I am a descendent of President Hayes, or so I’ve been told.
When my Uncle died (in 1984, I seem to recall), he got a telegram read out at his funeral that was from Indira Gandhi.
I have no idea why.
Let’s see…
My great uncle was a Navy codebreaker, on Corregidor. He was from the same branch of the family as the relative who was P.T. Barnum’s Fat Lady, but also has a very strong naval background (civil and military)—so I’m also part Chinese, and (family rumor has it) decended from a ship’s captain who was probably pressured into making at least one slave run.
My grandfather—my Dad’s father—was in the Air Force for several years, flying weather reconnasance. B-29s, and later RB-47s. During his time stationed overseas, he apparently was tasked with making some meteorological flights over the Baltic. Very, very deep over the Baltic, it seems. Apparently the Russians actually shot a missile at him, at one point. (Though he made it back OK) :eek:
Grandparents on both sides of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9. Paternal ancestors have risen in arms against the government 7 times since 1800, between the Napoleonic and Carlista wars (that side of the family refers to the '36 war as “the sixth Carlista war”). And that’s the side that has a reputation for being “about law and order and respecting authority,” only the people who put that label on them don’t have the slightest idea what they’re talking about.
My direct paternal line were “knight-captains and keepers of the strong house” for a group of villages in northern Spain since at least the IXth century and until the early XXth. My great-grandfather married his sister in law after his wife’s death; when he died, she saw that she couldn’t afford to give “their due” to all of their children (education or dowry - note that a man could get dowry too, if joining certain religious orders) and keep the strong house, so she sold the strong house to a Marquis. The current Marquis still owns the house, and of course the “knight-captain” title with it, as they’re linked, but logically he doesn’t use it much as Marquis is bigger (although sort of nouveau-noble, ya see… that specific Marquis title is about 900 years younger than that house 
).
My father knew his first 32 lastnames by rote. The second one is the only one that’s not evidently Basque. According to family tradition (I understand my PhD in History cousin actually tried to verify it, but there are some records missing due to churches being burned down), that lastname comes directly from one of the people who founded Bilbao in 1300.
Hey, I had a distant uncle who suffered the exact same fate. Was Mrs. Geek’s ancestor with the 16th Connecticut, by any chance?
Oooh, sorry - got distracted and forgot the interesting historical events list.
Got ancestors on both sides of the family who survived the Mill River Flood of 1874. Bunch of local mill owners (my distant uncle among them) built a dam in Western Massachusetts for hyrdoelectric power. The thing was so shoddily built that it gave way six years later after some heavy spring rains and wiped out three towns, including one named after my manufacturer uncle. Neither his nor my great-great-grandfather’s family lost anyone to the disaster, which is lucky because if my great-grandfather had died then I’d be someone else entirely.
Other stuff: Passage on the Mayflower (just found out that’s on both sides of the family too), the founding of Boston, soldiers and officers in the American Revolution, survivor of Antietam and Andersonville, refugees from the Irish Potato Blight, um… yeah, that’s about it for the top of the list. Ooh! One of my great-granddad’s cousins (another flood survivor) paid to rebuild a small French village after World War I destroyed it. They’re still pretty grateful about it.
I think my great grandfather and mother faked the death of an infant in the late 1920s. I don’t know for sure right now, but she was the hardest person to find anything about, even her own kids knew nothing of her. Unfortunately the only person who really knew her died a few years ago, this being the baby I think ‘died’ in 1929.
Flora MacDonald is a direct ancestor – after her most famous exploit, she moved to North Carolina with her husband and founded a small dynasty of Presbyterian farmer-soldiers-pastors.
Nitpick. The White Star Line didn’t merge with the Cunard line until 1933- 20 years after the Titanic mess.
It’s all heresy and scuttlebutt in my family, so I don’t have anything solid or proven. Or anyone known to be famous.
My grandmother on my father’s side says that her grandfather was shanghaied out of San Francisco and never made it home.
That side of the family (named Martin) is Irish Catholic, and she was the oldest of eight children. Her mother was in and out of a “home”, so she and her siblings were in and out of the care of the local nuns, an arrangement that eventually became permanent when her mother died and her father abandoned them all there. It was apparently an unpleasant life. The older girls were eventually farmed out to families as foster children/servants (where one of my great-aunts was raped by the father of the family), and one of my great-uncles ran away at 14 or 15 and joined the circus as a geek.
My mother’s father’s side (named Coulter) supposedly came from horse breeders from Virginia. That side of the family is Scots-Irish. Rumor says that we were horse thieves in Ireland.
My mother’s father also had a Native American grandmother. Of course, considering the times, she could have been almost anything non-Caucasian. (She was definitely something, as he was pretty dark skinned and somewhat exotic looking in one of the few pictures I’ve seen). He was a violinist for the Philadelphia Philharmonic.
Believe I’m descended from this guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tyrrell, who supposedly helped kill the Princes in the Tower, plus another ancestor who was burned at the stake by order of Mary Tudor in 1556.
Also share a famous ancestor (Stephen Hart, arr Connecticut 1632) with the former Lady Diana Spencer. This is why I am not impressed when people are ‘related to Prince William’. Woo-hoo, so are a lot of people.
When my mother got interested in genealogy, my grandmother tried to discourage her by saying that all of our relatives were poor white trash. My mother contacted several relatives, and found than many of them were much wealthier than we were. Grandma’s sainted father turns out to be the instigator of one of the bigger scandals in the family history. The family historians refer to him as “Old Super-Stud”. [sub]Perhaps there’s hope for me yet.[/sub]
One of my ancestors is almost unknown to the historical records, except for one court record, in which he was found “not guilty” of horse theft.
One of my ancestors graduated from Oxford University. After moving to America, he died, leaving infant children. When they were grown, they signed documents with an “X”. 
According to family folklore, one branch of my ancestors were Catholics living in northern Germany. When northern Germany became Protestant, they were expelled, and moved to France. They converted to Protestantism and were expelled from France, and moved to Britain. They became Quakers, and were expelled from Britain, moving to America. Three generations of my ancestors were expelled from the Quakers for joining the army or navy in various wars.
My cousins include the guy who killed Pat Garret, and the guy who found the “UFO” wreckage at Roswell. (For the record, he always told my relatives that it was a weather balloon.)
A number of them.
On my fathers side, we descend from the McCrae clan of Scotland. One member of the (vastly extended) family tree is John McCrae who wrote the poem In Flanders Fields.
Some of the most wellknown bits of our family history relate to Eilean Donan castle. Our clan were the protectors of the castle which was owned by clan MacKenzie. The castle and it’s surrounding area were where much of the fighting during the Jacobite Rebellion in the early 1700’s.
In the 1910’s, one of the McCrae clan bought the castle and refurbished it. The castle has been featured in numerous films including Highlander and just this past year, Made of Honour and Elizabeth - the Golden Age.
My great-great-great-great grandfather on my fathers side imigrated from Germany to central Illinois in the early 1840’s. His naturalization papers were completed and signed by his lawyer Abraham Lincoln . These papers are my family’s one heirloom and my brother and I still fight over who will get them (we’re both pretty big history buffs).
My mother’s ancestors were Dutch Hugenots. The story goes they traveled around Holland and northern France until after the revolution. Once fighting was over they moved to Canada until finally imigrating to Pennsylvania.
This guy was my great-uncle.
My wife’s family - a great, great, something uncle was the most famous actor on stage in Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. Yep, her maiden name was Booth.
Me? Ummmm…I’m descended from Charlemagne?
Interesting. Why?
I still haven’t figured everything out, and I’ve wanted to start a tread on this, but what I’ve got so far is this.
My great grandmother had three girls and one boy with my great grandfather. She then left him sometime in 1928-9, left the girls and the boy too. In 1929 the boy supposedly died. My g-grandmother, Anna, got remarried and had three more children. However, when I finally got in contact with my great uncle, who no one in the family knew, he told me that his brother was named after my great grandfather! When I went looking for records I found a birth certificate for Charles, and a death certificate for John, both born on the same date. When I found Charles’ obituary it said he was the son of both my great grandparents. No one else seems to have known this.
I think Anna couldn’t stand Earl, g-grandfather, so she left. She had no money so she left the children except for Charles, with Earl. Earl refused his girls to see their mother so no one knew the family, they knew they existed but that’s it. So someone is claiming to be a son that shouldn’t exist. I’m still very confused by it all.
I had a Scots-Irish ancestor who fought at the Battle of Alamance when he was 60, the first major battle between American rebels and royal governor/troops (1771). A few years later he enlisted as a private and fought at the Battle of Cowpens, and shortly after the war he took in the orphaned fellow Scots Irish lad Andrew Jackson for a few months.
I had a branch of the family who lost their farm due to a freak snow fall in 1816, known in America as “1800 and froze to death” and internationally as (in several languages) “the year without a summer”. It was due to the eruption of Mt. Tambora a year before, the largest known volcanic eruption in historical times, which cast something like a nuclear winter over huge chunks of Europe and North America and caused summer snowfalls and massive crop failures. (Also led to the literary jam session that inspired Frankenstein.)
One of my Confederate ancestors was in the unit (Co. H of 51st Alabama Cavalry) that intercepted Clement Vallandigham, perhaps the only American ever to be exiled. (He was an Ohio born ardent abolitionist turned copperhead whose pro-South/anti-Union editorials caused a Union general to escort him from his Ohio home into Confederate territory in Tennessee; though given refuge by the Confederate government he almost immediately hopped a blockade runner to Canada and spent the rest of the war there.)
My dad’s family has links to Mary, Queen of Scots.
One ancestor was a close friend and confidant of the Queen before and during her imprisonment. Another was implicated in the murder of her second husband (Darnley).
My great uncle on my mother’s side (and an even more distant cousin) both attended the 1936 Olympics (which I’ve [del]probably[/del] mentioned before) but that same g.uncle also fell through the roof of the foundry where he worked, landing in a recently emptied crucible. My Great grandmother would not allow the doctors to amputate his severely burned arm, so a certain Dr McIndoe became involved, refining techniques he’d later use on the Guinea Pig Club