Count me in as ‘not horribly surprised.’
I mean, I already have ‘kidnapped and enslaved a saint’, ‘burnt down castle with mother in law still inside, while drunk’ and 'arms merchant to Israel in ‘48’.
Oh, and ‘genocide of an entire population’. Admittedly, that one’s mythical.
Hell, I’m proud of 'em all. They’re family!
Huh. My family (father’s mother’s side) had to leave town in a hurry with a 3 month old during that mess. Family history says we were about to be accused. And we founded that place, too.
(Got old Henry Cooke’s court records from the 1600s - he apparently kept mocking the guard and bitching about people stealing his rakes. I’m not joking. Complete jerk. Ah, here it is. He called the guards “proud, saucy,malapart boys who were rascally jacknapes.”)
No. If the crime is big enough i wouldn’t talk about it. Like, if your long-lost relative of Hitler than i would defenitely not mention it. Besides, if people see sense then they won’t connect you to the ancestor since you are your own person. The people who judge other people by their relatives are foolish
I knew a descendant (great-grandson I believe) of Yakov Yurovsky, the man who killed Tsar Nicholas II. Somehow he (the descendant) wound up in Birmingham, Alabama, married to a professor at the U of AL. He was extremely embarrassed by it; when a touring exhibit of Nicholas & Alexandra memorabilia came to Alabama he forbade his wife and kids to go to it.
Admittedly, murders involving an unarmed family (including a hemophiliac son) and innocent servants is pretty gruesome, but even at the time I knew him this was more than 80 years before. You’d think you’d get over it.
William Patrick Hitler, half-nephew of Adolf, served in the U.S. Navy in WW2 and had four sons who grew up in the U.S. under their father’s adopted surname of Stuart-Houston. (Per wiki the oldest was named Alexander Adolf.) Even though they were born years after their famous grand half-uncle’s death it is evidently a huge sore point; at least one changed his name from the surname his father had changed to from Hitler to further distance himself. As of a TV spot I saw on them in the 1990s none had children, supposedly due to their bloodline.
OTOH, Hitler has relatives in Austria, descendants of his half-sister Angela, who as recently as the 1980s sued for his personal effects and his estate (including the royalties from Mein Kampf).
My great-grandfather’s much younger third wife was cheating on him with a friend of his. An aged relative said, “You don’t want to know the details.” At a certain stage of research I discovered that the friend died just two days before great-grandpa, who himself died under mysterious circumstances (found drowned, no witnesses to the death.) Of course I was sure great-grandpa had offed the guy and then thrown himself into the Satsop River. When I ordered the friend’s death certificate from the great state of Washington, the cause of death was listed as…
Lung cancer. 
I’m a direct descendant of people who were capable of looking at newborn babies and saying “Let’s call it…” and ending that sentence with things like Arvazena, Louisianna, Epaphroditus, Zama Jalene, and Cuthbert (all actual names on my family tree). Beyond that, further cruelty is just a matter of variation.
At least they showed a little imagination. One of my immediate ancestors came all three children essentially the same name.
I loved my mother, but she was an odd cookie.
I think it’d be kinda cool to have an ancestor like that.
Actually, I recently found out that when I was a kid, my own grandmother committed identity theft. Got away with it too.