I have an aunt who is basically the historian for our family - she does all sorts of genaeological research and unearths all the cool stories in our family.
She just emailed me to tell me about my great-grandmother’s uncle. My family goes back about 10 generations in Montgomery County, Maryland. This guy emigrated from Maryland to Fiji to become a coconut farmer. He didn’t get married until he was 53, to a woman in New Zealand. He died at 68 in Sydney, Australia of “exhaustion.” I bet he was exhausted - what a life! It makes me wonder what kind of guy he was to decide he wanted to grow coconuts in the South Pacific. Was he desperate for money and thought this was a good get-rich-quick scheme? Did he long for a tropical climate? Did he have a buddy who told him the surfing was good? I wish I could find out somehow.
We have all sorts of adventurers in my family, including one of our very first “American” relatives who was sent to the Caribbean as an English POW and escaped to the colonies (which were pretty much pre-colonial). I also have a relative who helped survey and plan out the Appalachian Trail. We have a postcard from some great-uncle that describes his day watching the Wright Brothers take their first flight.
Very cool. What did your cool ancestors do?
(the reason my aunt emailed me about the Sydney relative is because I also emigrated to Australia and live just north of Sydney - she wants me to go find his gravestone)
A member of our family on my mother’s side was an engineer back in Russia who was so valuable to local communities that his village was spared from the Pogroms.
Also had a bunch of family who worked for the cause of Israeli statehood in '48. They did stuff like smuggle guns and work with the mafia stateside in order to assure that shipments went out from the docks without undue questions being asked. They’re even mentioned rather prominently in the book “The Pledge”.
My Grandpa had a pretty interesting life. His father died when he was 14 and his mother had a difficult time raising all the kids herself so he stayed part time in an orphange. The very same orphanage Babe Ruth was in and Ruth, still with the Sox, would come to the orphanage and give the kids silver dollars and teach them some baseball.
30 years later he and my grandma are looking at want ads for jobs. He had been in the merchant marines and so my grandmother picked out a job in Hawaii. In Pearl Harbor. So he traveled from Baltimore to Honolulu and arrived here Dec 2, 1941. Oh what a first week he had!
My great-grandfather was in the cricket team that played on the first Test match between England and Austraila in the 1880s. This does not mean that I understand cricket, however.
He returned to London and was later found floating face-down in the Thames in 1906. Someone had robbed him for his pocketwatch.
His son, my grandfather, emigrated to Canada in the late 1920s with my grandmother… to Saskatchewan, just in time for the Great Depression. Grampa was a mechanic and inventor; he spent much of his time traveling the prairies fixing things. At one point he was the army quartermaster in the town of Weyburn; his family and the mayor’s family were the only families in town with access to meat. There were very few surviving businesses; people were using the shops as apartments and sleeping in the shop windows.
Later, the family moved to Regina. My mom often spoke of her childhood there, walking to school on the wooden sidewalks of the city, in the -40 temperatures of winter.
When the second world war came along, Grampa rejoined the army and brought the family to Ontario. After the war he ran for parliament on a CCF/future NDP platform, not unlike our own matt_mcl.
Continuing on to the next generation… my mother and her two sisters were backup singers in my uncle’s band (that’s how my uncle met my aunt…). My father went to a concert, saw my mom, and fell in love. Yes, my dad was a groupie.
My grandfather (on my mother’s side) was in a Nazi POW camp called Stalag IX C during WWII. They basically did the same thing that the prisoners at Stalag Luft III did, and tunneled out of there, taking dozens of people. He was shot at the train station just prior to getting on the train, and spent the rest of the war back in the camp.
I’m also told that my great-great-grandfather (on my father’s side) was the first person in the British Navy to have been promoted from an enlisted rank to an officer’s rank.
Well, my greatX5 grandfather (I think I have enough greats…maybe a couple of more) was the guy who planned the Glencoe Massacre.
Other than that, we have the requisite horse thieves, general miscreants and roustabouts that characterize any number of Southern families who have been here since the 1600s.
My family had a bunch of bakeries and sold lots of bread to the Confederate army during the War Between the States. We were also stonemasons, and laid much cobblestone and brick in Baltimore. We joke about our family being built on “bread and bricks”!
There is nothing interesting about any of my ancestors except for one great something grandfather who killed his sister-in-law over a cow.
What’s amusing is that the branches of the family split after that, with my side leaving the name spelling the same as the original German, and the other side adding a “t” to the spelling. So it’s easy to see the criminal side of the fambly.
On my maternal grandfather’s side of the family, I’m related to both a signer of the Declaration of Independence (Wm. Floyd - NY) and an assassin of a signer (Lachlan McIntosh, who killed Button Gwinnett - GA in a duel in 1777.) Granddaddy’s mother was also a direct descendant of a North Georgia Cherokee girl/woman who escaped the Trail of Tears removal. The family’s (factual, but tongue-in-cheek) joke is that some of the family came over with General Oglethorpe (founder of the Georgia colony,) and some of the family met the boat.
On my maternal grandmother’s side of the family, I’m related to Adolph Hitler’s (apparently Jewish) mother.
My brother has traced a branch of our paternal grandfather’s family back to the mid-seventeenth century in Maryland, and then to some castle in Northumbria. I assume that the ancestor was probably a spit boy or a scullery maid.
Our coolest ancestor, though, was probably my maternal grandmother’s mother, whom I remember well. In terribly rural SE Georgia in the late 19th/early 20th century, she bore a child out of wedlock - apparently the product of a brief romance with a WWI soldier, married, became a homeless widow with five daughters in 1928, worked to own more than 500 acres, sent all of her daughters to high school, and divorced a lazy-ass second husband – all before V-E Day. From the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment until her death in 1980, Granny never missed an opportunity to vote, she signed loans for her brothers to buy land, she sponsored a rural school by donating land, and she died without the first penny of debt.
The only really interesting thing is that on my dads side my grandfather was in WWII. He was an engineer in D-day, on one of the first boats to land. Managed to survive unscathed too, although he had a whole list of names of people he knew who were killed that day. My grandfather on my mothers side has flat feet, so he wasnt able to fight.
Also, my uncle went all the way to almost getting his doctorate to dodge the draft for the vietnam war. He went into college to avoid it and was drafted after getting his bachelors but there was some kind of hold put on drafting that summer so he went back to get his grad degree. After getting his grad degree the draft was going to call him in so he went BACK to school and stayed till the war ended.
No famous people that I know of (though our family has only started recently to try and trace back.) However, I have a great great (great?) grandfather who was killed by the moon.
Apparently, in 1910 the moon was “closer” to the Earth than it usually is and thence larger. Apparently the carriage he was riding in went about a corner and the horse saw this big white blob all of a sudden and freaked out causing a carriage accident.
(To some extent, though, this story strikes me as a bit of hooey.)
