He was your ancestor?
He sure got an early start at reproduction!
Further research revealed that his sentence was reduced to confinement in the prison hulks at Camden Yard (decommissioned naval vessels at anchor used as prisons). My mother has a hand written letter from him while he was confined (circa 1840) He sounded utterly despondent. He must have been released at some point, because died at age 49.
Just the typical scandals–slave owning ancestors fathering children with their slaves, grandfather fathering a child out of wedlock, drunk great-grandfather abandoning his wife and kids. One of the more unusual stories involves a cousin back in the 1800’s. He lived in Iowa and owned a few stores so he traveled about the state checking on them. He was married but in his travels he met another woman he liked and married her too. As the wives lived in different counties there were no problems at first, but eventually the wives somehow found out about each other. The first wife divorced him but the other wife stayed with him; eventually he became prosperous and quite fat and died of a heart attack one day while climbing into his carriage.
Ah, those records look like he was sent to Australia - not so?
Like some others here, eighteenth-century German immigrants where one generation was born in upstate New York, the next was born in Canada, and the next in central New England. Sympathies lying elsewhere and all that during a certain six- to eight-year period.
One that came out of the blue: My maternal great-grandfather may have abandoned his first wife and young daughter, eventually skipping town with a woman almost exactly fourteen years his junior (who would become my great-grandmother). Grandma (who was born in Ohio) had said on at least one occasion that she thought her parents got married on the journey from western Massachusetts to Cleveland because she’d never been able to track down the record of it. Some time later I Googled great-granddad’s name and found an exact match on a genealogy site with an entirely different wife and daughter, several years before Grandma was born.
It was around that point that I recalled Grandma had told me once that the local radio station in the small Massachusetts town she grew up in after the family moved back had run an announcement: a woman was looking for a family in the area that matched Grandma’s exactly (surname, number of kids, etc.) Grandma never called the station to find out what was up; I suspect now it may have been her older half-sister looking for the rest of them.
Thanks to DNA, I got to break the news that my parents have 3 cousins who were given up for adoption. Three.
That’s not really dark, what’s dark is how they keep shunning these perfectly fine adults decades after the fact.
It seems common to me. Seems like “wrong last name” was a very fluid concept a couple of centuries ago.
I’m super confused here. Do you not share the same mother? How is it that the test revealed you to be “not siblings, and likely no closer than second cousins”?
Several years ago my first cousin, once removed (aka my mother’s cousin) was doing some research and mentioned that her great-grandfather (my gg-grandfather) had gone missing for several years at some point. I did a little internet research and found who his parents were, where they came from etc., then ordered his Civil War Pension File. He was in the Union army 61-64. Married a girl he knew from what amounted to college back then on July 4 of '62. After he and his brother (they were in the same regiment) were discharged, he/wife/brother/brother’s wife/their young daughter packed up and moved from Indiana to Kansas. Gg-grandfather and wife went on to have five children and stayed in Kansas. Brother and wife moved on to Oklahoma.
One day, gg-grandfather said he was going to walk to town to get tobacco (it actually says that in an affidavit in the pension file) and never came back. After a few years, gg-grandmother assumed he was dead and filed for a pension. Many, many affidavits later from people saying they didn’t know where he was, that he was surely dead, she was granted the pension.
Many years later, his son (my g-grandfather) recieved a letter from him. The letter had been intended to go to his brother in Oklahoma. G-grandfather and gg-grandfather’s brother had the same first name and somehow the letter was sent to his son in Kansas instead of to his brother in Oklahoma. How it got sent to Kansas and not Oklahoma I never figured out, but it did. Per his own affidavit, he’d originally gone to Missouri and was a teamster there for some years, then ended up in a veterans home back in Indiana. No hanky-panky with other women or anything like that as far as I could tell. So the family went and got him and took him back to Kansas. He lived there for a while then decided to go live at the veterans home in Leavenworth, where he remained until his death.
Interesting things I found in the pension file:
Brother said gg-grandfather and wife never got along. He’d have left her, too.
Neighbor said gg-grandfather’s mother and three of her brothers were insane.
His mother wandered out into the orchard one night (in Indiana) and froze to death.
Gg-grandfather showed some odd behavior. If he saw someone walking towards the house (in the country) he’d go hide. (Hell, I do that!)
Further research showed his sister had been in and out of Longcliff Asylum in Indiana and had spent time with him and his wife in Kansas. I got that sister’s medical records from Longcliff and one day she went into the watercloset (bathroom), tore a strip of fabric from her dress and hanged herself from a pipe.
My other gg-grandfathers pension file: about 10 pages.
Does selling lard to Kosher grocers count as a more serious offense?
Well, in doing our tree my wife found out we have a common ancestor in the 1830s, making us 5th cousins.
I guess that’s not too shocking.
Turns out our mothers were related. There may be something in genetics because they are both harpies. 
Just remembered that my maternal grandmother is listed on the 1930 Census as living on a farm run by the State of Wisconsin. This would have been two years after Mom was born; Mom was raised by one of her aunts (we had already known that).
All we know of Mom’s father is a name on her birth certificate. It’s entirely possible that she was conceived on that farm during an Easter celebration.
Last fall I got a 48 year old police report about my father, 14 pages long, that talks about several different bodily fluids of his including semen, and also screams about a STOLEN COLOR TV in all caps. I guess maybe that could count.
My parents were people the world would have been better off without. I think I would have been too, except for their reproductive contribution.
Would love to have been a fly on the wall for THAT conversation!
Were they separately placed for adoption as newborns, from different branches of the family tree, or were they full siblings who were adopted later?
How are they “shunning” them?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the dynamic here, but if I had a semi-distant biological relative who was given up for adoption decades ago unbeknownst to me, I’d classify them as a total stranger. How can you shun a stranger?
I’ve got a thread around here somewhere about how I found out my parents are seventh cousins. Common ancestor back in the early eighteenth century.
As an update on that: Couple years ago I was helping my ex with her family tree just for laughs and doing pretty well at it (we’re both white and from the northeastern US, so records aplenty). We get back to the same time period, and suddenly I’m getting déjà vu on a particular name. Turns out my ex and I are eleventh cousins — in my case through both parents!
I found a bit of what you would expect - for example, my cousin that got married at 17 had her first child six months after the wedding, that sort of thing (I’m a lot younger than her, so never noticed it at the time).
The juiciest piece I uncovered started with my paternal grandmother, who was born in 1897, three months after her parents were married. Nothing that unusual, except her birth certificate contains this wonderful wording in the box for details of parents:
“(paternal grandmother), domestic servant, married on (date in 1897), to (her husband), ploughman, who, she declares, is not the father of the child”.
So she’s a domestic servant, who, at age 24 and six months pregnant, married a 19 year old ploughman. I would like to think someone at the big house did the dirty and then paid off the local ploughman lad to take care of her. This was all in a rural village about twenty miles from Edinburgh. With her husband, she went on to have another seven children, so there is a happy ending.
But the identity of my great-grandfather will remain forever a mystery.
Not in the home DNA testing era 
My grandfather was a WWI draft-dodger!