Researching family history- I keep finding skeletons!

I am a direct descendant of a passenger on the Mayflower, which is the ‘Holy Grail’ for genealogy snobs. But my ancestor was among the 45 (out of 102 total) passengers who died during during the first Winter while anchored near Plymouth, but before setting foot on land in the New World in the Spring of 1621. So, in genealogical circles, that puts me back down to the level of common gutter trash and unable to join their little Mayflower douchebags society…I was truly heartbroken to learn this, but somehow managed to pick up and move on with my pathetic life…

Besides, a much more interesting ancestor of mine came here with his ‘alleged’ wife (many sources claim they were never married prior to leaving England) as an endentured servant in 1624. And he changed his name (from Brookshaw to Brookshire) upon arrival and all blood descendants from anyone with the surname Brookshire in the U.S. are distantly related! And I’ve found all sorts of criminals, deviants and generally unsavory characters in that bloodline…which is much cooler than having a Mayflower relative!

I started researching my family history seven years ago. Both of my parents are only children, so I have no aunts, uncles or first cousins. I also have never met any of my paternal grandfather’s extended family (only his two siblings) and also never met a single member of maternal grandfather’s family including my grandfather, who died two years before I was born. So I was curious to find out where the hell we came from and if there were reasons why I had never met any of my grandparents’ relatives except for my maternal greandmother. She was one of 10 children and I actually know almost every one of my dad’s first cousins and their children (my second cousins) but only on that side of the family.

I’ve found more skeletons than I ever dreamed possible along the way…murders, incest, more murders, thieves and even one alleged prostitute! Initially, I was depressed because I started out hoping to find heroes and otherwise impossibly perfect people in my past…but I found more ‘white trash’ than anything. But my outlook changed over time and I realized that there were a few truly amazing people in my family’s past, and I’m proud to share a tiny bit of DNA with them. But I also found comfort/solace/contentment in the fact that I am a far better human being than many of my ancestors! As are my parents, sister and grandparents. And I can always claim that I’m adopted if anyone ever discovers some of the sordid secrets from our past!

Has anyone else embarked on the journey to research their family with high expectations, only to find more skeletons than anything!?

I’ve been doing it for years, and even as a child liked nothing more than looking at old pictures with my grandmother.

I’ve never had high expectations, just curiosity. My family consists of farmers from Germany and pub workers from England and they all seemed to behave themselves over here. No one came over much before 1850 so I’m definitely not Mayflower material.

I find the whole thing fascinating, though, and just like to wonder what they were like.

Maybe I’m daft, but how can you be descended from them if they died before making landfall. If they had a kid with them and the kid survived, wouldn’t that be your Mayflower ancestor?

In my case, both parents died and the son was sent back to England. I am a descendent of the son, but his children and several more generations all lived in England or Wales and didn’t finally cross the pond for another 150 years

Left the kid in service [apprenticeship perhaps] back in England, or female and married to someone back in England.

I know one of my English ancestors left one of his kids and a piece of propertywith his younger brother - there was court paperwork because he took a ship back and sued his brother for selling the property that was supposed to be held for his kid when the kid turned 21. How gothic romance is that … except the kid was a boy instead of a girl. :stuck_out_tongue: Moral of the story is don’t sell off your ward’s property if the original parent isn’t dead, and you have the postage and ability to write a letter to Daddy to complain!:smiley:

I’ve had a few very special, positive experiences also
My great-grandmother (my paternals grandmother’s mother) died from cervical cancer at the age of 49 after having 10 children (2 girls and 8 boys). The second oldest of all the children and the oldest girl was my grandmother. She was 20 when her mother died and her youngest brother was only 3yrs old. She and my grandfather had only been married a few months, but they moved back in with her father and she was the ‘mother’
to her four youngest siblings for the next five years. Then my grandparents built their own house about 500 yards away and one street over. Her younger sister finished raisign the two youngest boys.

But I never knew anything about my great-grandmother’s personality or hadn’t ever seen a photo of her. I immediately fell in love with her smile and as I heard stories from various family members and other people from my homtown, she was one of the kindest, most gentle and loving souls that ever lived. She worked in the school lunchroom, but would go in early and cook breakfast with food she bought for kids from poor familes who were hungry. the school superintendant threatened to fire her if she didn’t stop and he did just that…but she lived directly across the street from the school and the kids came to her house before school for their breakfast instead…

Proof that there is some justice in the world, the superintendant was killed in a steam shovel accident (and he suffered) and his replacement immediately re-hired her…

It makes me sad that I’ll never get to meet her, unless I’m wrong and there really is an afterlife…but I have more than a dozen photos of her now and she has such a great smile, it makes me happy to look at them and think about her.

My latest and most interesting find is about my maternal grandmother’s maternal grandfather (my great-great-grandfather). For unknown reasons, after living in Georgia since 1821, the family suddenly moved just over the state line into Alabama for 22 years. Then they moved back to Georgia, but not the the same county where they lived prior to moving to Alabama.

I finally met a distant cousin who had all the documentation to explain why. He killed a man in a dispute over a chiffarobe (a piece of furniture) and left Georgia for a few decades until he felt that they would no longer be looking for him…and he started going by his middle name and dropped his first name altogether…and the law never pursued him, so he got away with murder,…

We found an ancestor who ran off to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the very early days of that movement and may have known Joseph Smith and Brigham Young personally or at least met them. We are descended from a daughter of him and his first wife who refused to make the trek out west. My ancestor married several more times polygamously (this was before they banned it), resulting in dozens and dozens of tenthish cousins in Utah.

Look at the bright side, you might be distantly related to the Osmonds!

As a Jamestown descendant I don’t commonly socialize with the Mayflower newcomers. To my knowledge all of my ancestors came after “The Starving Time”, but some were present for the 1622 massacre and its reprisals and one was instrumental in poisoning several Indians as payback for it. (Something morbidly fascinating to me about that branch is that 4 consecutive generations of kids grew up without a father [i.e. their father died when they were children]; there couldn’t have been much continuity save for a surname and I might well know more about their grandfather and great-grandfather than they did. Also, one of the girls from the family was fostered to an abusive foster-mother and was the subject of one of the first child abuse investigations and hearings in the New World.)

I’ve found several wills that I would love to know more about; they include lines like “I leave my daughter Susan and her husband $1 for reasons she well knows”.
I’ve found lots of “premature births” (i.e. kids born 6 months after the wedding), and my great-grandparents probably didn’t marry until after the birth of their first (of fifteen) children. (Her descendants actually knew that she was pregnant when they married, but probably not that the child was born.) I was surprised to learn how common this was all over America from the 17th through the 20th centuries; there apparently wasn’t even as much stigma as you’d think so long as the parents did eventually marry.

One of my great-great-grandmothers, Amanda, married her first husband in the 1850s when she was 23 and he was 66 (or 68, depending on the record). They had four children, the youngest born shortly after he died at the age of 73 the month before Fort Sumter. Within a year she had remarried and was pregnant very soon after. Her second husband did not serve in the Civil War even though he was only in his late 20s/early 30s when it was fought.
I’ve wondered many things about this: why would Amanda marry such an old man, for starters. True, he was rich for the time/place: he owned 60 slaves and more than 1,000 acres of land- BUT he had 10 children by his first marriage and this was a time when the wife rarely inherited more than one of the kids- she had no reason to expect to be left wealthy by this, plus while her family wasn’t nearly as wealthy as his they weren’t indigent either. Then I’ve wondered where the second husband came from and how he stayed out of service; I have a theory she may have made him manager of her first husband’s plantation, which would have made him overseer of more than 20 slaves which could have exempted him, but I’ve no idea.
A horrifying thing to learn is that her many troublesome stepchildren began suing the estate for immediate liquidation within weeks of their father’s death and the result was two slave auctions on the plantation in 1863 and 1864. Some of the slaves who would have sold for more than $1,000 before the war were actually bartered for food and land. Amanda’s daughter (with the old man) talked about how awful it was on a voice recording made in the 1950s when she was almost 100; she still remembered it because some of her friends were sold. (They were at least luckier than most slaves in that most were sold locally and they were free very soon after due to CSA defeat and the 13th amendment.)

I am certain that my great-great-grandfather (my maternal grandmother’s paternal grandfather) murdered my great-great-grandmother so he could marry another woman. I’ve never been able to prove it, but I know it’s true.

My great-great-grandmother, Fannie, was 48 years old, in perfect health and worked on the farm every day. In less than six hours, she became violently ill and died for no apparent reason. My basted g-g-grandfather buried her in an unmarked grave on the back side of the farm and woudln’t allow a funeral or any sort of service at all for her.

Five days later, he married the daughter of the highest ranking judge in Northeast Georgia. She verbally and physically abused his six existing children, and she had two children with him. She would force her hungry step-children to watch her two kids eat the finest food and throw away half of it, then send them to bed hungry afterward…

My g-g-grandfather fell down a well almost 20 years later and, sadly, no one could hear his screams for help. He lived more than a day down there before having a heartache and/or drowning from or during it.

I get a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about how his bitch troll wife died, a few years after him. She was in an auto accident and launched thru the windshield stopping halfway with the glass slicing into her waist…she bled out but suffered for over an hour and one of her brats died with her…

Karma is a fucking bitch…

One thing I haven’t been able to find is any Civil War veteran at all. As far as I can tell all of my ancestors who lived through the war just farmed right through it.

I have Cherokee Indian ancestry from both of my paternal grandmother’s parents family lines. My best friend (since childhood) and I went to Cherokee Reservation and Casino in NC several years ago. I wanted to meet a tribe chief and receive my Cherokee name, but after two hours in line with countless people still ahead of us, we gave up.

We decided that my Indian name would be “Dances With Boys” and his would be “Flaming Arrow”. Although ‘Dances with Nobody’ would be more accurate for the last few years…

Stay away from the wolves! :smiley:

Mrs. Geek went into it knowing that one of her ancestors was an American Indian and wanting to find out more about it. She ended up tracing ancestors back to the Mayflower, so if she ever gets her documentation in order she’s eligible to join the Mayflower Society (which would be kinda funny since we’re the polar opposite of the high class society types you generally associate with them). She’s also eligible to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, and she had ancestors on both sides of the Civil War. Ironically, she can find absolutely no trace of any American Indian blood anywhere in her past.

All kinds of skeletons have fallen out of the closet. There are plenty of marriage dates and birth dates that don’t quite have enough time between the two (if you know what I mean). There are also prison records that no one in the family ever bothered to mention. And then there was the man who, when his wife died, immediately shoved both of his daughters into a mental institution and started over child-free with a new wife.

When researching my side of the family, she discovered that my grandfather and his brother came over from Greece and started a restaurant, which I already knew. She found several things I didn’t know though, such as the fact that my grandfather had a patent for a condiment dispenser. And she also discovered that my grandfather and his brother accidentally started a fire in their restaurant that pretty much burned down the entire town. You could almost feel the angry tone in the newspaper article, who only referred to them as “those Greeks” and didn’t reference them by name. In the next few census records they lived in another town, so I guess they had to leave town rather quickly and stay away.

All my ancestors were in the U.S. by the Civil War but, although I have several ways to enter the Sons of the American Revolution, the only Civil War service I’m aware of is a gt-gt-grandfather who served as physician for the Confederacy.

I’ve not come across any felons as direct ancestor, but one was lynched in 1838, possibly by authority of the “Mormon Extermination Order”. Another ancestor had a half-sister hanged for witchcraft in Salem; another had a very famous cousin who was hanged 2nd December 1859 for treason, inciting rebellion and murder.

I’ve got a Mayflower ancestor. I can’t remember the name offhand but it was one of the indentured servants. The idea of even applying to join some group based entirely on line of descent from Mayflower passengers makes the bile rise in my gorge. Such groups are devoted to petty snobbery based on something they had no control over. As I believe Francis Bacon once said, “Important families are like potatoes. The best parts are underground.”

I also have a lot of Baptist preachers on my father’s side of the family, mostly in the 19th century. Not a skeleton but an interesting bit of family trivia.

I remember asking my Grandfather when I was a kid if we had convict heritage or id he’d even been in the army during the wars. The old bastard looked me in the eye and said ‘No’ to both counts.

So imagine the surprise when I find out later courtesy of some internet searching and a curious cousin that his grandfather was transported to Aus as an 18 year old convict, lived til 83 years old and got to see his youngest grandchild (my grandfather) born in 1901.

The old boy was also in the army during WW2 in his 40’s when the US had an airforce base at Tocuumwal in southern NSW. I knew he worked out there, but didn’t realise he joined the army to do so. His daughters were flabbergasted.

Old timers are also good with keeping secrets about birth and marriage certificates. My dads oldest sister was shattered when she got to see her parents marriage certificate when her mum died and realised that she was born shortly after they were married.

I recently got a copy of my mums fathers birth cert from 1911. She’d never seen it, he was born without a father listed and had his mothers surname, then was changed 12 months later when she got married. I assume the bloke she married wasn’t his natural father, which also may account for the stories I was told about him clashing with his “dad”.

Apparently, when he was 10 he had a fight with his dad about how he spoke to one of his sisters. So at 10 years old, he packed a swag, got on his horse and rode off never to come back. Worked on farms for board and could train anything with 4 legs. I spent a week with him when I was a kid working on the farm he worked at when he was in his late 60’s. He sat a horse like it was part of him.

I’d love to find out more about my family, but both sides came to this country from Poland in the early 1900s and no one is still alive who knew anything about where specifically they originated. Somewhere along the line, I thought I’d figured out where my paternal grandfather was born, but I lost the notes and I never tried to look again. And online records from Poland in the late 19th century are pretty sketchy.

Based on old photos, we’re pretty sure we come from peasant stock - I recall being told one side of the family farmed and the other side were miners. There were a few minor skeletons even leading up to the present. For example, my dad’s Uncle George (my grandfather’s brother)* lived in sin with a woman!!!* :eek: He died in 1952 - 2 years before I was born.

One of my dad’s sisters *had *to get married :eek: and the whispered belief was that her husband wasn’t the father of my cousin. My mother’s brothers used to joke (joke??) about having children in Germany from when they were in the Army in the 50s. One of those brothers married 5 times - a family record! Probably the biggest family shame is my cousin (now 48 or so) who has been jailed repeatedly for drugs, alcohol, and prostitution. The theory is that she was screwed up when her mother left her father on the advice of a psychic. The older cousin understood a bit more what was going on and the youngest of the 3 was just a baby, but the middle girl may have been at a vulnerable age.

There are at least 3 children born out of wedlock, and several divorces (which was a BIG deal in the 60s in our family) but as far as I know, no major crimes or intrigues. Our skeletons are pretty weak, all things considered.

I found out some family anecdotes are just flat out not true. My great-grandfather, who my mother and her sister both remembered, was said to have an Irish lilt to his voice on account of being raised by his mother, an Irish lass with a thick brogue who came over in the potato famine; my research showed that his mother was born in Alabama to parents who were born in South Carolina to parents who were also American born, and judging by surnames and the one immigrant I’ve located on that side they were English and Scots-Irish and came over a century or more before she was born anyway, so if the family had lilts and brogues they were most likely the either affectations or speech impediments. I was also told we were related to a famous Creek Indian chief, William Weatherford (bka Red Eagle); we’re actually related to his half-brother but on the opposite side, so no connection to Weatherford himself.

Speaking of Native American ancestor, I always heard we had it, and upon research we do, but it was a lot further back than expected (early 18th century).

The biggest shocker was learning of African ancestry on two sides. One branch of the family had to register as mulatto when they were in the Carolinas up until 1820, but stopped doing so when they moved to Alabama (by which time they were perhaps 1/8 black or less- light enough to pass). They were descendants of a white female indentured servant who had an illegitimate biracial baby ca. 1705 (and went to jail for it, though she was released and raised the daughter, who herself had an illegitimate family with a white man).

Another free black ancestor, Gideon Gibson, left quite a paper trail in the 17th and 18th centuries. His wife was a Saponi Indian (or perhaps that was his son’s wife- I’d have to look a the tables) and a female descendant married a white man and their descendants were listed as “tithable” (meaning, basically, ‘not altogether white’) in the Carolinas, but because they were of native ancestry rather than black. Further research showed that a lot of the ubiquitous claims of “Indian blood” may have actually been African blood or mixed African-Native American blood, a sort of genealogy laundering.

I have one ancestor whose widow applied for a Revolutionary War pension on his behalf in the 1830s when the information I have shows he was born in the early 1770s and was very unlikely to have been of an age to serve. (She said he was born in 1765 or thereabouts, but his parents did not marry until 1763 and then had several children older than he was.) Whether this was an honest mistake or a desire to get $40 per year fraudulently I don’t know, but the pension was denied in any case.

Speaking of birth date, while it’s understandable that slaves would not know their birth date, it’s interesting how many free white people did not know their own birth date either, even to the year. I’ve seen pensions and other applications where people would refer to their birth as happening “around 1760” or even more vague; one I saw had an old man (not from my family but in the same records as one) saying he didn’t know the year he was born but it was the year that the town he lived in flooded.

Like pretty much all Americans who h