My great-grand father and his first cousin lived in what is now the Georgian Republic. They were both the oldest sons and Jewish and as such were conscripted into the Czarist army for ten years. They both decided to escape the brutality of the Romanovs.
My GGF went to New York and didn’t do much of note. His cousin went to Palestine. He was one of the signers of the Israeli Declaration of Independence and was Israel’s first delegate to the UN. He wasn’t an official ambassador because this was before the UN recognized Israel as a country.
I dunno for sure, but she must have had connections. I do know she was very religiously observant, so maybe there was a friend or family member who was willing to do it?
My great-great-grandmother was a covered-wagon pioneer, crossing the US in the 19th century when all the Mormons were called to Utah. She married a steelworker from Copenhagen and they left Utah because they were under constant pressure to take on a second wife. Her father call the sheriff and said that all the grain they had was stolen, so the sheriff sent out a posse to arrest the husband and take her back to her father, but she refused to go with them and spent two weeks living in a surveyor’s shack in Utah, in winter, with her two kids.
They eventually ended up in what was to become Hollywood. She opened a school to teach her own (7) kids and took in other kids as well; she was the first white, english-speaking woman in southern California and the first schoolteacher there. She published her story in a short book titled “Our Pioneer Mother,” as told to her daughter.
Apparently I’m related to this guy on my maternal grandmother’s side. She told me that her parents left Germany to escape the draft and went to Russia and from there to the US. Grandma was born while they were in Russia. Her stories of growing up in the Dakotas included homesteading a farm alone with her grandmother for a year. During that time a band of native americans scared the bejebus out of the two lone women but all they wanted was to barter for some sugar. Later on she rode horseback to teach in a one-room schoolhouse where my grandfather left her love letters in Morse code on the blackboard. They moved to upstate New York and my grandfather became mill foreman for the deepest zinc mine in the world. Grandma used to drive us to all kinds of unique places (maple sugar groves, bowling pin factory, abandoned iron mines, dairies, the Frederick Remington Museum) but was truly most famous among us grandkids for the drives into “the deep, dark woods” where she would petrify us with bogus bear sightings. Once a for-real porcupine the size of a small pony wandered across the road in front of the car and, of course, she yelled bear. I think every one of us wet our pants.
I’ve also heard the term used to mean an in-law of an in-law. For instance, you’d be a shirt-tail relative to your sibling’s sibling-in-law. You’re not related in any sense, but you often show up at the same family gatherings.
A great-great uncle was a contractor who worked on the Chicago Water Tower.
I have an unusual name, so it’s been traced back definitively as far as 1610, and putatively beyond that to around 1330. One ancestor, Cornelis Aertsen, was described as the first resident of Bowery Village in Manhattan in a 1930 book about the neighborhood.
while marriage will get you “shirttail” relations, it does’t give you 12th cousins … more generations away from the siblings does. My mother’s brother’s son is my (first) cousin. my children and his children (if they existed) would be second cousins to each other, and their children would be third cousins to each other, etc …
removals come into play if there is a difference in the number of generations away from the siblings. My grandchild is my cousin’s child’s second cousin once removed.
On my father’s mother’s father’s side (and that really is the way we were taught to say it … ) I am a direct descendant of 2 of the signer of the Mayflower Compact. William Brewster is my Great x12 Grandfather and Isaac Allerton is my Great x11 Grandfather. William’s daughter Fear did not sail on the Mayflower, but came over later and married Isaac. (She was his second wife.)
What is cool is that, according to family folklore, Isaac was kicked out of Plymouth and came to New Haven, and then was kicked out of New Haven for taking “unfair advantage” of a trade monopoly and sent back to England. The story ends with him old and sick and allowed back to New Haven to be cared for by his son Isaac.
so I could be descended from the first person to be deported !
I haven’t been able to completely confirm this, but he definitely was one of the original land grantees in New Haven Colony and is the only signer of the Mayflower compact buried in Connecticut.
and I can find quotes to support the story:
“MAYFLOWER PASSENGER” – Signed Mayflower Compact. “— of London, tailor, ‘the first Yankee trader’ Probably one of Ancient Brethren, Amsterdam; citizen Leyden, 1614; asst. governor, Plymouth, 1621-c.1631; … Purchaser, 1626; Undertaker and London business agent, 1627-c.1631 … died insolvent.” (Saints… p. 437)
“A Leiden Separatist and 1620 Mayflower passenger, Allerton was second in authority only to Bradford in the early years of the colony. However, Bradford felt that Allerton had abused the trust the colonists placed in him, and Allerton left the colony in the 1630s for other parts.” (Plymouth Colony, p. 234)
My mother tells me that on her mother’s mother’s side of the family we are related to Vlad the Impaler (the historical Count of Dracula), but she could be pulling my leg. :dubious:
Supposedly I’m related to Paul Revere and Isaac Newton.
More reliably, my mother’s side of the family goes back to pre-revolutionary war, making them one of the first Jewish settlers. My sister is in the DAR. An ancestor’s gravestone sits near a windmill on the east end of Long Island.
My great-great-(great?)-grandfather was Isidore Isaacs, aka Theodore Barwood. He enlisted into the Union army well underage, and served as a private in the 59th NY Infantry, 12th NY Calvary, and 6th NY National Guard. More important than his undistinguished war record, he was a commander of the NY Department of the Grand Army of the Republic. On top of that, he was a founder of the Hebrew War Veterans, later the Jewish War Veterans.
I’ve got many of his mementos, including his service records, his autobiography typed on onion-skin paper, his spurs, belt buckle, gun and holster. I’ve also got a gold pocketwatch that I just had repairs and carry around. His initials are engraved on the front, and the inside back says:
Idon’t have any proof, but according to a tradition on my mother’s side of the family, Guy Fawkes is somewhere up in the family tree. (You know, the guy – the original “guy” – burned in effigy every November 5th in Britain).
1st cousin 6 times removed to William Clark of Lewis and Clark. Lewis is also a fifth cousin 5 times removed.
More interesting though I thought was this Ragsdale ancestor:
Potential Early Antecedents: There was a Ragsdale family in Virginia from the earliest times, the first arrival being a Godfrey Ragsdale, who came to Jamestown from Nottinghamshire and settled at Henricus Town (near present-day Richmond) Henricus was the inland settlement and was on the frontier of Indian territory. Chief Opecanough of the Powhatan Confederacy (uncle of Pocahontas) massacred the majority of the inhabitants in 1644, including Godfrey Ragsdale and his wife and family. The sole survivor of the family and one of the few survivors of the massacre was an infant, Godfrey Ragsdale, Jr. He is the progenitor of most of the Ragsdales in the US.
The surviving infant was my 8th great grandfather. Guess I’m sorta lucky to be here (at least as who I am!)
A g’g’g’g’uncle of sorts was Larkin Skaggs, a degenerate preacher and slave owner who rode with Quantrell’s Raiders. He was the only one of the 448 who rode on Lawrence, Kansas to die during the attack. He got stinking drunk, murdered several innocent bystanders and stole a diamond ring from a woman who happened to have received it as a gift from Quantrell himself. When she appealed to Quantrell, he told Skaggs to give it back. So, Skaggs decided to get revenge on her. He killed her father and then tried to set fire to her house. He was so drunk, though, that he couldn’t manage it. At one point, he realized that the rest of the Raiders had left without him and tried to ride out, but a posse caught up with him.
He was shot from his saddle and killed. They tied him to a horse and dragged him back into town where he was strung up for several days and then set on fire. At some point, his remains were cut down from the tree and tossed in a ditch where passing slaves and Indians pissed on him.
No more than he deserved, as far as my opinion goes.
Yeah, but how much of a pain was the documentation? I imagine it must have been substantial, or you would have found churches and synagogies springing up all over the place. And I can’t imagine my non-English-speaking great-grandmother plowing through packet of government forms.
One of my great uncles was awarded a bronze star in WWI. Details are a little sketchy but my great uncle and another soldier were away from the rest of their platoon (did they call them platoons back then? Yes, I know nothing about the military) when the others came under fire. The two of them went for help, but the other soldier didn’t make it. My great uncle brought help, but too late; all the men had been killed. He still got his star, of course, which I remember seeing in a box in a dresser drawer at my grandparents’ house. Uncle Harry didn’t want to see it, so my grandfather kept it for him.
On my mother’s side of the family, one of my ancestors was a madam in an Arizona mining town. She did rather well for herself it seems.
