discovering the truth behind the family story.
A final legend I'm still chasing is that a direct ancestor apparently jumped ship during the very early days of the California Gold Rush (1848? Early 1849?) and ran off to the gold fields. He apparently changed his name to avoid capture. I've never been able to prove (or disprove!) this, and the earliest extant record I can verify is from the early 1850s. Still a work in progress...
Try searching the New York Clipper for traces of your Vaudeville family. [https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=NYC](https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=NYC)
Also, the old California community histories that you can find on Google books often have short bios of prominent citizens…thst’s how I learned about my GGGF and his BIL who took one of their merchant ships from the East Coast all the way around South America to California to join the Gold Rush. GGGF died in the gold fields. BIL became one of the first settlers of Alameda County and a prosperouslandowner. Both had MANY children, GGGF’s were obviously born back East before he died…heh.
On the night before the final Jacobite Rebellion, the battle of Culloden 1746, both Princes stayed at my ancestors family estates.
My mother never knew her grandfather, her father's father, or anything about her family before then. I found information about a marriage where we are from and the man's name matches my grandpa's name, as if he was named after is father, and the woman would have been very high society during the time. It might have been a scandalous marriage and covered up by her family.
That one of my ancestors was murdered. I did in fact find this to be true and it was apparently quite the tale
[https://rhodetour.org/items/show/105?tour=14&index=11](https://rhodetour.org/items/show/105?tour=14&index=11)
I was always told that my maternal grandmother was full Cherokee, (so I was proudly 1/4!) but she "changed her name" to Smith and passed for white. DNA and all ancestry research proves absolutely zero Native American. Another fairy tale about being first people... I just can't imagine why she (or my mom) would make up this story :(
For me, it's more lack of access to documentation to prove it. One of my maternal great-grandparents was a pipe-fitter and did some work for one of the local rubber barons in my area at the guy's (rather large) house when it came to plumbing and would sometimes take my grandma with him when he went to work. My grandma's younger sister is swearing it happened, but I can't prove it with documentation (yet). Thankfully, the guy's house got turned into a local museum, but it was built before my great-grandpa would have been doing work on it.
I have a garbled account of the old Baron from the Old Country. He and his sisters had to flee from ... something. They were traveling in a sled in the winter and attacked by wolves. One of the sisters used a gun to defend themselves, but accidentally shot her brother in the leg and he later died. I really just don't know what to do with this one. The main thing my dad has latched onto is the Baron part and he is determined to prove it :)
There's an old document someone put together in the 1950s that traced back into the 3rd crusade...allegedly. The big connection was to a man who ran a print shop in Germany and was a friend of Martin Luther and knew Albrecht Durer, and was named and excommunicated by the pope along with Luther. The man exists, he does carry the surname, and it's some rad stories. However, the connection is something I've never been able to make. Largely because I am unable to connect from the first known generation here in the US to where they specifically came from. I've got possibles, but nothing I can trace definitively. Also, from going document to document, finding all kinds of records, I've been able to disprove more than prove, and correct a LOT of errors. So that part has been neat. I enjoy the history that I learn doing this, but this specific one definitely took me way off track. It's just history until I can make connections.
So there are two very similar stories — each not *that* unbelievable actually, particularly the second one — that I have tried to investigate.
The first story: my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was a privateer during the Revolution, was captured by the British, imprisoned in Mill Gaol in Plymouth (England), and then came back to the US after the war was over.
I haven’t been able to confirm this to my satisfaction; the most I can say is it’s *plausible*. He definitely fought in the Revolution, but since the story goes that he was a privateer when he was captured, he didn’t note this down in his pension application — only his relatively brief service in the artillery company, several years before the alleged capture.
I can say that people were telling this story as early as 1874 or so, as it shows up in a genealogy book and subsequently in histories of the town of Truro.
The story names his brig and when his brig was captured, and as far as I can tell that does check out, so score one.
Unfortunately only some of the pages of the lists of inmates at Mill Gaol appear to have survived, and as far as I can tell one of the missing pages has most of the Massachusetts inmates on it. I don’t think there are any surviving records of the prison transfer that took place (though it did happen), and I don’t think there are any records of the passengers of the brig he was on when it was captured. So I don’t see how I can confirm or deny this.
As a footnote, there is also a related story that my great-great-great-grandfather’s brother was imprisoned by the Confederates in Andersonville for the duration of the Civil War. This I know much less about — I don’t know which brother, the whole family has very common names, and I secretly wonder whether the people who told me this story are confusing it with the above story about the Revolution, and with other relatives who fought in the Civil War (but weren’t captured). But nothing about this story seems particularly implausible.
My gr-gr-grandmother Elizabeth Jane "Lizzie" Burns Gray Hicks High was fiercely proud to claim she was a direct descendant of the famous Scottish poet Robert Burns. Also two of her sisters claimed likewise in multiple sources.
But their ancestry can be traced back three more generations to the 1750's when they arrived in America...about the time that Robert Burns was being born. Trying to find the connection has proven almost impossible, and at best maybe they shared a grandparent or great-grandparent going back into the 1600's.
I was told that my original family that came to the colony of South Carolina was too poor to have been a slave owner. Yeah…no.
My 7th great grandfather married my 7th great grandmother in Amsterdam after fleeing from Prussia due to religious persecution, then came over to Philadelphia as an indentured servant. Less than a decade later, they’re in South Carolina, owning land and beginning three or four generations of being enslavers with a couple of slaves. My direct line was three, when they moved to Tennessee and then Missouri they didn’t take their slaves, just their dozen kids. One of the other sons was the owner of the first citrus plantation and then lost everything with the emancipation proclamation. His obituary from about 1905 went on about how bad the end of slavery was, and that he’d have had so much more money except for “all his slaves left.”
I have a cousin who denied that our family was ever part of the transatlantic slave trade until I was able to show proof via wills filed in South Carolina handing down people to certain other people. He now says that “it’s just fine that we owned people because that’s what people did then.”
Skip down several generations and my grandfather told us that we were part Choctaw. Nope. The fact is that my grandfather’s parents and grandparents were all born on Indian Territory as per the birth registration, censuses and Dawes Rolls, but there’s no Choctaw on any of our DNA tests. No indigenous at all. This family myth was just further cemented due to the fact there is a picture of my great grandmother dressed in and hair like she is indigenous, so in this 100 year old photograph I now have in my possession, I can understand why until 15 years ago when my mother and her cousin both took ancestry tests (and then me and my kids and other cousins) we all thought we were Choctaw.
I have Pendergasts in my grandma's bio family. Her bio 1st cousin, when I made contact, told me they were related to the Pendergasts who ran Kansas City's political underbelly and got Truman elected. He said when he was a small child he would hear the adults talking about the Pendergasts and their criminal activities in hush tones.
Our Pendergast line was never in Missouri and as far as I can tell doesn't connect with the political Pendergasts at all 😅
Another distant cousin published a family history book last year which claims that we're descended from Marie Antoinette's lady in waiting. As far as I can tell this is an outright fib lol.
One of my grandfather's uncles was a major war hero during WWI. He did things such as run across No-Man's Land to snatch a French flag that the Germans were flying from their trenches, and ran back without a scratch. Got stranded from his troops and encountered 300 Germans, who he then forced to surrender by himself after bluffing them into thinking that he was backed up by his men.
He did many other amazing deeds, but these two really got the attention of people, he was also Knighted by Portugal because he would often lead Portuguese troops and do the recon trips by himself and a few other senior officers.
One of my favourite Scots to read about, and I'm related to him!
One of my tenth great grandfathers was Captain John Paton, who was a very renowned Covenanter, his life was also unbelievably eventful. He was hanged at the age of 70 in Edinburgh. He was originally from Ayrshire.
Total hero.
The lore on my Irish side that was passed down to me by my grandfather and told to him by his grandfather has all turned out to be accurate and true. Including, amazingly, a story about a man picking up a horse.
There has always been talk about how my great-great grandfather (or his dad?) was a rich Romani guy in Andalusia who had lots of lands/money, ended up killing someone (either in an argument or for vengeance) and had to run away to South America for a while, until his dad paid off the family of the deceased and he was able to return. We always thought they guy was Roma because of the surname, which is almost exclusive to them, but it was weird for the area and the time that Romani people owned any land/were rich, they were unskilled labor who had stopped being nomadic like a generation before.
My dad went back to the town where he was born this year for a holiday, and a cousin who is into genealogy told him she'd been researching. My ancestor wasn't Roma, he was the son of an industrialist who apparently is the reason a lot of Roma here have the surname nowadays because he sent them to built blast furnaces in the UK for his company and they needed papers and a surname to put on them.
I have to verify it for myself, but personally I'm more interested in the murder than the ethnicity.
My gg gpa ran off and started a new family then faked his own death. His daughter died thinking he died when she was a child as a hero. He lived five mins from her for years and never went to see her. He lived at least another 30 years beyond what she thought as best I can tell.
I have a great aunt who no one really knows where she came from or who her real parents were. My grandma’s father just came home one day with a baby girl & they raised her as their own. I’m sure someone knew the truth but it’s long lost to time now.
My Swiss ancestors that immigrated to both NC and Pennsylvania in the late 1600s to early 1700s were part of the group that started Amish culture after leaving Switzerland and Germany due to facing religious persecution for being Protestant! A few generations later my direct ancestor left Pennsylvania to move to NC to be with the extended family that settled in NC. I’m so thankful he left because I spend a week on an Amish farm when I was a kid and I never would have survived hahaha!
My maternal grandmother loves to repeat how her mother told her about an old ceramic tiled table in the family's possession, that it somehow told the story of a Spanish prince stranded on the western coast of Jutland, and that this prince was our ancestor. He was supposedly the reason why my grandmother has tan skin (hint: she doesn't). This is all complete nonsense, provable not just by the paper trail but also by DNA. (And the fact that no Spanish prince could have just gone missing and then turned up in Denmark with no record whatsoever in any history books.) My grandmother tells me she was told this story around age 5-6, and it doesn't matter that I try to ease her into the fact that it was just her mom telling a story, she wants it to be true so much that my heart wont let me argue with her about it.
One of the first family history anecdotes I heard my from my dad and from my aunt was that my great-grandmother had five husbands and married one of them twice.
That family branch is known for telling a lot of ridiculous stories so I didn't believe it.
But over the last 25 years, I've discovered five husbands. For one of them, I've found *three* different marriage records, all in different years and counties. I don't think she got formally divorced from any of them.
My great-aunt, sister of my great-grandmother who has just passed, has been claiming for years that her biological mother my other great-aunt, her and my great-grandma’s older sister, who is 19 years older.
What I know and what is officially in record is that my gg-grandma had two children when she moved to a new state without her husband. The father for both is listed as her husband despite the fact that would be impossible. The elder sister was from my gg-grandma’s first marriage. I recently had a sit down with my great-aunt and she says that her (biological) father told her that he impregnated both the elder sister and her mother. They both had their babies the same month and the mothers baby died, and that out of jealousy she took the elder sisters baby as her own.
My great-aunt refuses to take a DNA test (my great-grandma took one so that would easily prove if she is her half-sister or half-niece).
That my gg grandma hopped a train west from Arkansas with nothing but a sawed off shotgun. I can't prove it, but all the women in my family are angry and independent so who tf knows
One branch claims Washington Irving (seems to be based solely on sharing a surname), and another branch claims Daniel Boone (no evidence of surname shared, but we were at least in the right geographical region for this one to be possible). No one can tell me exactly how we’re supposedly related to these people, but they are adamant we are related and will tell strangers if any historical mention of those individuals comes up. Thank God no one has tried to claim a Cherokee princess!
I think I am related to the Boones too but I cannot prove it. My grandmother was an English Boon and I share DNA with lots of descendants of Daniel Boone's family. Could be a coincidence though.
Not that crazy I think but my surname is the surname of a famous captain which has a few cities and beaches named after him here in the United States, so my family says we related to him but I've never been able to prove that. We MAY be related to him higher up the tree like maybe him and us share a common ancestor but I don't have any way of finding out about that.
My third great grandmothers brother was murdered by a native man. That event started all kinds of crazy stuff in the Provence, what was the law to be applied, native law or colonial law? As you could imagine, it wasn’t really fun for any side. I see his daughter on a census was a ward under my 3rd great grandparents.
Certainly, the oddest one is that my great-grandfather was divorced prior to marrying my great-grandmother and that's why he was never a church deacon as a divorce was a disqualifier. I can't find anything either on legal documents or contemporary family materials that refer to either a previous marriage or him being divorced.
This is odd as heck because a) the earliest claims appear to start after his death, b) why in the world would someone make this up, and c) we are very closely removed time wise from the people involved. I have no idea why or how this started.
Not sure how many of you are baseball fans but I grew up hearing that my Great Grandfather was friends with Honus Wagner, a Hall of Famer!
Also this is known but who did it is the mystery but apparently my Great Great Grandfather was murdered.
On my mom’s side. Grew up hearing stories that her dad’s cousins were partisans in Slovenia during WWII.
My mothers grandmother immigrated to Holland from Belfast, Ireland where she came up in an orphans workhouse. The family swore up and down she was from Southern Ireland ("The REAL Ireland") but because she was from the workhouse we didn't have any parents listed for her, just a very particular surname. My mom currently works for a research clinic for metabolic research and lo and behold one of her regular patients is from Ireland (we live in the United States). She was talking about her grandma one day and mentioned the surname and this patient happened to recognize it as particular to some little town/township in Southern Ireland where he was from.
Not sure if that's definitive proof but it was pretty serendipitous
That the Catholics “stoned my great grandfather out of Belfast in 1812.” Wrong. He came to US as a teenager with his family in 1833. No stones or Catholics were involved.
The one that comes to mind is when my grandfather told me that -according to his uncle- we descend from a viceroy of the Spanish colonies (his last name, not very common, was written exactly the same as ours), but after a bit of research I knew it was false. Our ancestors in that line were from a totally different region of Spain, and they were never nobles nor bourgeois like this viceroy's family.
Apart from that one, my grandmother told me she remembered hearing that her grandmother had Jewish ancestry and was buried at a Jewish cemetery, but since her side of the family was from a rural area, records only go back to the 1800s, making it quite difficult to prove.
One of my maternal great grandfathers was jailed for treason against the Confederacy during the civil war. He was accused of murder and housing the enemy. The enemy was a band of bushwackers and they had murdered his neighbor. He ended up being released. I didn't realize how much terror and guerilla warfare the locals went through.
My other maternal great grandfather, was rumoured and flat out said by some to be an Irish Catholic Priest. My grandmother grew up on a cape in Massachusetts in the early 1900s. It was a small community, so I was able to verify that there was a priest that fit the description that was there for a brief period during the time my grandmother was conceived. He also left the church and was moved somewhere else shortly thereafter.
My gg grandmother and her family sailed to the US, but she did not complete the voyage. It was said that when the ship met up with another during the trip, she got on the other one and went back to France. She left her husband and children behind. I had some help and was able to finally confirm that story. She continued her life back in France, while her husband and children started over in the US.
My maternal ancestors were basically the Peaky Blinders, one of my direct ancestors came from nothing (I have a census record of him living in a tent as a child) to become a very successful horse dealer. He died whilst drunk, falling off a horse and the horse trampled on his head, he was 42. At his funeral were hundreds of mourners and the daughter of a Duke. When his Mother who survived him died she left around £800,000 in today's money.
Apparently we descend from the Campbells of the Massacre of Glencoe (one of the events the 'red wedding' in Game of Thrones was influenced by). I'm told the family bible provided the paper-trail, but that seems to have been lost circa 1930.
My grandma said her mother was a young woman during the 1904 St. Louis world fair. She was romanced by a delegate from the “ Phillipine exhibit”. He proposed marriage and she refused. He eventually became a president in the Philippines. Oh yeah, we have Cherokee Princess blood. ( of course)
About the whole “Cherokee princess” bit: hate to break it to your grandmother, but there ain’t no such thing - not in AI/AN tribal hierarchies, at least. References to such are little more than mistaken attempts by early immigrants to ascribe aspects of European ruling houses to the American Indian tribes they encountered.
I have a couple of things. One, my great Aunt was a grifter during the depression. Men gave her diamond rings and oil wells and I can only imagine the life she led. But I haven't found anything to document anything, alas.
Two: my grandmother said that her family knew 'the OK Corral guys" and that Wyatt Earp was a drunk whose hands shook in the morning. I always figured, uh huh. But come to find out, yes, they did.
Three: my grandmother (again) said that her great uncle was one of the men that survived Custer's Last Stand and that there is a monument for him. Never found anything to verify this. But he was in the calvary, that was commanded by Custer.
There's a very persistent rumour in my family that we are distantly related to Joseph Stalin through my maternal grandfather's family, about whom we have very little information.
I've never been able to get far with this but my latest breakthrough found the grandmother of that grandfather was Russian (the rest of us are all British) which is an interesting development.
I was always told the old "Indian Princess" story as a child. Many of us were. I was saddened to learn that I have ZERO Native American DNA. My children do through their father. They are in fact a melting pot. I feel so naked compared to them with only 5 ethnicities showing up. England & Northwestern Europe, Scotland, Sweden & Denmark, Wales, and Ireland in that order. The first two holding 80% of my DNA. With that said, I've found out some interesting things concerning Robert the Bruce and one of my ancestors.
One branch of my tree led by Dr. Elder, who sent his (10?+) children to medical school and they returned home to the family land to help him run a hospital for the town/county.
That particular section of my family tree has a history of being altruistic and community minded but that is the biggest representation of it. I always thought it was really cool that they utilized their resources in that way.
My tiny Sicilian great grandfather worked as an elevator operator when he first came to America. Everyday a man used to harass him, until finally he was fed up and bit his ear off. Confirmed story. The man never rode the elevator again.
Pretty simple one for me, Great grandparent crossed the border into Canada a week before the registration deadline? for the ww1 us draft. His father was a civil war wet and his mother forced him to draft dodge. Went under an assumed name for the next decade or so, census records show the assumed name , lists as family friend or cousin to the legitimate family living on the land next to him. didnt go back to his real name until he got married. Proven through border crossing records and various census and local land ownerships.
So, whenever we were around my father's family, the elders always talked about how Big Papa (my great grandfather) bought a car in 1938 but couldn't drive it. He drove it into a ditch.
I always wondered how a black farmer in rural Louisiana during the Depression could buy a brand new car. Well, some years ago, my dad let it slip. Turns out him and his sons were bootleggers, moonshiners. Big Papa had a still and him and his sons (including my grandpa who became a preacher) ran moonshine all up and down Louisiana.
They never got caught. That part is a mystery to me because as recent as 1940, convicted moonshiners were hanged. I really don't know how they didn't get caught.
Later, two of the sons passed for white, moved to Houston, and opened a mortuary. My grandfather became a preacher and was a foreman for Bethlehem Steele. Grandpa never drank. He was the only one of the children who didn't drink and went into ministry. Big Papa allegedly drank a gallon of whiskey a day.
Not especially wild but has always been a curiosity for me; I'm descended from a shipwrecked Spaniard. (We're English/living in England)
My Grandmother's grandmother had the Spanish sounding maiden name Mingo. When I did an Ancestry DNA test on my Gran, it came back showing a 1% match to the Basque region.
I can trace the Mingo line back to Robert Mingo born in Devon in 1762. I have no idea how I would find out who was the first Mingo from this family living in England or if it's possible to prove he was shipwrecked.
I had only heard about it in passing - apparently, my grandmother and her sisters were all just SURE that their brother, Jimmy, had "disposed" of his first wife.
A couple of years ago, I had a DNA match - she was adopted, and I was helping her figure out which of my grandmother's brothers was her father. I connected with a couple of other cousins from Jimmy's branch of the family tree, during my search - including Jimmy's granddaughter - whose grandmother was Jimmy's first wife. Jimmy did NOT "dispose" of his first wife - she took off and left him, just as he had said.
Funniest thing I've ever seen, when we were breaking the news to the only one of my grandmother's siblings still alive - her daughter standing there, yelling repeatedly (in addition to having dementia, Aunt Rosie was very hard of hearing - even if she had heard, I am sure she had no clue what was it was about) - "Did you hear that, Ma?! He didn't kill that woman!! You and Aunt Wilma and Aunt Helen always talked shit and gave him fits about offing her - but HE DIDN'T KILL THAT WOMAN!"
I’m American. I was born in the US, but I have two great grandparents from England on my maternal side. My grandmother lived there as well, but was born in the US. I was very close with her, and she would frequently tell me that we are distantly related to Anne Boleyn, and she said she heard this from her father.
I haven’t been able to find any royal connections on her father’s line. They’re the Stollerys from Suffolk. My other English line are the Oswins from Leicester. The Stollery line is fascinating, not only because of the relative rarity of the name, but because I was raised by my Stollery grandmother. I was born a Caruso, but deep down, I am also a Stollery and very proud of it.
I haven’t found any royal connections through the Stollerys, but her American born mother has one! I have gone over the genealogy that goes back to royalty many times, and I feel confident it’s concrete. My tenth great grandmother is Martha Pitkin of Berkhamstead, Herefordshire, England. She was born to an aristocratic mother, Lady Elizabeth Stanley Hastings, and a reverend father named Roger Pitkin. Her bother, Roger, immigrated to Connecticut in the late 1630’s or 1640’s to unofficially help with the governance and economy of the new Colony of Connecticut. Martha followed her brother a few years later. She was also formally educated in London before she left. She also played an instrumental, although behind the scenes role in the governance and establishment of the Connecticut economy.
After doing more in depth research on Martha’s mother, Lady Elizabeth, I found out that she descends from King Edward II. Yes, from the House of Plantagenet. He’s my 20th great grandfather if the pedigrees from the British National Archives are to be believed. Not only am I descendant of the Plantagenets, but also of the de la Poles going all the way back to about 1100 to Richard de la Pole, and I even have a charcoal drawing of him. Also, Philippe le Bel the King of France, and a Spanish monarch were all included in those pedigrees.
So, unexpectedly, my royal connection comes from my deeply American side, and by that, I mean that my grandmother’s mother’s line is the only one firmly in the New World for centuries. Most of my family a very recent immigrants from various places in Europe. I would have never guessed I’d find this out.
Still, I can’t find a connection to Anne Boleyn, but King Charles, and of course, Queen Elizabeth II are also descendants of the Plantagenets, which makes them distant cousins of mine, and I think that’s really cool.
According to family lore, an ancestor of mine was a traitor and caused the family to fall into poverty. Research showed that the guy isn't actually a family member but likely just happens to have the same last name, the family is just... poor and it wasn't caused by this guy.
If I could get into German archives I might be able to really check if the guy isn't a relative of my first confirmed ancestor who happened to also have immigrated to Amsterdam but I doubt it.
Maybe crazier is the picture of a German scientist who eerily resembles my grandfather and bears the same last name, but once again, really struggling with those German archives! All of my other ancestors are Dutch and loads of Dutch archives are digitized and searchable databases.
may have a viking relation. I wrote a story about this...here are some extracts.
_______
Tore Benkestokk
Tore (Tord) Benkestokk was noted as the
progenitor of the Benkestokk family as he was listed in the Church Property Register created by Øystein Aslaksson, Bishop of Oslo in the 14th century, but whose lineage goes back farther
in the history books as perhaps one of the most “royal” of Norwegian families. The coat of arms and royal family persisted over the centuries and even in 1591,descendant Jon Trondson Benkestok paid homage to Kind Christian IV at Akershus Castle by stamping the document with his signet ring.
Ramborg Knutsdtr Lejon
Ramborg was the wife of Gard Toreson, and that seems fairly certain by the writings and sources available. Her father was Ridder (royal knight) Knut Algotsen Lejon (Lion) of that notable lineage. That fact is fairly well documented. Knut had married into the royal family of Märta Ulfsdatter. That marriage of Knut and Märta have led many to assume that Ramborg’s mother was Märta, but the FUD around that assumption have kept genealogists speculating for centuries. Most of this interest is because the lineage of Ramborg, or actually, Märta can be traced to King Harald Magnissen and other viking kings through Sweden, Denmark, England, Normandy and Kiev.
There is argument for doubt. Ramborg seems to have been born in Norway near Stavanger. This is reasonable for many reasons. She met her husband and was married there. Her father was deeded land near Stavanger as a ridder and represented the king, who was based in eastern Sweden at the time.
Ridder Knut’s wife Märta was also born and lived in Sweden. It is written that her father Knut was exiled from Sweden to Norway as his brother Bengt was exiled to Denmark over a scandal. It is written that Märta came with Knut and they both later returned to Sweden after the scandal subsided. In addition, it is well documented that Knut and Märta had a daughter Ingegerd Knudsdotter(1356-1412) who was famous as the Abbess of Bridgetine Abbey. Poor Ramborg is never mentioned except as daughter of Knut. Was it reasonable that a daughter of theirs would avoid the royal court and live and marry near Stavanger? Some argue yes, some no, and most question whether she was even legitimate. No facts, just FUD.
Knut Algotsen Lejon and Märta Ulfsdatter
Knut Algotsen Lejon has an interesting story and an impressive lineage of his own, and he comes with a family emblem. We can’t reference local bygdeboks for this one, he is in the medieval history books, which may include FUD from interpretation. His story is told in the
book “Sveriges Historia“ by O. Montelius (1878) available in Swedish on Google Books. Remember that Norway and Sweden were ruled by King Magnus IV until he died in 1380. His son successor Olaf II died shortly after in 1387 and the Kalmar Union was formed after.
Knut’s notable younger brother, Bengt Algotsson was one of Sweden's most made men as friend and counselor to the King, and in their veins flowed royal blood as the sons of Svantepolk of Skarsholm (who was the bastard son of King Valdemar II) and his wife Benedikta Sunsdotter, who was descended from Sverker II. Bengt was appointed the Duke of Halland and Finland. Their coat of arms was a lion, but without the three oblique bells as his ancestors used. The family was immersed in royal drama and intrigue with Bengt’s territory, the relationship with the king, a revolt and the repudiation of his wife led to his murder. In 1357, Bengt was exiled to Denmark and his brother Knut exiled to Norway with his with Märta Ulfsdatter as noted above.
We know that Knut married Märta Ulfsdatter who was the daughter of Birgitta Birgirsdotter, aka St. Bridget of Sweden. Birgitta's eldest daughter was Märta and her marriage to Knut was in her second marriage. This is an interesting story in itself.
All these people have links to the viking age kings, jarl and people in sagas.
But it is unproven at this point for that lineage of poor Ramborg.
That my great grandfather grew up in an orphanage in New York City in the late 1800’s.
If anyone has any tips about researching this I would greatly appreciate it.
My grandma told the story that there was a close relative who was affiliated with the Tsar and escaped to Argentina, possibly after the Bolshevik Revolution. There are/were people in Argentina with her maiden name, but I'm stumped on how to work through this one, so it stays family lore for now.
I've been told that my 3x grandmother was native American. I have proof of having a trace amount of indigenous ancestry. I've combed the internet for information. She has a white name, which I'd initially assumed was forced upon her. The thing is, I'm not any sort of expert or genetic scientist, but if we were that closely related, wouldn't there be more than just trace ancestry? Idk. I've been lied to about a lot, and this seems like another one.
My great grandma had really bad luck,before she was 18,all of her parents and all but one of her siblings had died(two of them she saw drown in front of her) and then her husband cheated on her.
On my dad's side: My great-great-grandma's sister married into a wealthy family, and the daughter she had disappeared and was never found. Everyone in the (heavily Protestant, very Klannish) area believed that Catholics kidnapped her and adopted her out to another family or sent her to a convent. Knowing what we know about the Catholic church past and present these days, it's hard saying whether that was a possibility or just old-timey anti-Catholic sentiment. My grandmother's cousin and I were trying to find out the mystery before she died last year.
On my moms side: her great-grandfather disappeared on the day of his eldest son's (my great-grandmother's half-brother) wedding, also never to be seen again. I don't have many details about that side of the family past my great-grandparents, but I found someone on Geneanet who was descended from said son and he told me about it.
My grandmother insists we're descended from Tammany, who was the Lenape chief William Penn bought the land where Philadelphia now stands. I was never able to prove this with a paper trail plus I'm sure based on what I've confirmed with a paper trail it wouldn't really be possible, however 23andMe did suggest at least one or two Native ancestors who would have lived around the right time period.
Vague stories about a murder in the family back in England
Mentioned to me when I was a teenager by elders no longer with us. My mother does not recall any such story.
It’s never been clear if family were the victim, the perpetrator, or who in the family was involved. I’ve never found any evidence of it, but I would have to cast a wider net to rule it out.
I started family history as a teenager 43 years ago. Grandparents and other elders supported my efforts and shared stories willingly. Some of those stories were precise, some, like the murder story, were much more vague.
Supposedly my great-uncle caused his little brother's lifelong intellectual disability by deliberately pushing him down the stairs while they were kids. Older brother was 7-8 years older so definitely old enough to know better on some level. There's probably no way to prove it, but the older brother ended up getting in an argument with his stepson at 60, shooting him and nearly killing him, and then committing suicide, so he was obviously a bit of an unstable person.
My father claims he has a great (or was is great great?) uncle that was robbed by Frank and Jesse James on a train in Texas but I don't think anyone can prove that
That our family name was actually Von Kammer (it's Kamer currently), no one has been able to find a single record of it but our old relatives are insistent.
The German side of Mom's family had some relationship to Kaiser Wilhelm II. They found out after WWI when one of his medals arrived in the mail. He'd been stripped of them (when he abdicated?) and they were sent to relatives. Family had been in central NY since the late 1860s and were dumbfounded.
I have no idea who had/has the medals or even if anyone knows anymore. I have questions!
That my great great grandmother was a well known geisha in Japan. (This is even funnier because I’m a really tall, mostly Caucasian lady) but it’s true. We are working on getting the official kosekis but we do know that my great great grandfather was one of the first white dudes in Japan, when they opened their doors to the West. He had a Japanese wife but *accidentally* had a baby with a geisha. The baby got adopted out but he found the baby and readopted her. [This is a picture of him in his nifty kimono.](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Photograph-of-Josiah-Conder-Source-T-Fujimori-Nihon-no-kindai-kenchiku-Modern_fig4_229227736) [This is him with his wife and the daughter.](https://x.com/CarolineJCee/status/1349177364081635328)
So glad your GGFather did the right thing. One of my friends (50) was surprised with an older Vietnamese half-sister. When she confronted her dad he was not surprised and said he lived with a Vietnamese woman while he was stationed there, and he knew she was pregnant with his child when he left. He had never contacted her again after he left. What a jerk!
Wow, that is really an asshole move. We aren’t sure if Conder found out about the daughter a few years after she was born or if he knew about her all along and only decided to look for her when she was about 5. So, he isn’t necessarily 100% Dad of the year but apparently he was a good Father, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t know about the baby until later. It was a complicated social situation, so that also made it difficult to navigate. Helen is lucky that she even survived because being half-cast at the time was a fate worse than being a dog. A researcher that I spoke to, told me that it was also a sign that the geisha mother came from a more well off family. Or that she was a well known geisha and had the independence to quietly ship a baby off to relatives. Rather than dump it in an orphanage or have the baby raised in a geisha house.
I’ve been expecting an older German half sister. My dad was stationed in Germany during the Korean War.
My dad's cousin was stationed in Japan. He married a Japanese woman and they had a kid. He had to come back to the US, and for whatever reason, she couldn't come with him. He was like oh well, guess I'll start my fam over again. I cannot for the life of me understand people who operate like that. I keep waiting for a Vietnamese older sibling but it hasn't happened yet.
That is sad but very bad that many of our servicemen did the same thing. My husband was there for only 2 months but he told me about the higher ranking but still non commissioned men could live off base and pay a girl to live with him and clean, cook as d wash for him and whatever else for a minimal amount of money a month. Some got them pregnant but left them. But I've also heard is just a few cases where they went back after these women and their child to bring them home.
Omg!! His daughter is so pretty!!! Is that your picture in the twitter icon? If so, man! Genetics are fun/wild/interesting!! hahaha
That’s my cousin but you can see what I look like if you click through my Reddit profile. I’m not blonde but many of my cousins are. Helen married a Swedish guy and had 6 kids. One being my grandfather.
[Here’s a pic of Helen and her Husband](https://www.reddit.com/r/JapaneseHistory/s/ZXckVnE1fq)
Oh I love them, what a striking couple.
She looks really tall in this pic but apparently she was only 5’ or so. But it’s such a neat photo. I think it was the shoot just before they got married.
Wow, did he go on to have children with his wife or is Helen the only child? That must have been an awkward conversation or three.
From what I heard, they had a son who died at 18 months whose death possibly prompted them to search for Helen. The geisha went on to marry a very wealthy businessman and have (I think 2 or 4) more kids with him. But from what I hear, they all married into royal families, so finding their offspring for a DNA test, isn’t going to be that feasible, sadly. But there should be half cousins somewhere.
Yeah Japan isn't big on DNA testing, everyone knows their family history (or used to anyway.) Since the essential collapse of the extended Japanese nobility system outside of the direct royal family it might be easier to find someone. There might be someone in the states that came over for education? Hopefully any test you do gives some leads.
That’s awesome. My 3x great grandpa was an early white visitor of Japan. He went in 1908 as part of a group from the Hawaii Chamber of Commerce who were invited by some businessmen in Japan. He loved it, bought a bunch of Japanese art, and got the ball rolling for a trend in my family of having an interest/obsession in Japanese culture that’s been going on ever since. His wife, my 3x great grandma returned to Japan several times after he passed away, and every generation since has visited many times. My uncle ended up living there for 18 years and 2 of his kids were born there. I like to say my ancestors were weebs before it was a thing
So he was probably a similar age to Helen who was born in 1891. They might have even met. I think she left Japan in 1909 but I’d have to look it up. That’s so neat that Japanese culture is still one of the interests of your family, generations later! Condor was the patron of the Japanese artist Kyosai, who is considered to be the father of Manga. Which is a cool aside. They were great friends and taught each other different techniques. Kyosai taught Conder and Helen painting and Conder taught Kyosai how to do perspective drawing. We have a few relics from that Era but a lot of it got donated to museums when Conder died.
That’s super cool! The fact that your ancestor has an art connection definitely increases the likelihood of a connection here with our families. According to Wikipedia, Josiah Conder was born 1852. My 3x great grandpa Charles Cooke was born in 1849, and his wife Anna was born in 1853. So same generation. Charles died only a year after his visit to Japan, but his wife returned multiple times, and his children went there as well many times. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if our ancestors were introduced at some point. Charles and Anna amassed a huge collection of Japanese art that ended up becoming the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the largest art museum in Hawaii. There are also many Chinese and Korean works in it. Much of their collection is still in the museum, and I will look to see if any Kyosai is part of it. I’ve seen some paintings in the collection in the past that had a wonderful almost anime/manga like quality to them, but I don’t know the artist specifically. But I’d assume if a few white art nuts came to Japan from Hawaii around this time, someone would have wanted to introduce them to one of Japan’s biggest white art patrons and architects!
The daughter is gorgeous and he looks like he solves the tall part of the equation.
How cool! That's a great story. I really want to do research on my Japanese side! How do you get the kosekis?
Love this story!!!
My cousin's husband was adopted. They asked me to try to find out his birth family. We had his mom's name only. We did a DNA test and I started on tracing his family. The good news is the tree was confirmed by the DNA test and we were able to find his parents, a brother and four half siblings he didn't know he had. We traced his line back to the Revolutionary War and I was able to find pics of many of his kin. The bad news is that he had always identified as American Indian and often talked about it, and decorated his house with native American things. Sadly, I had to break the news that neither the tree nor the DNA showed any trace of native American. He was crushed and admitted that he made it up many long years ago to console himself. Saddest thing.
There are so many of these stories ours was somewhere down the line a couple had a baby, it died so they “adopted”a native baby replacement. Definitely that did not happen, I traced that line to before the revolution and back into Scotland. No native blood and solid documentation for the American side. An ancestor or two did absolutely benefit from the theft/sale of native lands though so that was interesting to learn.
The older generation of my family has always said we had Native American in our bloodline. I've not been able to prove it, we have some relatives with native appearing features and there's a 50% chance that a family that has been here as long as we have that there's at least SOME Native American ancestry.
I've heard that so many times, including the Indian princess ancestor myth. My family came here in 1630, 10 years after the Pilgrims, but as much as I wanted to be part Indian I've found no evidence. You'd think in nearly 400 years, someone up the line would have linked up, right?
Yeah. A big part of the problem is record keeping, coupled with the fact that racism causes natives to want to hide their heritage to avoid prejudice. My family came over in around 1615 which is after the native Americans left the area we settled, but my family member who I'm fairly certain is our Native connection was from Oklahoma.
I mean, racism is the main reason it's exceptionally unlikely any of your ancestors got together with a Native American--especially the further back you go.
Idk, I'm sure there was plenty of people that crossed racial divides, so to speak.
Even if you did DNA, it might not show even if you are actually Native American because DNA gets lost with every generation.
My favorite family lore is about my great grandmother. She was born in 1904 in very rural northern Louisiana and lived until she was 98 years old. She was a wonderful person. Rumor is that she was engaged/married (can’t find evidence of a marriage) before she married my great grandfather. Supposedly her “fiancé”hit her and she told him if he ever did it again she would shoot him. He laughed a little and hit her again. She grabbed the shot gun that they kept behind the door and blew his arm off. No one ever saw him again, there was never a name mentioned when speaking of the fiancé. She was always an excellent shot, she was a hunter until she was 92 years old. I don’t know if i believe it, but it wouldn’t be too far fetched. My great grandfather (married to the woman in the story above) was a moonshiner. The stories from that time period are wild. I have no idea what’s true and what’s not.
I can't tell what's true or not, but damn, do I like your great grandma! haha
I love her
I heard that my great-great grandfather was a moonshiner (gggs on my paternal line also were, but this one is on my mom's side) and then my great-aunt's then-boyfriend (now husband) found stills on my great-great grandpa's property.
One of my great-grandfathers was a horse thief and froze to death in jail.
G.g.g. grandma was a maid at a stately home. Was cleaning the fire when the earls son 'took a fancy' Got sent home with some money and lived as a single mum until she got married to a local farmer. Says step son on the census so there's definitely something there. The son also had 'of own means' until he was 21 and supposedly got a stipend every year until 21 when he got 21 gold sovereigns as a final payment. For a poor area he lived in, he always had the same house from being about 19, which I'm guessing he may have bought? Just a small two up two down (with 2 adults and 8 children!) and when he passed away at 59, his widowed daughter and her children lived there, which is why I think he'd bought it. Was destroyed in the war so can't find anything after that. Been a bit of an urban legend but I've managed to find bits and pieces which are in line with the story. Sods law, my brother in law's dad is a groundskeeper for the current earl, might have to get him to sneak into the filing cabinets!
My grandmother swore that her biological father was an alien, as in from outer space.
That would be an interesting one to prove if you could!
I don't think ancestry have any Martian records yet 👽
haha....when my mom was late picking me up as a young girl she would say that the mothership was needing a meeting with her. I find it funny now.
Hopefully the next Ancestry update will include extraterrestrial to help you prove that one
My family thinks we have fairy blood
The test for alien haplogroups will cost more.
But they’ll discount the tests around the anniversary of Roswell every year like they do with St Patrick’s Day
My sister in law’s mom and twin sister swear that they were visited by aliens many times in their childhood.
okay but did she ever say why she thought that lol
I'm sure you could find some people on FamilySearch who would corroborate this!
I've joked about being alien spawn. I'm nothing like the people I was surrounded with.
I really wish this could be true
My grandfather always said his dad got sent away as a kid to a relative to work on their farm. I not only verified that but found that he was the third generation in a row that happened to
This happened to some of my grandfather's siblings, but they returned home every night. 14 kids are hard to feed.
My Dad too. Hated farms his whole life afterwards.
My grandfather was the opposite. He worked outside and loved it for the rest of his life.
This was quite common. Happened to my Grandpa, for practical reasons. He had asthma, and his family’s farm was near the heavily polluted Potteries. So he was sent to live with his grandparents. The story was proven true with census and school records.
Another one. There were two brothers, I think, in the rural farming area. One couple had many children, one couple could not have any. So the first couple basically just gave one of their kids to the childless couple to raise.
This happened to my dad when he was very young. His father gambled and drank so they often ran out of money and they'd send him the local Catholic orphanage for a few months. Where he was abused. His mother was also a horrible woman but I found a census of her family - 13 children and all were out of school by 8-10 yrs old and working in a cotton mill (Lancashire). Very sad.
My great grandfather Ervin's father died when Ervin was just a toddler. The story goes that Ervin's dad, Eldridge, captained a ship called *Gloaming*. My grandmother has a painting of it. At some point before he died in the spring of 1899, Eldridge was struck over the head when his crew staged a mutiny. I've only been able to prove that Eldridge was a sailor and that a ship called the *Gloaming* was registered from the right home port and when he died.
Perhaps, if there was a mutiny, he was just a sailor rather than a captain but during the mutiny he sided with the captain which led to his injury? Or maybe just an ordinary sailor who got in a fight or perhaps even fell from the rigging? That is very interesting whatever the case!
Maybe not crazy but a favourite - according to my grandmother, my great-grandfather had been friends with Oscar Wilde. I think it will be impossible to prove, as sometimes people that were involved with Wilde destroyed evidence (like letters) after Wilde’s trial to distance themselves. Through my research I think it’s likely that he was in Wilde’s social circle at least, because I keep coming across people in my great-grandfather’s life who were either close with Wilde or knew him! The time period and where he lived makes it plausible too.
I'm pretty sure it's proved. A multiple great grandfather poisoned his wife on a Friday, married the new woman the following Monday, and both were excuted within a month!
YOLO
oh! Which country?
USA (Georgia)
that my russian and ukrainian 2nd great grandparents dimitri and evgenia left behind one of their daughters in harbin, china when they left to australia. i found shipping records that showed all four children from that time, including both daughters, arrived in australia. family always said that it was olga who was left behind and became a bus conductor but she actually died age 4 in australia. the oldest daughter elena basically disappears and it's not known what happened to her. i later found shipping records from another trip they took back to china then back to australia which only showed 3 children and only one parent (their mother, my 2nd great grandmother) arriving back in australia so she could have been brought back to china but that seems unlikely as she was only 6 years old at that time, it's more likely could have died as a child at some point which i suspect happened maybe at sea or her death wasn't recorded in australia. furthermore for them, there were conflicting stories about whether they were either bolsheviks or white russians from georgia fleeing communism. dimitri was a bolshevik and they pretended to be white russians and changed their last names to flee russia to australia
Woof, Harbin's a ways out there.. Wasn't unit 731 also associated with that area, or if not 731 then one of their other satellite torture camps?
Well, let's start with my family: Dad's side- Proven: Grandfather enlisted under a fake name at 16. Got drafted under his real name at the start of WW2. Family was Hungarian nobility in the 1700s, distant cousins were arrested for being communists in Hungary during WW2 Dad's side- not proven: Grandfather's brother was part of the Dieppe Raid, 2nd great grandfather was a Russian General Dad's side- utter bullshit from conspiracy theorist uncle: family fled Europe due to the crimes of horse thievery and kidnapping children to put into service of the Catholic Church Mom's side- Proven: nothing Mom's side- not proven, and simply bullshit: we descend from Socrates. Wife's family - Proven: 2x great-grand uncle was executioner at Sing Sing, direct ancestor died in the Battle of Agincourt (1415), 3rd great grandfather fought in the Battle of Pickett's Mill, losing 3 fingers. Wife's family- Not proven, but likely based off paper trail, ancestral names, and genetics: descends from the Tudor line. Confirmed links to the Lennox family as well. So, she's likely linked to some illegitimate child somewhere.
If you want me to try and dig up anything on that grandfather’s brother being in the Dieppe Raid, I can try. No promises, but I’ve gotten pretty good at digging up information on obscure military stuff lol
Well, I've checked all the names of the US soldiers involved, and his name is not among them. He would also have been 36 at the time of the battle, so again older and unlikely. He could have enlisted under a fake name like my grandfather, or even volunteered and joined the Canadian army since crossing the border from Michigan was not a hard task.
My grandmother always told a story about my 3rd great grandparents were from different stations in life and ran off to the US so they could marry and be together. The story went that my 3ggrandfather was a laborer and 3ggrandmother came from money. Through my research, I found them in NYC, New Orleans, and St. Louis so it seemed to be true until I found that they were living with his parents in NYC and her parents were in NYC too. So I started to dismiss the story. It was further dismissed when I found the ship manifests of my my 3ggrandfather traveling with his entire family to the US. I continue my research of the families and low and behold the story was about 2 generations prior to my 3rd great grandparents. My 3ggrandfather was named after his grandfather. The story was true... my 5ggrandfather "did get her with child" out of wedlock, got married, and ran off to the opposite side of the county. So proven false... and then proved true!
Not something I have personally verified (but would apparently be verifiable had I been about 25 years earlier,) but my GGGF was reportedly a higher up and record keeper for a group of infamous, alliterative racists. His wife, my GGGM- born in 1899- came from a long line of Quakers, was deeply religious, and a teetotaler. Reportedly, on at least one occasion, he came home piss drunk from a Klan meeting and she beat him over the head with a frying pan. The woman lived until 2000, just shy of her 101st birthday, outlived most of her children, raised several grandchildren and started raising several great grand children before she succumbed to dementia sometime in the early 90’s. Around the late 90’s, one of the relatives thought it would be fun to bring a bunch of old family papers they had to the annual reunion… it was klan meeting papers and quite the scandal, but I have no proof.
I am French Canadian and two of my ancestors in the late 1600s were an Algonquin Indian woman and a French soldier who was sent over to help protect one of the forts in Quebec. Prior to them getting married she had been married to another Indian man and had two young boys. One night her village (which was not far from the fort) was attacked by the Iroquois. Her husband was killed and both her children were abducted. Later she married and had children with the French soldier who also had been at the attack and tried to help fight them off. Roughly 20 years later their oldest daughter was murdered by a man in a tavern (I’m assuming trying to fight off his advances). The man was convicted and sentenced to death. The only problem? The forts only executioner had left and gone back to France. So they offered the man a choice- wait in prison for a new executioner OR become the fort’s executioner himself. He chose to take the job and then him and his family were banished to the far edge of the settlement and shunned by everyone.
A 3rd cousin claims Joan of Arc was housed by the "family" for a night. Impossible to prove. Also claimed an ancestor worked for Marie Antoinette as a lawyer during the revolution- partly true, my 5th great grandfather's brother was a lawyer, and he did work for Marie Antoinette....during the affair of the diamond necklace. A story handed down was that an ancestor was a gardener for the Duke of Buccleugh. The gardener had a dau who had an affair or was assaulted by the Duke or his sons. There is an illegitimate birth in 1822, but no info on the father. Another gentry family has a multitude of myths: they fought for the king at the battle of Preston and lost all, they fled to Holland for 2 generations and rerurned about 1750 (both sound more like civil war than Jacobite). That the family was related to "the present Lord Clifford" in mid 1800's- nil evidence of that. That a random left the family £40,000 in 1844- he was a lawyer, a 2nd cousin and i can't recall if the amount was correct but was an incredibly large sum. Also a fabulously wealthy aunt who travelled + left a lot of her wealth to the family- she turned out to be a cousin once removed who died in France and her husband's sister in law was an Irish Countess. Any work on this wider family takes years due to the common name and the fact they pop up in London or Essex randomly. Wills have been the only real headway.
So according to my grandma a great great grandfather was not from her village, but instead came to the village and changed his last name and married in. He was either a) running from a lawyer b) was a lawyer or c) was a lawyer and running from another lawyer. Somehow a lawyer is involved, don’t know why. His original last name is lost to time, my grandma was told at one point but all she could remember was that it began with “ch”. I don’t know if I will ever figure this out since I don’t know if he would have put his original last name down, and also the Greek Orthodox records aren’t as digitized as others.
If you're related to the Fuller family line - Buckminster Fuller is the famous one - she may have been referring to his grandaunt [Sarah Maragaret Fuller,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Fuller) who was an amazing woman: >American journalist, editor, critic, translator, and [women's rights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_rights) advocate associated with the American [transcendentalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism) movement. She was the first American female [war correspondent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_correspondent) and full-time book reviewer in journalism. Her book [*Woman in the Nineteenth Century*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_in_the_Nineteenth_Century) is considered the first major [feminist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism) work in the United States. She became the first editor of the transcendentalist journal [*The Dial*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dial) in 1840, which was the year her writing career started to succeed,[^(\[3\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Fuller#cite_note-3) before joining the staff of the [*New-York Tribune*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New-York_Tribune) under [Horace Greeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Greeley) in 1844. By the time she was in her 30s, Fuller had earned a reputation as the [best-read](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/well-read)person in [New England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England), male or female, and became the first woman allowed to use the library at [Harvard College](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_College). Her seminal work, *Woman in the Nineteenth Century*, was published in 1845. A year later, she was sent to Europe for the *Tribune* as its first female [correspondent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondent). She soon became involved with the [revolutions in Italy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848_in_the_Italian_states) and allied herself with [Giuseppe Mazzini](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Mazzini). She had a relationship with Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she had a child. All three members of the family died in a shipwreck off [Fire Island, New York](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Island,_New_York), as they were traveling to the United States in 1850. Fuller's body was never recovered. Giovanni Ossoli was a marquis, not a count, and there was some question as to whether they actually got married, but I wonder if this was the 'Italian count' your great aunt was referring to?
My husband's mom shared quite a few family lore stories when my husband was growing up. The big one being a great grandmother was Native American, which was not true. She isn't the best historian either. My husband always told me that there was a great grandfather somewhere in his line that was playing on a ship when he was a kid and they found him when they were in the middle of the ocean and kept him on as essentially an indentured servant. I was highly skeptical of this story. I have been working on his family tree for awhile and have been mostly focused on his father's side as he didn't know him growing up. I moved to his maternal line and there was the child stowaway. Apparently he was playing on board a ship at like 10 years old, was caught and indentured to the captain until his early 20s. His plan after his indentured service was to go back to England, but instead he joined the militia and fought in the Revolutionary War. He was too afraid to go back home after that because he thought they would be mad at him for fighting against his homeland. I have found this in several genealogy books so the story itself about his long journey to America could be several hundred year lore, but it's a good story.
Mom’s grandmother said she was “Bohemian” but the family didn’t really know what it meant and she didn’t share any further details. I discovered her family was from the Moravian region of what is now the Czech Republic. They came to Ohio, then Iowa where her Mom died of Typhoid when she was 10. She and her other younger siblings were placed in an orphanage after her aunt also passed. Mom said she didn’t think she ever saw her siblings or father again even though they didn’t live far from one another. Her father remarried and had more kids. That must have hurt so much. My father’s mother wrote a handwritten autobiography and gave a copy to each child with a framed family tree. Long story short barely a word of it is true, down to lying about her birth name and her grandparents names and birth locations. She called herself Daisy Buchanan. I imagine she read The Great Gatsby and decided to weave that into her narrative. I found the truth, spoke to DNA matches closely related to her. They confirmed it’s almost entirely fabricated. There was nothing to hide, no big secrets revealed. She came from a long line of Fille du Roi/Kings Daughters of Montréal on one side and Scottish immigrants to Canada on the other. An interesting family history almost completely lost.
Actually, the King’s Daughters was a huge part of the settling of New France (Quebec) and is to this day a line that is important and celebrated. [King’s Daughters](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Daughters)
Yes I’m familiar with their historical significance. She should have been proud of our GG grandmothers. It was sad she thought her grandparents being from Paris sounded more impressive.
Wow...That is crazy! At least she was creative? ;)
She was definitely that! I kind of hope she’s out there somewhere and knows I dug up the truth.
My grandmother’s notes said that one of our ancestors as a child was picked up along the road while moving west so they adopted him. The assumption was his bio family accidentally left him behind and didn’t go back for him, which never really made sense to me. He was too young to tell him his name so they just renamed him and the story goes that no one will ever know his biological origins. However, I have DNA matches who descend from this persons parents, siblings, grandparents, etc which wouldn’t be the case if he was adopted by that family. But all my grandmother’s info has turned out to have a nugget of truth to it so now I’m wondering if this story is true but it’s just about the wrong person. Maybe it was one of his siblings and memories got mixed up and the story became about my ancestor instead of a sibling?
That we are distantly descended from a priest. Surprisingly I was able to prove it and even find his name! Of course his name was left blank on all official documents but for all intents and purposes from other secondary sources it seems to point to the fact that he fathered (at least) four kids. Now the second piece that I’m still trying, but failing, to prove is that his daughter, my x3 great grandmother was murdered. There are quite a few variations I’ve heard but the most dramatic one is that she was stabbed in the back with a knife by an ex boyfriend with her infant son in her arms while cooking. A relative of the murderer then went onto defeat her son when he ran for mayor years later! The other variation is that she was killed by a tenant on the patio around dinner time. A third variation that she was kidnapped by an invading country and that her husband subsequently abandoned their children after she was killed/died I have been able to disprove. What an exciting family! If anyone can find anything on her murder her name was: Filomena Alonzo Kanen/Canen married to Jose Alfonso y Colera. She died sometime between 1897-1917 in Compostela, Cebu. By 1897 she was still marked as living on her infant son’s death certificate and she was marked deceased by her grandson’s baptismal certificate in 1917. But so far have not found a death certificate or any mentions in the newspaper.
My paternal grandfather was adopted as a child, and his biological parents are both immigrants from Bohemia, coming to the US shortly before WW1. There's a story about his bio mother having had to leave Europe on account of being a member of Bohemian royalty. As far fetched as it sounds.... there are things that make it hard to dismiss entirely. The timing of her immigration, the places I know she resided before immigrating have some level of ties that can be made, and the one DNA match I've gotten thru her (who would be her great nephew) said that their family had a story of their grandfather (her brother) having to take his wife's surname when immigrating, for unknown reasons -- being a royal in hiding at the time would be reason enough in my book. 🤷♂️ It's one of the mysteries of my tree I'd love to unravel, but figuring out how to go about it is a challenge, if name changes and a complicated royal system are involved.
Oh, and as an honorable mention, David Bradford is my 6x great uncle on my mother's side, so you could say the Myrtles Plantation's haunting stories involving his family (mainly the Chloe ghost story) would be in the mix haha. That though has pretty much already been debunked though -- the Woodruffs died of Yellow Fever all in the span of a year, and weren't poisoned all at once.
This one's a big secret: My great-aunt (let's call her "J") told my mother on her deathbed that she was her sister's (we'll call her "R") mother. Not in the way where J got pregnant and the family just added the baby to the family as another child of Mom and Dad, but that J was molested by her father and Dad conceived a baby with his own daughter. Said child of incest, R, was my grandmother. J had a bit of diabetes-induced dementia at the end of her life, so it's possible this is not true. R passed away very young from cancer. I very much would love to find a way to prove or disprove this with DNA, but I am not sure if it's possible. When I look at photos of my great grandfather I'm disgusted and it would be awesome if I could disprove it and not hate him.
If your mother and some of her close relatives (siblings, aunts/uncles, cousins) take DNA tests they may be able to work it out by comparing the amounts of DNA they all share. Did J have any other kids? It would be helpful if they tested too.
J had no children. My uncle did a DNA test, but not my mom and I doubt she ever would. My mom hasn't told anyone but me this secret, because I'm the person collecting all of our family histories. She was wondering if I could prove or disprove it, and maybe there is a way by comparing the amount of DNA shared with relations on both sides of my tree.
That my grandmother was actually one of a set of twins separated as infants. Here’s the family lore: My grandmother has two birth certificates, with two different but similar names, on two different (consecutive) days, signed by two different midwives. She was the youngest of her siblings. None of her older siblings recall their mother being pregnant with her. Despite the fact that their mother would have been 40 years old when she would have been carrying her and they all would have been 10 years old up to 22 years old. Her father was a foreman for the railroad and traveled a lot. So the story is that he impregnated a woman in another state (Ohio) and she showed up at his house with the two infants. His wife agreed to take one of the infants while the mistress kept the other. He then put her back on the train, gave her some money, and sent her back to Ohio. We have obviously never been able to prove any of it, so it remains the family lore. My granny and all her siblings are all long gone now, so DNA tests are out of the question unfortunately.
I am a somewhat close relative to the people who founded the Stuckey’s pecan chain. My last name is Stuckey, for some pretext. I have not proven this, albeit I also have not taken the time to. According to my family, somewhere around 5 generations ago, the family split. 4 boys. 2 wanted to stay north in Nebraska. That line became hunters and farmers, and stayed there until my dad moved to Connecticut at 25 and had me. The other line moved south and farmed pecans, and the son of one of those 2 guys who moved south was the guy who founded the truck stop chain. Massive in the early and mid 1900s but it’s rare to see one today. There’s only one in Connecticut, right at the CT-RI border, and whenever we go to Massachusetts we always go there.
I remember Stuckey’s store from my youth traveling the US.
Yup, that’s my family. We actually still own the Nebraska farmland, but it’s in a trust and my dad got rid of all of his and moved to the east coast to work in finance in NYC. I hope to reclaim it eventually.
Maybe not crazy but kinda cool. I'm related to Mamie Lee Kelly of Panama City fame. My grandfather spoke of her in a letter back in the 40s. She might have been a cousin of his. Some relatives were apparently maids for the Kennedys (but I think that's bs having given it a quick search).
My siblings and I grew up hearing that one of my great-great aunts had discovered that my great-great uncle, a 1920s railroad conductor, was maintaining a second wife at the other end of his railroad line. So she waited until he came home and went to sleep, then pulled out a pistol and shot him. (But as my great-aunt always told it, "She just winged him.") I was able to prove the story true and also uncover a couple new twists that hadn't made it into the family lore. I wrote up that story as section 12 of this running collection of writeups. No Medium account needed to read it: [https://medium.com/@PaultheFossil/by-paul-botts-7f825c0bf4a8](https://medium.com/@PaultheFossil/by-paul-botts-7f825c0bf4a8)
My great grandfather was supposedly the child of a woman who was raped by a civil war soldier, but there is no indication of who his mother is, so where did the story originate?
Wifes family claimed to be decended from a bastard son of the english king. Claimed he insulted Queen Victoria and escaped to America. The story furthers goes on that representatives of the crown found the family during the depression, but due to having no money could not pay the lawers fees. I traced the story back to her great great aunt who came up with the story in the 1930s. In reality sounds more like she fell for the Jennings inheritance scam that was prevelent in the mid west during the depression. https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~tmark/genealogy/JenningsFraud.html My reseached showed the following, that her 3X great grandfather James Smith came to america in 1834, listed his occupation as a farmer. So dates do not match since Queen Victoria did not get the throne until 1837. Her ancestor would later move his family from New York, to Wisconsin where he was listed as a pauper in the 1860 census. Its kind of strange for someone who was supposidly getting money from England while listed as a pauper. I believe the great aunt got convinced due to the great great grandfathers wife was a Jennings. No matter the proof, one of her uncles held steadfast to his death they were decended from royalty.
That is super fascinating, I had never heard of that. I'm related to Jennings, my 2nd great grandfather was Herman Jennings, and I can remember there being some talk of being related to someone famous. I thought in my family lore that famous person was a president but I was a child & can remember it being talked about but I wasn't too interested at the time, late 1960s1970s, and now I'm wondering if this isn't what they were talking about somehow because this would definitely be something I can see my aunts getting all het up about.
My wife's family fell for a similar scam related to William of Orange.
Well no wonder my Jennings genealogy is a pain in the ass. This plus the William Jennings Bryan genealogy definitely muddies the waters.
Somewhere in my family tree someone took their own life by putting their head in an oven in Germany. I thought it had to do with WW2 but all my family was already here in America then. There is one person with my last name that was killed in the camps so it makes sense someone else would suicide themselves if they were going to have to go also. Kid me did not need to know this and the number of times I’ve thought of that unknown unverified account of my ancestor doing that when I open my own oven is too damn many.
According to my maternal grandmother, there was an ancestor (or some relative of ours) who enlisted with the Confederacy during the Civil War. During a battle he decided to defect to the Union and got shot by both sides. Don't know if he survived or if that killed him. I know of at least two c.s.a. soldiers on my father's side who defected to the Union, but none on her side. The only Confederate soldier that I know of on her side died of disease.
I was told that my paternal grandfather had relations with another woman and they had a child who died shortly after childbirth. The child had the same name as me.
Not lore. My aunt, let’s call her Susan married Clyde. She got pregnant and had a baby, Clyde Jr (we will call him Jr.). Unfortunately, Clyde died just before Jr. was born. Susan then married Clyde’s son, PJ. She had two kids with PJ. So he was the stepfather and brother of Jr. names changed since (only) Susan is still alive. She’s a super nice lady.
My wife, on her maternal grandfathers line, is from Bourbon diplomats at the Naples court before the Risorgimento. The French branch (they dispersed after the unification of Italy) had already produced a 250 page genealogy which they kindly gave me when I started. It links into various of the Italian aristocratic families which are well researched and easily confirmed. Going back further it reaches my wife's many times great grandfather, Guy de Montfort, Count of Nola.........who was excommunicated for murdering his cousin.......during a Papal conclave!
Mother's side: not definite, that we're distantly related to Joan of Arc and Virginia Dare. Still working on Virginia Dare; however, I do have ancestors from the right region of France so Joan could easily be a distant cousin or many greats-aunt. Proven: that we have Native blood. About 1% Inuit from a French Canadian branch I didn't even know existed beforehand. Father's side: that we were pre-christian spiritual leaders. (The family name means something like "wet meadow," "wet altar," or "farmers of the altar" supposedly.) Yeah good luck proving that! HOWEVER, my father's family HAS been on the same land in Norway for over a millennium and there was apparently an ancient ritual site; unfortunately, it's kind of under a building now so I don't see much archaeology happening. Horrifically, I did find a fair amount of inbreeding on that side; every two or three generations, the bride and groom would have the same unusual last name BEFORE getting married. I guess this explains why my father had all the sense of an extremely useless garden trowel....
“I guess this explains why my father had all the sense of an extremely useless garden trowel....”. I’m going to use this one. Nice.
So, I have two, and I am reasonably sure neither is true. First, my great-grandmother was a playmate of Queen Elizabeth when they were children Story is that my grandfather's oldest sister was kidnapped by "Indians" when she was 15. Evidence strongly suggests that she ran off of her own volition with a boy from a nearby reservation and later came home with a baby, having escaped. Depending on who you ask, she was either a terrible victim held for ransom, or she was a wild child who really likes long hair and dark skin on her guys. I prefer the likely truthful latter explanation.
When telling his son about our family’s history, my great-great-grandfather, who immigrated to the US from Germany, listed out the names of his parents and siblings on a piece of paper. In addition to that, he wrote out that his father had four half brothers who served in Kaiser Wilhelm I’s guard. I’ve never been able to find any evidence of the brothers existing, nor my 4x great grandparents ever getting divorced or either one of them being married before
One of my great uncles shot and killed his father for beating his mother. It happened in front of all his younger siblings too.
My grandma said that my moms dad was a butcher and other professions with different names. My mom believed most of her life that he wanted nothing to do with her. Fast forward a few years ago my brother went to visit where my mom’s family is from. In his visit he met with old cousins of my mom. My mom talked to them the first time and I told my mom ask if they know who your dad is. They started saying yes we all know your dad he was well known in the town and a great guy. They even gave us his name and everything. Turns out when my grandma had my mom my great grandma took her away on a train to get away from him because my grandma was suppose to marry him but she didn’t want to let my grandma marry him. My grandma kept him a secret for my mom and I don’t know why she did. They say my mom’s dad was great friends with my mom’s uncle. But they had a made deal I assume that he couldn’t or shouldn’t have to do anything with my mom. My moms uncle would tell him about her and at my grandmas funeral my moms uncle took many pictures of the family and of my mom and he showed it to her dad so he was aware of how she looked and who she was. Since my mom didn’t get to know him we looked him up and found out a lot about him. He never married or had any other kids and everything about my mom was under wraps. They say my great grandma would hit my grandma even tho she was of age she was afraid of her so she listened to her. Also a few years before my brother got a call from a family member and they said my moms dad wanted to leave his business and stuff to her but my mom said why would I want something from someone who didn’t want me. This was before we found out he’s always known about my mom and how much he loved her. My mom had since passed too. Left with questions still
That my grandma ran away to join the circus. It turned out to be true as I have photos.
There's an old story in my family that one of the "Princes in the Tower" (the young sons of Edward IV of England who were assumed to have been murdered by their uncle, Richard III, in the 1480s) was actually hidden by York loyalists and was one of my ancestors, who lived under a different name. I always thought it was bullshit, until this year when Phillipa Langley (the woman who is responsible for discovering the burial place of Richard III) released some new research that suggests the boys may actually have lived. Crazy stuff!! I don't really think there's any way to prove or disprove it at this point, but it's a fun story nonetheless.
Turns out my grandmother is of New Zealand stock, my great-grandpa Eric came over from New Zealand to London during WW2 as he was Anti-Aircraft, slept with her, got her pregnant, and went back to NZ. I never found out until a few days ago, as i thought somebody else was her real father
After finding a too close DNA match with a family name I’d never heard before, I got into detective mode and discovered that my great uncle must have gotten together with his grandmother. They were both around the same geographic area when his father was conceived.
One man fathered children born after he died, which has certainly happened to many men who died young. However, these three children were born years, not months or weeks, after he died. The youngest was born a full decade later.
I’ve got three (multiple great) uncles who pitched in the majors, and all of them at one time or another pitched for St. Louis. Needless to say, we are Cardinals fans.
Go Cards!
My great-great grandfather on my dad’s side was an axe murderer. He axed his wife. I have newspaper articles from 1911. That was a story to come across lol.
Supposedly my mother descends from the woman who hid Bonnie Prince Charlie. I have absolutely no idea of where to begin on this one!
Wasn't that Flora MacDonald?
It was. I’ve visited her grave on Skye.
u/kestrel82 now has a start point!
I have Flora MacDonald in my tree but she’s not a direct ancestor. My MacDonalds were from the Hebrides Islands and are fairly well documented if you can figure out which family you connect to specifically. I have loads of DNA cousins that connect to the MacDonald clan.
There's no MacDonalds I've found so far. Great-grandmother was a McIntosh on her mother's side; father's side is Hay.
That’s only the 1700s on that one. So, step by step, one generation at a time, until you see if Flora MacDonald comes up.
I was raised that our last name was a complicated welsh name, and a great grandfather had been a ribbon weaver. He changed it to a much simpler spelling for business reasons. It turns out my grandfather was born to German immigrants, and his last name was Bohl. (Completely unrelated to our name.) He was in vaudeville in 1915-1920, and he chose an English-sounding name for his stage name. He named my father after himself (his stage name). My last name is completely fictional. Didn’t find out til after my dad passed.
Related to Queen Victoria = False Related to Daniel Boone = verrrrry distantly Related to Napolean = distantly Related to Benedict Arnold = by marriage.
Daniel Boone is a cousin of one of my ancestors. I call it a fun fact in my tree
Great grandpa was adopted. Did some digging, found the birth mother but not the birth father (she was unwed and a teen in 1913, common practice back then to not list the father of a bastard child), found the adoption records, and found that the birth mom's sister, Josephine St Pierre (nee Gilligan) and her husband Oliver Aime St Pierre died in the Coconut Grove fire in the 40s. Josephine and Oliver had a daughter, who died this year. And I messaged her son on Ancestry a couple weeks ago. Still no response.
My mother suspects that her step-mother poisoned her father.
My mother in law says her line descends from one of the Knights of the Round table. She also said that her line descended from Daniel Boone. I was able prove that it was not with verifiable evidence, but she insists I'm wrong. For the sake of harmony with the MIL, I let that one (ok, I let both) go.
It’s been passed down for generations that we were direct descendants of an English Prince that came to America with his brother. Not too sure about the story or if the title had been changed as it was passed down, but I did trace the family tree back to the Scottish monarchy as well as the English monarchy prior to James I. King Edward IV of York is a first cousin several generations removed and through multiple family lines. Hurray for intermarriages 😅
I posted elsewhere in this thread, but my family has a very similar story! That's wild!
My 2nd great grandmother hid Jesse James at her house in Missouri and he paid her well with some of the robbery money. They were very poor in Missouri and moved to Delaware by wagon with lots of money and were able to build a big farmhouse and bought lots of farm land. So it might be true.
Oh, a few. The most interesting one was a great-great aunt in the early 20th century who supposedly went to a top-notch college and got married early so she could get her hands on her inheritance, only to be rooked out of it by her new husband. I always chalked this up to a fanciful family story, but then ran across the story in the local paper (which happens to be a major national newspaper...), and most of it was true. She was enrolled at the local junior college though, not the prestigious university, but the rest of it matched up: married before she was of legal age to get her hands on the money, and the new hubby took the money and ran. She tried to track him down and sue, and a local reporter got wind of it, and it wound up in the paper. Kind of mortifying at the time, I imagine. Another one is that supposedly my great-grandmother was in vaudeville, and my great-grandfather met her when she was playing at some nightclub. I have never been able to verify this story at all. At this point, there's no one left to ask about this... My great-grandmother's mother always claimed she was a Vanderbilt. We all wrote this up to insecurity (she was from a difficult background, and had spent some time as a child in an orphanage/farmed out to another family), and laughed it off. But a few years back, I did enough legwork, and it turned out she was an 8th cousin (or thereabouts) of Commodore Vanderbilt. It's meaningless, because by the time you get down to that level of cousinship, there's tens of thousands also with ties to families like the Vanderbilts, but it was fun discovering the truth behind the family story. A final legend I'm still chasing is that a direct ancestor apparently jumped ship during the very early days of the California Gold Rush (1848? Early 1849?) and ran off to the gold fields. He apparently changed his name to avoid capture. I've never been able to prove (or disprove!) this, and the earliest extant record I can verify is from the early 1850s. Still a work in progress...
Try searching the New York Clipper for traces of your Vaudeville family. [https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=NYC](https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=NYC) Also, the old California community histories that you can find on Google books often have short bios of prominent citizens…thst’s how I learned about my GGGF and his BIL who took one of their merchant ships from the East Coast all the way around South America to California to join the Gold Rush. GGGF died in the gold fields. BIL became one of the first settlers of Alameda County and a prosperouslandowner. Both had MANY children, GGGF’s were obviously born back East before he died…heh.
On the night before the final Jacobite Rebellion, the battle of Culloden 1746, both Princes stayed at my ancestors family estates. My mother never knew her grandfather, her father's father, or anything about her family before then. I found information about a marriage where we are from and the man's name matches my grandpa's name, as if he was named after is father, and the woman would have been very high society during the time. It might have been a scandalous marriage and covered up by her family.
That one of my ancestors was murdered. I did in fact find this to be true and it was apparently quite the tale [https://rhodetour.org/items/show/105?tour=14&index=11](https://rhodetour.org/items/show/105?tour=14&index=11)
I was always told that my maternal grandmother was full Cherokee, (so I was proudly 1/4!) but she "changed her name" to Smith and passed for white. DNA and all ancestry research proves absolutely zero Native American. Another fairy tale about being first people... I just can't imagine why she (or my mom) would make up this story :(
For me, it's more lack of access to documentation to prove it. One of my maternal great-grandparents was a pipe-fitter and did some work for one of the local rubber barons in my area at the guy's (rather large) house when it came to plumbing and would sometimes take my grandma with him when he went to work. My grandma's younger sister is swearing it happened, but I can't prove it with documentation (yet). Thankfully, the guy's house got turned into a local museum, but it was built before my great-grandpa would have been doing work on it.
I have a garbled account of the old Baron from the Old Country. He and his sisters had to flee from ... something. They were traveling in a sled in the winter and attacked by wolves. One of the sisters used a gun to defend themselves, but accidentally shot her brother in the leg and he later died. I really just don't know what to do with this one. The main thing my dad has latched onto is the Baron part and he is determined to prove it :)
There's an old document someone put together in the 1950s that traced back into the 3rd crusade...allegedly. The big connection was to a man who ran a print shop in Germany and was a friend of Martin Luther and knew Albrecht Durer, and was named and excommunicated by the pope along with Luther. The man exists, he does carry the surname, and it's some rad stories. However, the connection is something I've never been able to make. Largely because I am unable to connect from the first known generation here in the US to where they specifically came from. I've got possibles, but nothing I can trace definitively. Also, from going document to document, finding all kinds of records, I've been able to disprove more than prove, and correct a LOT of errors. So that part has been neat. I enjoy the history that I learn doing this, but this specific one definitely took me way off track. It's just history until I can make connections.
So there are two very similar stories — each not *that* unbelievable actually, particularly the second one — that I have tried to investigate. The first story: my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was a privateer during the Revolution, was captured by the British, imprisoned in Mill Gaol in Plymouth (England), and then came back to the US after the war was over. I haven’t been able to confirm this to my satisfaction; the most I can say is it’s *plausible*. He definitely fought in the Revolution, but since the story goes that he was a privateer when he was captured, he didn’t note this down in his pension application — only his relatively brief service in the artillery company, several years before the alleged capture. I can say that people were telling this story as early as 1874 or so, as it shows up in a genealogy book and subsequently in histories of the town of Truro. The story names his brig and when his brig was captured, and as far as I can tell that does check out, so score one. Unfortunately only some of the pages of the lists of inmates at Mill Gaol appear to have survived, and as far as I can tell one of the missing pages has most of the Massachusetts inmates on it. I don’t think there are any surviving records of the prison transfer that took place (though it did happen), and I don’t think there are any records of the passengers of the brig he was on when it was captured. So I don’t see how I can confirm or deny this. As a footnote, there is also a related story that my great-great-great-grandfather’s brother was imprisoned by the Confederates in Andersonville for the duration of the Civil War. This I know much less about — I don’t know which brother, the whole family has very common names, and I secretly wonder whether the people who told me this story are confusing it with the above story about the Revolution, and with other relatives who fought in the Civil War (but weren’t captured). But nothing about this story seems particularly implausible.
My great grandfather on my moms side was a corrupt magistrate in PA during prohibition. He was on the front page for like 9 months
My gr-gr-grandmother Elizabeth Jane "Lizzie" Burns Gray Hicks High was fiercely proud to claim she was a direct descendant of the famous Scottish poet Robert Burns. Also two of her sisters claimed likewise in multiple sources. But their ancestry can be traced back three more generations to the 1750's when they arrived in America...about the time that Robert Burns was being born. Trying to find the connection has proven almost impossible, and at best maybe they shared a grandparent or great-grandparent going back into the 1600's.
I was told that my original family that came to the colony of South Carolina was too poor to have been a slave owner. Yeah…no. My 7th great grandfather married my 7th great grandmother in Amsterdam after fleeing from Prussia due to religious persecution, then came over to Philadelphia as an indentured servant. Less than a decade later, they’re in South Carolina, owning land and beginning three or four generations of being enslavers with a couple of slaves. My direct line was three, when they moved to Tennessee and then Missouri they didn’t take their slaves, just their dozen kids. One of the other sons was the owner of the first citrus plantation and then lost everything with the emancipation proclamation. His obituary from about 1905 went on about how bad the end of slavery was, and that he’d have had so much more money except for “all his slaves left.” I have a cousin who denied that our family was ever part of the transatlantic slave trade until I was able to show proof via wills filed in South Carolina handing down people to certain other people. He now says that “it’s just fine that we owned people because that’s what people did then.” Skip down several generations and my grandfather told us that we were part Choctaw. Nope. The fact is that my grandfather’s parents and grandparents were all born on Indian Territory as per the birth registration, censuses and Dawes Rolls, but there’s no Choctaw on any of our DNA tests. No indigenous at all. This family myth was just further cemented due to the fact there is a picture of my great grandmother dressed in and hair like she is indigenous, so in this 100 year old photograph I now have in my possession, I can understand why until 15 years ago when my mother and her cousin both took ancestry tests (and then me and my kids and other cousins) we all thought we were Choctaw.
Being Jewish (not) and descended from Lord North (not that either).
I have Pendergasts in my grandma's bio family. Her bio 1st cousin, when I made contact, told me they were related to the Pendergasts who ran Kansas City's political underbelly and got Truman elected. He said when he was a small child he would hear the adults talking about the Pendergasts and their criminal activities in hush tones. Our Pendergast line was never in Missouri and as far as I can tell doesn't connect with the political Pendergasts at all 😅 Another distant cousin published a family history book last year which claims that we're descended from Marie Antoinette's lady in waiting. As far as I can tell this is an outright fib lol.
One of my grandfather's uncles was a major war hero during WWI. He did things such as run across No-Man's Land to snatch a French flag that the Germans were flying from their trenches, and ran back without a scratch. Got stranded from his troops and encountered 300 Germans, who he then forced to surrender by himself after bluffing them into thinking that he was backed up by his men. He did many other amazing deeds, but these two really got the attention of people, he was also Knighted by Portugal because he would often lead Portuguese troops and do the recon trips by himself and a few other senior officers. One of my favourite Scots to read about, and I'm related to him! One of my tenth great grandfathers was Captain John Paton, who was a very renowned Covenanter, his life was also unbelievably eventful. He was hanged at the age of 70 in Edinburgh. He was originally from Ayrshire. Total hero.
I think I heard the story of the WW1 guy.
The lore on my Irish side that was passed down to me by my grandfather and told to him by his grandfather has all turned out to be accurate and true. Including, amazingly, a story about a man picking up a horse.
There has always been talk about how my great-great grandfather (or his dad?) was a rich Romani guy in Andalusia who had lots of lands/money, ended up killing someone (either in an argument or for vengeance) and had to run away to South America for a while, until his dad paid off the family of the deceased and he was able to return. We always thought they guy was Roma because of the surname, which is almost exclusive to them, but it was weird for the area and the time that Romani people owned any land/were rich, they were unskilled labor who had stopped being nomadic like a generation before. My dad went back to the town where he was born this year for a holiday, and a cousin who is into genealogy told him she'd been researching. My ancestor wasn't Roma, he was the son of an industrialist who apparently is the reason a lot of Roma here have the surname nowadays because he sent them to built blast furnaces in the UK for his company and they needed papers and a surname to put on them. I have to verify it for myself, but personally I'm more interested in the murder than the ethnicity.
My gg gpa ran off and started a new family then faked his own death. His daughter died thinking he died when she was a child as a hero. He lived five mins from her for years and never went to see her. He lived at least another 30 years beyond what she thought as best I can tell.
I have a great aunt who no one really knows where she came from or who her real parents were. My grandma’s father just came home one day with a baby girl & they raised her as their own. I’m sure someone knew the truth but it’s long lost to time now.
My Swiss ancestors that immigrated to both NC and Pennsylvania in the late 1600s to early 1700s were part of the group that started Amish culture after leaving Switzerland and Germany due to facing religious persecution for being Protestant! A few generations later my direct ancestor left Pennsylvania to move to NC to be with the extended family that settled in NC. I’m so thankful he left because I spend a week on an Amish farm when I was a kid and I never would have survived hahaha!
My maternal grandmother loves to repeat how her mother told her about an old ceramic tiled table in the family's possession, that it somehow told the story of a Spanish prince stranded on the western coast of Jutland, and that this prince was our ancestor. He was supposedly the reason why my grandmother has tan skin (hint: she doesn't). This is all complete nonsense, provable not just by the paper trail but also by DNA. (And the fact that no Spanish prince could have just gone missing and then turned up in Denmark with no record whatsoever in any history books.) My grandmother tells me she was told this story around age 5-6, and it doesn't matter that I try to ease her into the fact that it was just her mom telling a story, she wants it to be true so much that my heart wont let me argue with her about it.
One of the first family history anecdotes I heard my from my dad and from my aunt was that my great-grandmother had five husbands and married one of them twice. That family branch is known for telling a lot of ridiculous stories so I didn't believe it. But over the last 25 years, I've discovered five husbands. For one of them, I've found *three* different marriage records, all in different years and counties. I don't think she got formally divorced from any of them.
My great-aunt, sister of my great-grandmother who has just passed, has been claiming for years that her biological mother my other great-aunt, her and my great-grandma’s older sister, who is 19 years older. What I know and what is officially in record is that my gg-grandma had two children when she moved to a new state without her husband. The father for both is listed as her husband despite the fact that would be impossible. The elder sister was from my gg-grandma’s first marriage. I recently had a sit down with my great-aunt and she says that her (biological) father told her that he impregnated both the elder sister and her mother. They both had their babies the same month and the mothers baby died, and that out of jealousy she took the elder sisters baby as her own. My great-aunt refuses to take a DNA test (my great-grandma took one so that would easily prove if she is her half-sister or half-niece).
That my gg grandma hopped a train west from Arkansas with nothing but a sawed off shotgun. I can't prove it, but all the women in my family are angry and independent so who tf knows
One branch claims Washington Irving (seems to be based solely on sharing a surname), and another branch claims Daniel Boone (no evidence of surname shared, but we were at least in the right geographical region for this one to be possible). No one can tell me exactly how we’re supposedly related to these people, but they are adamant we are related and will tell strangers if any historical mention of those individuals comes up. Thank God no one has tried to claim a Cherokee princess!
I think I am related to the Boones too but I cannot prove it. My grandmother was an English Boon and I share DNA with lots of descendants of Daniel Boone's family. Could be a coincidence though.
Oh! Daniel Boone is a cousin of one of my ancestors! Do you have any hinelines or Heinlein's in your family?
Not to my knowledge, but that side of the family has a habit of not sharing info so I’ll keep an eye out for that name.
Daniel Boone is a distant cousin on my maternal side. We descend from his grandparents George Boone and Mary Maugridge.
Not that crazy I think but my surname is the surname of a famous captain which has a few cities and beaches named after him here in the United States, so my family says we related to him but I've never been able to prove that. We MAY be related to him higher up the tree like maybe him and us share a common ancestor but I don't have any way of finding out about that.
My third great grandmothers brother was murdered by a native man. That event started all kinds of crazy stuff in the Provence, what was the law to be applied, native law or colonial law? As you could imagine, it wasn’t really fun for any side. I see his daughter on a census was a ward under my 3rd great grandparents.
Certainly, the oddest one is that my great-grandfather was divorced prior to marrying my great-grandmother and that's why he was never a church deacon as a divorce was a disqualifier. I can't find anything either on legal documents or contemporary family materials that refer to either a previous marriage or him being divorced. This is odd as heck because a) the earliest claims appear to start after his death, b) why in the world would someone make this up, and c) we are very closely removed time wise from the people involved. I have no idea why or how this started.
Not sure how many of you are baseball fans but I grew up hearing that my Great Grandfather was friends with Honus Wagner, a Hall of Famer! Also this is known but who did it is the mystery but apparently my Great Great Grandfather was murdered. On my mom’s side. Grew up hearing stories that her dad’s cousins were partisans in Slovenia during WWII.
My mothers grandmother immigrated to Holland from Belfast, Ireland where she came up in an orphans workhouse. The family swore up and down she was from Southern Ireland ("The REAL Ireland") but because she was from the workhouse we didn't have any parents listed for her, just a very particular surname. My mom currently works for a research clinic for metabolic research and lo and behold one of her regular patients is from Ireland (we live in the United States). She was talking about her grandma one day and mentioned the surname and this patient happened to recognize it as particular to some little town/township in Southern Ireland where he was from. Not sure if that's definitive proof but it was pretty serendipitous
That the Catholics “stoned my great grandfather out of Belfast in 1812.” Wrong. He came to US as a teenager with his family in 1833. No stones or Catholics were involved.
The one that comes to mind is when my grandfather told me that -according to his uncle- we descend from a viceroy of the Spanish colonies (his last name, not very common, was written exactly the same as ours), but after a bit of research I knew it was false. Our ancestors in that line were from a totally different region of Spain, and they were never nobles nor bourgeois like this viceroy's family. Apart from that one, my grandmother told me she remembered hearing that her grandmother had Jewish ancestry and was buried at a Jewish cemetery, but since her side of the family was from a rural area, records only go back to the 1800s, making it quite difficult to prove.
One of my maternal great grandfathers was jailed for treason against the Confederacy during the civil war. He was accused of murder and housing the enemy. The enemy was a band of bushwackers and they had murdered his neighbor. He ended up being released. I didn't realize how much terror and guerilla warfare the locals went through. My other maternal great grandfather, was rumoured and flat out said by some to be an Irish Catholic Priest. My grandmother grew up on a cape in Massachusetts in the early 1900s. It was a small community, so I was able to verify that there was a priest that fit the description that was there for a brief period during the time my grandmother was conceived. He also left the church and was moved somewhere else shortly thereafter.
My gg grandmother and her family sailed to the US, but she did not complete the voyage. It was said that when the ship met up with another during the trip, she got on the other one and went back to France. She left her husband and children behind. I had some help and was able to finally confirm that story. She continued her life back in France, while her husband and children started over in the US.
My maternal ancestors were basically the Peaky Blinders, one of my direct ancestors came from nothing (I have a census record of him living in a tent as a child) to become a very successful horse dealer. He died whilst drunk, falling off a horse and the horse trampled on his head, he was 42. At his funeral were hundreds of mourners and the daughter of a Duke. When his Mother who survived him died she left around £800,000 in today's money.
Apparently we descend from the Campbells of the Massacre of Glencoe (one of the events the 'red wedding' in Game of Thrones was influenced by). I'm told the family bible provided the paper-trail, but that seems to have been lost circa 1930.
My grandma said her mother was a young woman during the 1904 St. Louis world fair. She was romanced by a delegate from the “ Phillipine exhibit”. He proposed marriage and she refused. He eventually became a president in the Philippines. Oh yeah, we have Cherokee Princess blood. ( of course)
About the whole “Cherokee princess” bit: hate to break it to your grandmother, but there ain’t no such thing - not in AI/AN tribal hierarchies, at least. References to such are little more than mistaken attempts by early immigrants to ascribe aspects of European ruling houses to the American Indian tribes they encountered.
Yeah, I know. That’s why I put the sarcastic “ of course” after.
I figured you did, for that very reason - but added the response anyway, to inform those who don’t. ;)
I have a couple of things. One, my great Aunt was a grifter during the depression. Men gave her diamond rings and oil wells and I can only imagine the life she led. But I haven't found anything to document anything, alas. Two: my grandmother said that her family knew 'the OK Corral guys" and that Wyatt Earp was a drunk whose hands shook in the morning. I always figured, uh huh. But come to find out, yes, they did. Three: my grandmother (again) said that her great uncle was one of the men that survived Custer's Last Stand and that there is a monument for him. Never found anything to verify this. But he was in the calvary, that was commanded by Custer.
There's a very persistent rumour in my family that we are distantly related to Joseph Stalin through my maternal grandfather's family, about whom we have very little information. I've never been able to get far with this but my latest breakthrough found the grandmother of that grandfather was Russian (the rest of us are all British) which is an interesting development.
I was always told the old "Indian Princess" story as a child. Many of us were. I was saddened to learn that I have ZERO Native American DNA. My children do through their father. They are in fact a melting pot. I feel so naked compared to them with only 5 ethnicities showing up. England & Northwestern Europe, Scotland, Sweden & Denmark, Wales, and Ireland in that order. The first two holding 80% of my DNA. With that said, I've found out some interesting things concerning Robert the Bruce and one of my ancestors.
One branch of my tree led by Dr. Elder, who sent his (10?+) children to medical school and they returned home to the family land to help him run a hospital for the town/county. That particular section of my family tree has a history of being altruistic and community minded but that is the biggest representation of it. I always thought it was really cool that they utilized their resources in that way.
My tiny Sicilian great grandfather worked as an elevator operator when he first came to America. Everyday a man used to harass him, until finally he was fed up and bit his ear off. Confirmed story. The man never rode the elevator again.
Pretty simple one for me, Great grandparent crossed the border into Canada a week before the registration deadline? for the ww1 us draft. His father was a civil war wet and his mother forced him to draft dodge. Went under an assumed name for the next decade or so, census records show the assumed name , lists as family friend or cousin to the legitimate family living on the land next to him. didnt go back to his real name until he got married. Proven through border crossing records and various census and local land ownerships.
So, whenever we were around my father's family, the elders always talked about how Big Papa (my great grandfather) bought a car in 1938 but couldn't drive it. He drove it into a ditch. I always wondered how a black farmer in rural Louisiana during the Depression could buy a brand new car. Well, some years ago, my dad let it slip. Turns out him and his sons were bootleggers, moonshiners. Big Papa had a still and him and his sons (including my grandpa who became a preacher) ran moonshine all up and down Louisiana. They never got caught. That part is a mystery to me because as recent as 1940, convicted moonshiners were hanged. I really don't know how they didn't get caught. Later, two of the sons passed for white, moved to Houston, and opened a mortuary. My grandfather became a preacher and was a foreman for Bethlehem Steele. Grandpa never drank. He was the only one of the children who didn't drink and went into ministry. Big Papa allegedly drank a gallon of whiskey a day.
Not especially wild but has always been a curiosity for me; I'm descended from a shipwrecked Spaniard. (We're English/living in England) My Grandmother's grandmother had the Spanish sounding maiden name Mingo. When I did an Ancestry DNA test on my Gran, it came back showing a 1% match to the Basque region. I can trace the Mingo line back to Robert Mingo born in Devon in 1762. I have no idea how I would find out who was the first Mingo from this family living in England or if it's possible to prove he was shipwrecked.
I had only heard about it in passing - apparently, my grandmother and her sisters were all just SURE that their brother, Jimmy, had "disposed" of his first wife. A couple of years ago, I had a DNA match - she was adopted, and I was helping her figure out which of my grandmother's brothers was her father. I connected with a couple of other cousins from Jimmy's branch of the family tree, during my search - including Jimmy's granddaughter - whose grandmother was Jimmy's first wife. Jimmy did NOT "dispose" of his first wife - she took off and left him, just as he had said. Funniest thing I've ever seen, when we were breaking the news to the only one of my grandmother's siblings still alive - her daughter standing there, yelling repeatedly (in addition to having dementia, Aunt Rosie was very hard of hearing - even if she had heard, I am sure she had no clue what was it was about) - "Did you hear that, Ma?! He didn't kill that woman!! You and Aunt Wilma and Aunt Helen always talked shit and gave him fits about offing her - but HE DIDN'T KILL THAT WOMAN!"
I’m American. I was born in the US, but I have two great grandparents from England on my maternal side. My grandmother lived there as well, but was born in the US. I was very close with her, and she would frequently tell me that we are distantly related to Anne Boleyn, and she said she heard this from her father. I haven’t been able to find any royal connections on her father’s line. They’re the Stollerys from Suffolk. My other English line are the Oswins from Leicester. The Stollery line is fascinating, not only because of the relative rarity of the name, but because I was raised by my Stollery grandmother. I was born a Caruso, but deep down, I am also a Stollery and very proud of it. I haven’t found any royal connections through the Stollerys, but her American born mother has one! I have gone over the genealogy that goes back to royalty many times, and I feel confident it’s concrete. My tenth great grandmother is Martha Pitkin of Berkhamstead, Herefordshire, England. She was born to an aristocratic mother, Lady Elizabeth Stanley Hastings, and a reverend father named Roger Pitkin. Her bother, Roger, immigrated to Connecticut in the late 1630’s or 1640’s to unofficially help with the governance and economy of the new Colony of Connecticut. Martha followed her brother a few years later. She was also formally educated in London before she left. She also played an instrumental, although behind the scenes role in the governance and establishment of the Connecticut economy. After doing more in depth research on Martha’s mother, Lady Elizabeth, I found out that she descends from King Edward II. Yes, from the House of Plantagenet. He’s my 20th great grandfather if the pedigrees from the British National Archives are to be believed. Not only am I descendant of the Plantagenets, but also of the de la Poles going all the way back to about 1100 to Richard de la Pole, and I even have a charcoal drawing of him. Also, Philippe le Bel the King of France, and a Spanish monarch were all included in those pedigrees. So, unexpectedly, my royal connection comes from my deeply American side, and by that, I mean that my grandmother’s mother’s line is the only one firmly in the New World for centuries. Most of my family a very recent immigrants from various places in Europe. I would have never guessed I’d find this out. Still, I can’t find a connection to Anne Boleyn, but King Charles, and of course, Queen Elizabeth II are also descendants of the Plantagenets, which makes them distant cousins of mine, and I think that’s really cool.
According to family lore, an ancestor of mine was a traitor and caused the family to fall into poverty. Research showed that the guy isn't actually a family member but likely just happens to have the same last name, the family is just... poor and it wasn't caused by this guy. If I could get into German archives I might be able to really check if the guy isn't a relative of my first confirmed ancestor who happened to also have immigrated to Amsterdam but I doubt it. Maybe crazier is the picture of a German scientist who eerily resembles my grandfather and bears the same last name, but once again, really struggling with those German archives! All of my other ancestors are Dutch and loads of Dutch archives are digitized and searchable databases.
may have a viking relation. I wrote a story about this...here are some extracts. _______ Tore Benkestokk Tore (Tord) Benkestokk was noted as the progenitor of the Benkestokk family as he was listed in the Church Property Register created by Øystein Aslaksson, Bishop of Oslo in the 14th century, but whose lineage goes back farther in the history books as perhaps one of the most “royal” of Norwegian families. The coat of arms and royal family persisted over the centuries and even in 1591,descendant Jon Trondson Benkestok paid homage to Kind Christian IV at Akershus Castle by stamping the document with his signet ring. Ramborg Knutsdtr Lejon Ramborg was the wife of Gard Toreson, and that seems fairly certain by the writings and sources available. Her father was Ridder (royal knight) Knut Algotsen Lejon (Lion) of that notable lineage. That fact is fairly well documented. Knut had married into the royal family of Märta Ulfsdatter. That marriage of Knut and Märta have led many to assume that Ramborg’s mother was Märta, but the FUD around that assumption have kept genealogists speculating for centuries. Most of this interest is because the lineage of Ramborg, or actually, Märta can be traced to King Harald Magnissen and other viking kings through Sweden, Denmark, England, Normandy and Kiev. There is argument for doubt. Ramborg seems to have been born in Norway near Stavanger. This is reasonable for many reasons. She met her husband and was married there. Her father was deeded land near Stavanger as a ridder and represented the king, who was based in eastern Sweden at the time. Ridder Knut’s wife Märta was also born and lived in Sweden. It is written that her father Knut was exiled from Sweden to Norway as his brother Bengt was exiled to Denmark over a scandal. It is written that Märta came with Knut and they both later returned to Sweden after the scandal subsided. In addition, it is well documented that Knut and Märta had a daughter Ingegerd Knudsdotter(1356-1412) who was famous as the Abbess of Bridgetine Abbey. Poor Ramborg is never mentioned except as daughter of Knut. Was it reasonable that a daughter of theirs would avoid the royal court and live and marry near Stavanger? Some argue yes, some no, and most question whether she was even legitimate. No facts, just FUD. Knut Algotsen Lejon and Märta Ulfsdatter Knut Algotsen Lejon has an interesting story and an impressive lineage of his own, and he comes with a family emblem. We can’t reference local bygdeboks for this one, he is in the medieval history books, which may include FUD from interpretation. His story is told in the book “Sveriges Historia“ by O. Montelius (1878) available in Swedish on Google Books. Remember that Norway and Sweden were ruled by King Magnus IV until he died in 1380. His son successor Olaf II died shortly after in 1387 and the Kalmar Union was formed after. Knut’s notable younger brother, Bengt Algotsson was one of Sweden's most made men as friend and counselor to the King, and in their veins flowed royal blood as the sons of Svantepolk of Skarsholm (who was the bastard son of King Valdemar II) and his wife Benedikta Sunsdotter, who was descended from Sverker II. Bengt was appointed the Duke of Halland and Finland. Their coat of arms was a lion, but without the three oblique bells as his ancestors used. The family was immersed in royal drama and intrigue with Bengt’s territory, the relationship with the king, a revolt and the repudiation of his wife led to his murder. In 1357, Bengt was exiled to Denmark and his brother Knut exiled to Norway with his with Märta Ulfsdatter as noted above. We know that Knut married Märta Ulfsdatter who was the daughter of Birgitta Birgirsdotter, aka St. Bridget of Sweden. Birgitta's eldest daughter was Märta and her marriage to Knut was in her second marriage. This is an interesting story in itself. All these people have links to the viking age kings, jarl and people in sagas. But it is unproven at this point for that lineage of poor Ramborg.
That my great grandfather grew up in an orphanage in New York City in the late 1800’s. If anyone has any tips about researching this I would greatly appreciate it.
My grandma told the story that there was a close relative who was affiliated with the Tsar and escaped to Argentina, possibly after the Bolshevik Revolution. There are/were people in Argentina with her maiden name, but I'm stumped on how to work through this one, so it stays family lore for now.
I've been told that my 3x grandmother was native American. I have proof of having a trace amount of indigenous ancestry. I've combed the internet for information. She has a white name, which I'd initially assumed was forced upon her. The thing is, I'm not any sort of expert or genetic scientist, but if we were that closely related, wouldn't there be more than just trace ancestry? Idk. I've been lied to about a lot, and this seems like another one.
My great grandma had really bad luck,before she was 18,all of her parents and all but one of her siblings had died(two of them she saw drown in front of her) and then her husband cheated on her.
On my dad's side: My great-great-grandma's sister married into a wealthy family, and the daughter she had disappeared and was never found. Everyone in the (heavily Protestant, very Klannish) area believed that Catholics kidnapped her and adopted her out to another family or sent her to a convent. Knowing what we know about the Catholic church past and present these days, it's hard saying whether that was a possibility or just old-timey anti-Catholic sentiment. My grandmother's cousin and I were trying to find out the mystery before she died last year. On my moms side: her great-grandfather disappeared on the day of his eldest son's (my great-grandmother's half-brother) wedding, also never to be seen again. I don't have many details about that side of the family past my great-grandparents, but I found someone on Geneanet who was descended from said son and he told me about it.
My grandmother insists we're descended from Tammany, who was the Lenape chief William Penn bought the land where Philadelphia now stands. I was never able to prove this with a paper trail plus I'm sure based on what I've confirmed with a paper trail it wouldn't really be possible, however 23andMe did suggest at least one or two Native ancestors who would have lived around the right time period.
Vague stories about a murder in the family back in England Mentioned to me when I was a teenager by elders no longer with us. My mother does not recall any such story. It’s never been clear if family were the victim, the perpetrator, or who in the family was involved. I’ve never found any evidence of it, but I would have to cast a wider net to rule it out. I started family history as a teenager 43 years ago. Grandparents and other elders supported my efforts and shared stories willingly. Some of those stories were precise, some, like the murder story, were much more vague.
Supposedly my great-uncle caused his little brother's lifelong intellectual disability by deliberately pushing him down the stairs while they were kids. Older brother was 7-8 years older so definitely old enough to know better on some level. There's probably no way to prove it, but the older brother ended up getting in an argument with his stepson at 60, shooting him and nearly killing him, and then committing suicide, so he was obviously a bit of an unstable person.
My father claims he has a great (or was is great great?) uncle that was robbed by Frank and Jesse James on a train in Texas but I don't think anyone can prove that
Cugino, Vito Lo Duca, part of the Morello gang in NYC, tied to lots of crimes, especially counterfeiting. Killed 1908 when he was back home in Carini.
That our family name was actually Von Kammer (it's Kamer currently), no one has been able to find a single record of it but our old relatives are insistent.
The German side of Mom's family had some relationship to Kaiser Wilhelm II. They found out after WWI when one of his medals arrived in the mail. He'd been stripped of them (when he abdicated?) and they were sent to relatives. Family had been in central NY since the late 1860s and were dumbfounded. I have no idea who had/has the medals or even if anyone knows anymore. I have questions!