The farthest back any particular line of my family goes is to 1681, when an ancestor of mine, Adam Kasson, was born. His family was living in what is now Northern Ireland, although they had come from France(so the story goes) because of the persecution of Protestants(St. Bartholomew’s)
He came sith wife and kids to the American colonies in 1722. One of his sons was court-martialed during the Revolutionary War. He wouldn’t fight alongside the French soldiers that came, they being Catholic and all. His conviction was later commuted but it’s embarrassing for my aunt, who wants to get into the DAR. One of Adam Kassons descendents, John Adam Kasson( a third cousin five times removed to me) was Postmaster General of the United States and ambassador to Austria-Hungary. He also was the author of a book, commsioned by Congress, which was the official centennial history of the US Constitution, in 1889. My grandmother Esther Kasson, (born in 1904 and still with us YEAH!) had an interesting time with her marriage to my grandmother. She was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse and when she married my grandfather Lietz they kept the wedding secret for a year, until school ended, because otherwise she would have lost her job. Only her parents knew they were married. She lived in one little town, he lived in Topeka, and they saw each other on weekends. Says Grandma, of the times she visited Grandpa in Topeka “I still remember the way those desk clerks would look at us!” I just love the image of my grandparents “sneaking around.” Incidentally, the two previous teachers in the schoolhouse married older brothers of my grandfather, so the school superintendent was heard to say “We won’t be able to keep a teacher until those Lietz boys all get married.”
Well, the family myth is that my mother’s side of the family is descended from Brian Boru. The only problem is, if everyone who claimed that descent had it, ol’ Brian would have been too busy in the sack to actually get any conquering done, so I take it with a grain of salt. 
The Idiot
There is an ancestor on my mother’s side who was transported to Australia (convict) for the crime of sheep-stealing. He did his seven years in legirons, was released and was hired by the fledgling Stock Squad to track down sheep and cattle thieves, on the principles of “set a thief to catch a thief.” However on the principle of “a leopard never changes its spots” he wound up back in legirons, doing another seven years for stock theft… :rolleyes:
The Murderer
My dad’s g-g-grandfather or something like that killed his stepfather and got away with it. The stepfather was apparently not a nice person and was reported to have hanged himself in remorse. However, the suicide story does not explain why my g-g-g-grandfather or something like that came home, ate dinner and only then noticed the hanging body (it was a one-roomed hut, nowhere to hide). It also doesn’t explain why both he and the evil stepfather looked like they’d been through a fight. According to newspaper articles we’ve been able to track down, the prevailing attitude was “oh, okay, he killed himself” wink wink.
On my dad’s side: William Sutton hit New York in 1749, but that ain’t no big thing. Just about every other Sutton hitting New York at that time was named William. They stayed there for a bit, and then drifted down to Virginia right before the Revolutionary War, but there is no record of any family member serving either side.
The next generation moved west into Kentucky and Tennesee around the turn of the century (1800), and the one after that into Missouri, where, supposedly, one of my ancestors was a close personal friend of William Lewis Sublette. The name Sublette survives in our family (usually a middle name) to this day, in my father and brother.
The family kinda splits and goes every which way after that, and there isn’t much record of significant events after the civil war, except that my great-great uncle William (there’s that name again) supposedly knifed a man in a barfight in Missouri, and lit out of there for Texas ahead of a hangman’s noose.
He changed his name and took a Mexican lady for a wife, and confessed on his deathbed that he was a murderer and a fugitive from justice. Or so he thought.
The guy he knifed recovered, and the county sheriff never paid the incident much heed.
But there are a lot of Sutton’s in El Paso.
To the best of my knowledge, we are of no relation to Willie Sutton, though there is a bit of a family resemblance
On Mom’s side: there is a family rumor that we were related by marriage to Jefferson Davis, but that isn’t something I would exactly go around bragging about.
Additionally, supposedly, my great-grandfather’s family name was originally Vincente, or somesuch, and were sharecroppers in Tennessee around 1900, and were in debt bad. So one night they stripped everything out of their cabin that wasn’t nailed down, torched the cabin and lit out for Illinois, where they changed the name to Vincent, which is my Mother’s maiden name and my middle name.
Italian ancestory expalins a lot about my family; it may explain why I fell in love with Italy the first time I went there. I felt like I was coming home. Kinda creepy.
I was just in Chicago & took the “architectural” river boat tour. Apparently the fire swept towards & across the river, and many people died trying to escape the flames by jumping in. 
My family tree goes back over 800 years to England. Our basic Coat of Arms is a silver shield with a diagonal red stripe indented with small concave curves, and our crest is a silver falcon with extended wings. Our name is Colepeper, with variations being Culpeper and Culpepper.
Thomas de Colepeper, Recognitor Magnae Assisae tempore Regis Johannis (my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather) was born about 1170. A couple of Thomas’ great grandsons, Thomas Colepeper de Brenchesle and Walter Colepeper, were drawn and quartered for not letting the Queen into Leed’s castle when she came a knocking at their door during a period when the Lancasters were trying to takeover the country. Fortunately for me, Thomas had attended to his line before the Queen had him attended to.
The family gathered lands in Sussex, Kent, and Calais over the years. One of the more interesting acquisitions is that of Wakehurst Place. John Culpeper of Bayhall, Hardreshull, and Bedgebury, (the great-great-great-great-great grandson of Thomas de Colepeper via Thomas Colepeper de Brenchesle) was a lawyer who found himself the trustee of a couple of young ladies and their estate, where the young ladies were cared for by their grandmother. John “promysed on the faithe and trouthe of his bodye and as he was a gentylman” that they should not be wronged. Having made such a fine pledge, he then broke it. With his approval, his brothers Richard and Nicholas “with force and armes riotously agense the Kynges peas arayed in the manr of warre at Goutherst toke and caried” the poor dears away on the backs of their mounts, “the seide Margarete and Elizabeth at the tyme of their takyng away makyng grete and pittious lamentacion and wepyng.” Richard and Margarete had no children, but Nicholas and Elizabeth had eighteen children, and Elizabeth outlived Richard. One of their great-grandchildren was Dr. Nicholas Culpeper the Herbalist, whose concoctions you can still purchase in London.
During Henry VIII’s reign, Thomas Culpeper, ran into a bit of trouble for having an affair with one of his cousins, who happened to be Queen Catherine Howard, daughter of Joyce Culpeper. They both had their heads chopped off, with her claiming "“I die a Queen, but I would rather die the wife of Culpeper.” Another more distant cousin, Anne Bolyne, also became Queen, and also had her head chopped off.
During the Civil War, most of the family sided with the royalists, and came out rather well for it. John Culpeper was made Lord 1st Baron of Thoresway in 1664. His branch owned much of Virginia, particularly Northern Neck. His son Cheney Lord Culpeper 3rd Baron of Thoresway pretty much pissed it all away gambling, and at one time blew apart a guard with a blunderbuss.
To avoid the trouble of the Civil War and to secure overseas holdings, some of the family settled in Virginia and surrounding states, leading to the such notables as Lady Frances Culpeper Berkeley, who pretty much controlled Virgina from 1670 through 1690, and locally elected Customs Officer John Culpeper who led Culpeper’s Rebellion in Northern Carolina in the late 1670s. The family was into planting and trading, and gradually oriented toward being merchants.
During a break in the Civil War my branch settled in Barbados in the mid-1600s, where they sugar cane planters. The Alleyne, Skeete, Culpeper, Layne, Pollard and Rose families pretty much ran the place, and intermarried for several hundred years. Our family home was called “Lazy House”. As idyllic as the life was, it was based on large numbers of slaves working the plantations. Conditions were often horrific for these slaves, particularly on our family plantations in Guiana, where on one holding managed by a Pollard the life expectancy of a slave upon arrival was three years.
Fortunately, slavery was outlawed by the British in the 1830s, despite strong opposition by the Carribean planters. This led to a gradual collapse of the family holdings, and a gradual diaspora. By the turn of the century, my great-grandfather Richard Alleyne Culpeper had, in conjunction with the Rose and Layne families, begun a gradual relocation to Canada, where my Bajan born grandfather Bernard Armel Culpeper eventually settled after growing up with a foot in both communities. A few others relocated from Barbados to South Africa.
Economically, my branch moved away from living on holdings to professional employment. Thus my great-grandfather Richard Alleyne Culpeper was a dentist, my grandfather Bernard Armel Culpeper and my father Bernard LeRoy Culpeper and my uncle Francis Bernard Culpeper were all engineers (who together designed and built Canada’s first nuclear reactor), and I, Richard Clark Culpeper, am a lawyer.