My father’s side of the family is a very old Irish line. The name is so ancient that it’s listed as “meaning unknown” in all the reference books. Despite this, it’s not a common name anymore, and the variants that arose when some of my ancestors were herded through Ellis Island are even less common – I’ve tried putting it in to those ‘see how common your surname is in the US’ sites before, and we’re not even listed. Anyone who has it is related to me to within a couple of degrees. One of my relatives is a professor at Harvard and is known for having written some brilliant but crazy books; another one is famous for children’s literature.
On my mother’s side of the family, one of my great great uncles is fairly famous in the limited circle of modern trance mediums. He wrote a book about his life in a Spiritualist community in New York and his boyfriend’s sessions channeling Lille Langtry. My mother has a copy of the book, but it was privately printed and does not show up in most catalogs, or in Amazon or Google searches, which always gave me the disconcerting feeling that I was reading something that didn’t exist.
I haven’t quite worked out the exact lineage, but family legend says we’re supposed to be descended from the same family as this guy (Patrick Gray, “Master of Gray”), who pretended to be a friend to Mary while working with Prince James and Elizabeth I to keep her imprisoned.
We had an ancestor who came to the US from Edinburgh via Canada, where he met and married his wife in 1853. They moved NY in 1855, and then to KS in 1870. In 1876, he just upped and left, dying in Windsor, Ontario in 1880. Nobody knows why he took off.
Same here! I even have cite-able proof online (since a few of my family trees online go all the way back to the 1200-1400s…and one that I know of back to 500 B.C.).
So if your wife really is too, I guess that makes us 10,000th cousins or something.
Well, one of my mom’s cousins was shot down in the Battle of Guadalcanal - I have the letter signed by Roosevelt in my living room along with his Purple Heart and other medals.
Nothing in my family tree, alas (although Napoleon Buonoparte DID pass through my ancestors’ hometown of Molodechno on his retreat from Moscow. And I’m exactly the same height as him, and when I look in the mirror…)
But Pepper Mill is related to several important figures in Colonial American History, including one of the Salem witches.
My great-great-great grandfather was one of the generals involved with Pickett’s Charge.
I learned a few years ago that my maiden name most likely comes from the name of a castle in northeast Wales, near Chester. When I went to Wales in 2004, I went to see my castle. It’s not one of the big famous ones, and you can’t go in or even get that close to it, but I still thought it was cool to be able to see it.
My great-great grandmother came over from Ireland around the time of the potato famine. AIUI, most of the Irish who came over around that time were Catholic, and my mom’s family is Lutheran, so I wonder if she (or her daughter, my mom’s paternal grandmother) converted or was part of an interfaith marriage (this isn’t the sort of thing that anyone talks about in my mom’s family). If either is true, her descendants in this generation are following in her footsteps- I converted to Judaism, and my sister married a Catholic and is raising her kids Catholic.
My great-great grandfather (husband of the great-great grandmother mentioned above) came over from Austria around 1848 because he didn’t want to serve in the Austrian army. I like to think he didn’t want to fight for an emperor whose only known coherent remark on any subject was “I am the Emperor, and I want dumplings”.
One of my dad’s ancestors was a “Cherokee princess” (so we know I have some non-white blood, at least). This is something my dad never talked about- I only found out when I was 28 and about to get married. I, on the other hand, think that’s a really cool and interesting thing to have in one’s ancestry. It’s an interesting commentary on generational differences in thinking about race. I suppose my wondering about my grandfather’s mother and her ancestors (who my mom’s family doesn’t really talk about, either) is likewise a commentary on changing attitudes toward religion and interfaith marriage. I think my parents might even be a little ashamed of those aspects of their ancestries (I found out abotu Benedict Arnold a long time before I found out about my dad’s non-white ancestry, for example)- I, on the other hand, think it’s cool…
My last name is not Dixon, but my father’s side of the family is full of Dixons and descended from George E. Dixon, commander of the first submarine to sink a ship in combat, the CSS Hunley. My brother became a submarine engineer before we learned that.
Rumor has it that another Dixon served in the Southern Campaign of the American Revolution, but to my embarassment I cannot now recall whether it was with Isaac Shelby or ol’ Dan Morgan.
My maternal grandfather installed the telephone cables in this thing..
Can’t think of any ancestors who actually made history (tho’ several have been involved in wars like the Revolution, 1812, Civil War). Best I can do is to claim descent from the Culps of Gettysburg. You Civil War fans are quite familiar with Culp’s Hill. That’s on the old family homestead. (It was then owned by Henry Culp, whose grandfather Christophel Kolb in an ancestor of mine.)
However, my wife can claim descent from a Jane Howard. She isn’t well known, but was associated with Anne Hutchinson of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and, like Anne, was “voted off the colony” and obliged to move to Rhode Island.
That reminds me: I do have a couple of sets of ancestors who appear in the Plymouth Colony court records. They were hauled in for the crime of “incontinency before marriage” (i.e., Junior joined the family before everyone had counted to nine).
Thanks, but the first link seems to be for Irish, and even though there was some Irish in the background, that branch of the family seemed to consider themselves English. Didn’t see him in the other link.
I am a direct descendant of Thomas Miner, the founder of a couple of towns in Connecticut back in the 1600’s. Ulysses S. Grant is the most famous ancenstor of Miner. Some of his descendants have done an excellent job of keeping records of the family tree, I recently supplied some info from my grand fathers side down through my grandchildren.
My 12-g grandfather settled near the Plimoth plantation in 1623. His daughter, my 11-g grandmother, witnessed against a witch in Salem. One of my uncles cofounded the town of Cambridge, Mass.
Also, I don’t know how to count this one. I have a well-researched line going back to Charlemaigne. More precisely, there is a famous genealogist who has a well-researched line going back to him, and I have a fairly short but very reliable line going back into her published line, so without much work that creates a pretty good line for me back, too. Though I don’t know what to claim about the reliability of any line going back 80 generations or so.
And, actually, anybody with Western European ancestry must have billions of lines going back to Charlemaigne, because he had many children and grandchildren and so got himself pretty well cemented into European ancestry. The fact that he’s 80 generations back means each of us European descendants have 2^80 or about a billion billion billion ancestor slots in our tree back there, which are duplications of the same much smaller number of real people then. Obviously, we typically descend in countless ways from everybody who was alive and breeding in our gene pool back then.
I’ve heard it said that just about everyone of Anglo-Saxon descent in the US comes from one king or another. It may have been the result of an illegitimate birth way back when or a question of ancestors being relegated to a lesser branch. I wonder how valid that would be if you were to take it back to the time of Charlemagne. Maybe we’re all descended from him. How far back do you have to go before you can say everyone from a particular ethnic group is pretty much related to one individual?
When the family moved to Missouri from Kentucky in the 1870s, they traveled with a family named Taylor, even intermarrying with them. In 1986, I unexpectedly met (and served with) a very distant cousin Taylor in the Army in Bamberg, Germany.
Supposedly, a great-uncle knifed a man in a bar fight in Missouri. The man was popular and well-known locally, and fearing that he’d killed him (he hadn’t), my g-uncle supposedly moved to El Paso and changed his name. He supposedly took up with a Mexican woman, and had quite a few kids. He supposedly confessed his true name and crime on his death bed sometime in the 1940’s.
I worked briefly in El Paso in '94, and met up with some hispanics with my distinctly Anglo surname.
On my Mom’s side:
Maternal Grandmother: We’re distantly related (by marriage, IIRC) to the Davis family. As in Jefferson Davis.
Maternal Grandfather: the family name is allegedly Vincenzo. Winding up on the bad side of a sharecropper situation in Tennessee in the late 1800’s, they allegedly packed up everything that wasn’t nailed down, set fire to the place, and moved to Illinois, changing the family name to Vincent along the way.
I don’t know how true that is, but Grandpa sure as hell smoked like a chimney, liked his coffee stout enough to walk on its own (sometimes flavored with a splash of 'bucca), and drank an awful lot of Grappa.
Come to think of it, so do I. And every time I go to Italy, I get the strangest feeling of being home.
Davey Crockett is pretty closely related,I am to lazy to go through it all now but my great-grandmother Frankie Crockett married my Great Grandfather Frank Hastings and are from of course Texas but eventually helped settle New Mexico and Arizona and we are all still poor ranchers hee today!haha I have tons of pictures of some sheriff(usually Crocketts) with famous outlaws and bandits and even one with them with Pancho Villia and his wife.Recently read a book based on the authors family that happend to be MY family as well and she had no idea how well doucumented and photographed our history is,apperently they wee conceited and vain as we are today ,and thought their story might be interesting.And it trullie is!
