My great-great-great-great…-uncle was a general in the Continental Army during the revolution. He won a bunch of important battles for the fledgling forces, but his political adversaries keep saying mean things about him, so he keeps getting in trouble with the law even though he’s innocent. Pissed off with everybody questioning his loyalty, he gets it into his head that he’d rather be in the British army and decides to defect. But wait! He decides not to tell anybody until the last second and intends to surrender his fort without resistance, then put on a British uniform.
Well the Continentals get wind of this plot and George Washington himself goes to hunt him down. Well my uncle realizes he’s being pursued, so he escapes to the British and becomes a Brigadier General in the British army, leading them in raids against the very area I now live in.
After the war, he moved his family to London where he died some time later. To this day, his name is synonymous in America with “traitor”.
Shortly after my father’s suicide, my mother began dating the principle of the local elementary school, even though he was married. He had been trying to fire a teacher whom many people intensely liked and many others intensely disliked, and his affair became a big scandal in the school district. While they were out on dates we kids got a lot of nasty anonymous telephone calls, some from people who were spying on the house who would tell us the things they had been able to see. His daughter tried to kill herself, and though I never heard why, gossipers associated the suicide with the scandal.
This local scandal was what I was most recognized for, from when I was twelve until I moved away at sixteen.
On my maternal side all the relatives I had ever met were old, highly religious, straight arrow types. A few years back I did some research on the maternal branch of my family tree, and found out my direct-line ancestor on my mom’s side that first came across the Atlantic did so in the 1830s. For a long time I didn’t know much about him other than that, however just earlier this year I found an online scan of a newspaper from England in the 1830s. His name appeared in several issues of the paper over several years time, the first articles I read he was just mentioned as a local attorney involved in various cases, so I thought that was pretty neat.
Then as the years went on things got a little dicier. He ended up being involved in politics, and during one election him and a gang of ruffians were watching the polling place to insure people voted a certain way, and later that day they all tried to attack someone who had been a supporter of their side leading up to the election but come voting day voted for the other side (apparently the crowd kept them from beating up the turn coat.) I was surprised to hear that they did not use secret ballots in the 1830s, at least for whatever minor election was going on.
The final article I read about him involves his name being in the paper due to an arrest warrant being issued for him, because he was involved in a scheme in which him and some co-conspirators had run a scheme involving a large sum in counterfeit gold coins. Next thing you know his name appears in Nova Scotia a year later, so I’ve always assumed he probably fled prosecution.
Following that line of the family up until about 1915 or so pretty much everything I read about any of them involved criminal activity. A great-great grandmother shot and killed her husband and then married a wealthier man a year later (The wealthier man paid for her criminal defense and she was acquitted.) I knew some of the people in my family from her children’s generation and they were very “white sheep” types, so it was surprising to find out their mother was most likely a murderer.
I assumed it was because he had simply lied that the millionaire was present and doing the signing – that he and the lawyer presumably murdered the millionaire and he fraudulently notarized the documents transferring power to the lawyer. Or he and the lawyer went to the millionaire’s house and forced him to sign the documents before killing him, perhaps.
