One of my mother’s father’s ancestors, General Lachlan McIntosh, killed one of Georgia’s signers of the Declaration of Independence in a duel. He’s the reason that Button Gwinnett’s signature is very, very valuable today…
(Okay, Gen. McIntosh did some other interesting stuff, but he’s really most famous for the duel.)
I’ve done quite a bit of research on my family and have found almost nothing remarkable. My Great Grandmother on my Father’s side gave birth to my GF out of wedlock in Scotland in 1860. She raised him with the help of her parents. A while later, she had another child with someone else. I traced him to a posh mental hospital in rural Aberdeenshire in 1901. After that, nothing.
I have been helping a friend trace her ancestry, which turned out to be much more interesting. Some of them were among the earliest settlers of Greenwich CT.
Her Grandmother told a story of having stolen a pen from Teddy Roosevelt’s desk in the oval office.
It seems that one of Grandma’s suitors was Harry Manning. Based on Great Grandfather’s connections at the time, the stories are quite plausible.
Thought of this too late to append to the earlier post:
My SO recently discovered that she has a cousin who is serving a life sentence in AZ for the murder of her parents.
Lemme see…my second cousin is married to Tom Barrasso. And I can trace back to Myles Standish and John Alden (John’s daughter Sarah married Myles’ son Alexander). The strange thing is the Sarah-Alexander line runs down to my paternal grandfather’s mom. And she married a descendent of Elizabeth Alden, Sarah’s sister. So see SouthDopers, even us Yankees have circular family trees if you go back far enough. 
So the Mayflower connections link me to John and John Q Adams, Marilyn Monroe, Orson Wells, Dick van Dyke, Dan Quayle (sadly), and Longfellow.
My Swede side is weird because I can trace it back a few generations and then it seems my ancestor just changed his last name. Most of his relatives followed the -son -dotter naming up to that point. So Isak Petter Nilsson Lagerstedt, son of Nils Jonsson and Ingrid Nilsdotter seems to have picked up the Lagerstedt somewhere. According to genealogy notes he was given the name by King Oscar. It also notes “It was common for military personnel to adopt new surnames to distinguish themselves.” So maybe there is something to that.
One of Pepper Mill’s, too.
She also had an ancestor who was a famous Revolutionary War hero.
my family came to the US too late for any of that, and I don’t know of anyone famous in the Old Country, where there were plenty of peasants. But I note that Napoleon passed through one of my ancestral towns on his retreat from Moscow. And I’m exactly his height…
Well, in was post civil war PA. The girls weren’t exactly shy & the guys weren’t exactly forgiving. I’m just glad that so much has changed there over the years…
I came from the same Howard family that gave us all the political Howard Tafts My mother and brothr’s middle name is Howard, and the “Annie” in my name is from my great-great-great grandmother Annie Lucy Howard.
My mother’s side of the family is descended from Scottish lumber pirates. Honest to God, lumber? As in, if there’s a family fortune somewhere, it’s just my luck it’s a buried hoard of 2x4s.
Continuing this tradition of maritime outlawry, on my father’s side of the family we find George Dixon, who perished in the Confederate submersible Hunley, in making the first successful sinking by a submarine.
The family was unsurprised that the legend of the gold coin turned out to be true – the coin itself has been recovered!
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My father’s side of the family has been around since the 1600’s since settling from England in New England. My uncle had a history self-published full of upwardly mobile striving stories of these people, but he was a big old braggart himself. My mother’s side is shrouded in mystery. There is a rumour my grandfather beat feet to the US from Russia after murdering someone. I asked about it once, and got the silent treatment from those who might have known, but they’re all deceased now.
Dad has his name on several patents for the pharmaceutical industry. I think one of them led to Armour’s thyroid medication.
Eberhart “Ebert” Sorkness, last surviving Civil War veteran in Colfax, WI; there’s a blurb about him in his local paper for his 94th birthday. Born in Norway in 1839, fought in Sherman’s army in 1864, died in Colfax in 1939.
There’s supposedly a link to the royal family of Denmark several generations back.
My favorite story is that my great-grandfather (to be precise step-great-grandfather, after he married my widowed great-grandmother) helped develop the individually-wrapped slice of cheese. He owned the company that produced the first example; although he didn’t invent the machine that first created them, he apparently came up with the final concept design.
Here is an article written by the machine inventor where he credits my great-grandfather and his brother as “the true patron saints of individually wrapped cheese slices”. What an epitaph.
No celebrities or historical figures, but my great-grandmother lived to “see” the birth of her great-great-great-granddaughter. This is a photo of all six generations. I put “see” in quotes because I think at the time she had lost most if not all of her sight.
Supposedly Edgar Allen Poe is in our family tree (somehow via his side, not through his adoptive parents).
My Aunt is attempting to verify this. Actually she’s doing up our family tree and in the process this family rumor should be verified. So we shall see…
He probably supplied the other pirates with planks for people to walk.
Probably a lucrative business. Pirates wanted to use Regulation Planks, or else it doesn’t count.
My paternal great-grandfather was a bootlegger. My dad likes to point out that “he just drove a truck” for the bootleggers. But, insofar as this was a truck full of illegal booze, and shipping illegal booze is a great deal of what bootleggers do, I feel comfortable describing the man thus.
I’m related in a relatively close but indirect way to C. Latham Sholes, which I find vaguely ironic given how much time I spend using a keyboard in my daily life.
My Dad left PA to declare war on the Japanese before the United States did. By quite a few months.
WIN!
My mother has a family bible with Meriwether Lewis in it.
Mom has managed to track down a number of our ancestors, few of which are noteworthy for anything other than getting over here very early.We’ve been mucking about this country since the 1600s. One in particular was a crewman on the Sea Venture. The only other noteworthy antecedant was my umpity-ump grand-uncle Sir John Dalrymple, who planned the Glencoe Massacre.
