Pretty boring family for me - at least in the 10 or 11 generations I have found. Parent’s lines from New Jersey & New England from the 1600s. No one notable unless you count a Scottish POW sent as a slave to the Saugus Ironworks. Other than my father and I, only two served in the military (one Revolutionary War vet and one Civil War KIA).
A distant uncle explored with Zebulon Pike and a great uncle married a woman whose great grandmother was killed along with five daughters, three of them hanged - but those are pretty far off the main family line.
Calling C. B. Fry just a cricketer is a bit like calling Shakespeare a good actor. Fry is considered one of the greatest all-round athletes of the 19th century. What a cool guy to have in your family tree!
My great grandfather is still quite famous in a part of Karelia, a province in Finland, for having chased down a moose in winter on skis and dispatching it with only a knife.
My last name is not Gilbert, but I am descended from a line of Gilberts through my father. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, discoverer of Newfoundland and half-brother to Sir Walter Raleigh (same mother), is my direct ancestor. His son was a co-founder of Jamestown. Sir Humphrey was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his services in slaughtering the godless Irish. They say the path leading up to his field tent was lined with the heads of those he had ordered executed. (I have plenty of Irish in me, too, a Patrick for a grandmother, so I can say “godless Irish.”)
Another Gilbert was a silversmith during the Revolutionary War and a contemporary of Paul Revere; an interesting article appeared about him in some historical journal in I think it was the 1940s. Another Gilbert (maybe the same one) was among the last few troops evacuated from the British siege of I believe Manhattan and so must have at least met George Washington, who was THE last to leave. (This Gilbert was appointed state librarian of New York in the early 1800s.)
One great-grandfather fought with the New York regiment at Gettysburg.
Admiral Sir Peter Warren was the wealthiest man in New York City at one point in the early 1700s. His daughter married into the Gilbert line. Seems he and a Gilbert had adjoining farms in what is now Greenwich Village. There’s not much farmland in Greenwich Village these days, and sadly his riches did not make it down to me. I believe that particular daughter died of smallpox, and it was her son or grandson who was the soldier and state librarian.
My “coolest” ancestor is Robert Blum, who was one of the German leaders of the revolutions of 1848. He was executed in Vienna for his part in that. There’s even a song about him.
