Researching family history- I keep finding skeletons!

In My Humble Opinion
21

With what little genealogy I’ve done, I’ve only been able to go to my maternal grandparents and no one else. Part of it is because all four of my grandparents immigrated here in the early 1900s, and most records would have either been in their villages/churches. I’ve been able to reasonably pinpoint the villages where both my maternal grandparents came from, thanks to getting their papers translated. I know my maternal grandfather came here with two brothers, and they all scattered once the boat docked at Ellis Island. I remember my mother telling me she and a friend occasionally “took the train to X” to visit one of her uncles and his family, but she never elaborated where. Ergo, for all I know, I’ve got a lot of cousins who don’t know I’m alive :shrug:

I know next to nothing about my dad’s side except that his mother was from Poland – whereabouts, I have no idea. I found this out quite accidentally. When I was a kid she always insisted she was from Austria…? My grandfather ran out on her when my dad was a kid and didn’t show up again until right before my dad moved up this way to attend school on the GI Bill. Nobody ever told me the details, but I know he died of cancer and both my dad and my aunt paid for his hospitalization :shrug:

22

I’ve tracked most of my family lines back to the early 1800s. Nothing really noteworthy, but one oddity. Almost all of my lineage is from light-skinned northern European stock. Except one. Family rumors have been that there was a slave somewhere back, but my research didn’t turn up one. More likely an Indian. I know which line that is, and, of course, it’s the one with the sketchiest information. My great-grandmother was an only child who died at 27. My grandfather, her son, died at 28. My great-grandmother was an only child, as well as bother her parents. I’d love to find a picture of her, but I doubt one exists. She’s the only great-grand for whom I’m lacking a photo–and she is definitely the source of all the dark complexions in our family.

23

There, there. I’m descended from two Mayflower travelers, and would be happy to rent you one for a nominal fee. I also have a Revolutionary War ancestor, one who fought at Sackett’s Harbor, one who fought in King Philip’s War, and a Civil War (Union Army) ancestor who was captured at Bull Run. I find you almost-Americans faintly repugnant. :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ve never joined any of those blue-nose societies, nor do I care to. My great grandmother was the last person in my direct lineage to become a member of the DAR, and I’ve never found anyone who belonged to the SAR or the Mayflower Society. There is no benefit to joining these clubs that I can see, unless one likes giving money away for no particular reason.

I was much more entertained by the story I uncovered of the Civil War guy; or by the fact that one of my great-great grandfathers was a steamboat captain on the Ohio River in the 1850s-60s; or that one of my grandfathers, dying from infection in a Portland hospital in 1915, gave a Christmas gift of a bushel basket full of oranges to the children’s ward as a last kind act; or that my family was one of the thousands who continually pushed westward and were an active part of the making of this country.

24

I belong to the Horowitz family (although my grandfather changed his last name shortly after WWII), which has all sorts of interesting people in it. Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly where I am on the tree, which is large and has many, many branches.

25

though I have a large number of interesting and, even, fairly notable ancestors and their descendents, the one direct ancestor of mine that I find a bit difficult to appreciate was a man who, with his wife, had 6 children, some born in New Jersey, some in Ohio (they walked, around 1835). Around 1848 they moved on to Illinois where my gggrandmother died during a harsh winter in 1852. My gggrandfather married the widow of another farmer who died about the same time. Now you might expect the story would be that they raised the 6 children (actually, one was already married and lived nearby) and had a few more of their own.

What really happened was that the new wife inherited a farm back in Ohio. gggf told his kids he they were going back to Ohio to settle things there, they would soon be back on the train. They never returned, instead stayed in Ohio, had a bunch more kids, and, more or less, abandoned the kids from the first family. Those children were parceled out as hired help/servants to other farmers, with the married daughter caring for the little girl, Susan, who was only 3 when her mother died. Susan helped her big sister raise her own 8 children until she thought it was time for her to make her own way in the world, leaving the farm for Peoria, where she secured a position as housekeeper for a widower, civil war vet with two kids, my ggf. Within a year, they were an item, with my gf being born a short but decent interval after their marriage.

My gf was married twice, first, as a very young fellow, to a twice-widowed woman only a few years old than himself. The family story is that they went off to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago not long after they were married, and he returned not too much later with the story that M. had been killed in a streetcar accident in Chicago. Modern access to all sorts of contemporary records has not revealed any proof of that story. I’ve speculated that she may have been one of the women abducted and killed by a serial killer who preyed on the tourists coming to Chicago for the ‘fair’, and that, gf, already thinking that her first two husband’s deaths were sudden and unexpected, may have thought she had run off. Or, he was wary and caught her trying to poison him, turned the tables and, perhaps, just left, or, perhaps, killed her himself and was not caught.

He married again, 10 years later, and the first surviving son of that marriage was my father, born in 1907.

26

There are British loyalists in my family. Turns out that they fled the US and were granted land on a loyal island out of thanks and they became farmers. The farming didn’t go to well apparently because the family moved to NYC… We’ve already checked - I can’t reclaim the land or claim citizenship by descent, not that I’d want to be a farmer in the middle of nowhere anyway.

27

My mother’s maternal grandfather was hanged as a horse thief in Ireland. Off my father’s side all I have of real interest is George Washington Ferris, inventor of the Wheel.

28

I’m a direct descendant of Annie Lucy Howard, a member of the same Howard family as President William Howard Taft and all the Ohio politicos. The Howard middle name survives to this day in my brother and his two sons.

29

Mostly Scottish / Irish, but a few rogues and a few wonders.

The rogues were my dad’s family; his father’s father came from good law-abiding stock (mostly Texas Rangers if family history is true) but dad’s dad was a mustanger (aka horse thief - a lot of his ‘wild’ horses had suspicious scars where brands might have been) and hard-rock miner who drank himself to death but not before burying his wife in a pauper’s grave and abusing or neglecting his 7 kids and 20-odd grandkids. His people came from England to Texas before the Civil War, and apparently I’ve a fair amount of Confederate blood in me, as the Texas side of the family left for Montana after the Civil War as they didn’t want to be part of the Union, but the Union later caught them up; the few who were semi-respectable stayed in Texas. Nobody’s sure where Grandma’s people came from, but she used to brag about having a cousin in the James Gang. Dad was definitely the kid from the ‘bad’ side of town who made good - he was the only one to go to university, and the only one who never did any serious jail time. Of course he was also a lawyer, so maybe not all ‘good’ :slight_smile:

Mom’s side was a bit more salubrious, but g’g’grandpa ended up a doctor after WW1 when he started as a medical orderly because the doc on the boat coming out of China had a bit of an opium problem and his brother officers solved it by leaving a loaded pistol on his bunk one night. G’Grandad was the only ‘medical’ person on the boat, so ended up as ship’s doctor and was later sent to medical school by the Navy because he was actually kind of good at it. He was in the cavalry in WW1 before joining the Navy and ended up small-town coroner in South Dakota of all places. Grandpa (only child) was a doctor and grabbed Grandma in Chicago where he was going to Medical School and she business school (who was far smarter than him) after a stint in the Phillipines in WW2 ended up in Montana. Grandma’s people came from the Shetlands, apparently after they grew got tired of dying in fishing accidents and starving in the Clearances and came to the New World and were largely well-off Farmers in North Dakota.

Now I’m back in the UK (happily not the Shetland Islands - I need more sunlight than that!) so it’s coming a bit full-circle.

30

I have the opposite problem - nothing but dull, hardworking farmers seem to show up in my tree - all the way back to the 1600s. Other than my father in WWII and me during Vietnam - no military service since the revolution.

Celebrate your “blacksheep” - perhaps you can join the International Blacksheep Society of Genealogists.

31

Pretty much every male in my family served in all the major wars from the Civil War onwards. I had three uncles and my dad in Vietnam and only 2 of them came back (my dad being one).

On Edit - we skipped Korea, though. Not sure how that happened.

32

Parts of what is now Poland weren’t always part of Poland. For instance, for years all we knew about one of my great-grandfathers was that he was from “someplace like Russia, but it wasn’t Russia.” Eventually someone found the record of his arrival at Ellis Island, which listed his country of origin as Ruthenia, which would have made his ethnicity Rusyn (not Russian).

As far as anyone knows, he took no particular pride in being Rusyn, and didn’t keep in touch with anyone in Poland/Ruthenia.

33

Family legend was that my maternal grandfather’s brother came to Minnesota from Bohemia, decided farming wasn’t the life for him, and offered the land to his brother if he’d just hop on a boat. GGGpa Joe hopped on a boat with his wife and children in 1887, came to Minnesota and farmed a large part of what is now an upscale suburb of Minneapolis. In going through family papers, my mom found the quit claim from 1906 where GGGpa took control of the land. I don’t know why there was such a gap between when they came here and when they owned the farm, though.

In looking through my maternal grandmother’s side - well, brick wall after brick wall. Per my mom, her grandfather was a Yiddish gangster in Chicago around the turn of the 20th century. Very abusinve. He came to Minnesota around 1920, a widow, with kids in tow. We know they had been in Indiana for some time, too. I have some documentation stating he was in the Polish military before coming to the US, but I have been unable to find anything else. I do still giggle over having a Yiddish gangster ancestor.

My dad’s family history is pretty clear. His paternal side were titled castle owners in the Holstein area of Germany - still have land there, I understand. However, the ones that came to the US became raging drunkards in Wisconsin. His maternal side I have learned about through ancestry.com, as he didn’t remember much of her. She died when he was 5. Her family goes back to PA in the early 1800’s. Nothing exciting but farmers.

34

I would love to find some skeletons. Back quite a few generations on one side I start hitting Salters. Which supposedly means a possible distant relation to Abraham Lincoln. For all other parts of the family I hit a brick wall when they came over around the turn of the century. Nothing really interesting.

35

Oi! We were sitting by the fire, and you were telling a story, and you got up to make tea, but then you didn’t come back :mad: Get back here with my cuppa and finish the story!

36

Mom was a librarian and fanatical geneologist, so I have all sorts of paperwork about the doings of the family from waaaay back. Sampiro and I might be related, for that matter. I too have ancestors from Jamestown (one particular ancestor was on the Sea Venture.)

Most were farmers and shop-keepers, but one lit out for the west after murdering someone else’s slave in South Carolina. I have membership in the Sons of the American Revolution through several branches, and links as far back as the Glencoe Massacre in the British Isles.

37

Same here. I still have the same last name as my Jamestown grandparents and everything. 400 years is a long time to maintain an unbroken string of males in a Southern lineage. I only have daughters myself but I do have nephews so maybe they can keep it going for a lot longer.

I have a lot of skeletons in my family tree as well. Most people don’t appreciate just how long it was between the time of Jamestown and the later Mayflower until the Civil War. It was a whole lot longer than it is from the Civil War to today. They say that almost no one admits to being descendants of slave owners because their family was either too poor to have them or came over too late or maybe they just didn’t do that. Not me. My family had a solid 250 years of slave owning experience in the U.S. before it was outlawed and another 50 after the Civil War running essentially the same thing with nominally free blacks as sharecroppers. The slaves fought back sometimes though. My great-great-great grandfather was chopped to pieces by one of his slaves. The slave knew he would be executed for it (and he was) but I am sure it seemed worth it at the time.

The last shocker was that I finally unraveled my maternal grandmother’s roots. She never told anyone much about her upbringing at all except for scattered details and weird place references without any context. I know why now. It turns out that I am 1/4 bonafide white trash coming from her side. I had no idea that they had exact analogs to today’s trailer trash back at the turn of the 20th century but they sure did. Her mother (my great grandmother) had her out of wedlock very young and always claimed my grandmother was her baby sister while other relatives passed my grandmother back and forth to raise but also abuse her. My great grandmother ran a beauty parlor out West that supposedly offered special packages in the back for the male clients. She and her identical twin sister were both badly injured in car accidents in their 30’s (caused by their own drinking and driving) and they both drank themselves to death by the time they were 40. Pretty impressive for flapper party girls.

38

I haven’t done much genealogical sleuthing, but I do know that I have an ancestor who lived to be 101 (1750-1851) :cool: and found, by typing my surname, which is not a common one, into a search engine, a family photo from the 1890s of a bunch of people who all kind of look like me. One of them in particular looked exactly like my sister did when she was a child, in boy form.

One woman knew that many lynchings were accompanied by a photographer with a mobile darkroom, and a portable printing press so people could purchase souvenir postcards of the “event”. :eek: She did not know until doing this search that she had an ancestor who ran the printing press. :eek:

I know another woman whose maternal grandmother had died at age 30, leaving behind two very young children, one of whom was her mother. Her grandfather remarried and had two more children, and this stepmother was the woman they knew as “Grandma”. This grandmother was one of 15 children, and she had never met any of the relatives from that branch of her family tree, and decided to so some genealogy to find out why. And did she ever find out. Her great-grandparents were both alcoholics, and most of the kids were too and also had lengthy arrest records and the like, as did their descendents. Her grandmother was one of the few who went on to have a respectable adult life, and that was why she didn’t know any of these people.

39

You can wend your way back on my Dad’s side through Nieu Amsterdam to Holland, and then back in Holland to the 1400s where one thread sneaks to France, and then back to the 1100s where we hit a dead end - someone would have to go investigate baptismal records, which unfortunately frequently ended up being burned in the French Revolution, and tombstones, as long as said revolutionaries didn’t break them up to be building material.:smack: At least the German and English components are a bit better preserved though they only go back to the 1300s and 1400s respectively.

I do at some point wish I could have the time and finances to let me actually go and rummage around in parrish records and cemetaries in France, it would be a blast.

40

And by a considerable margin. A baby born today would be in his/her 90s before slavery has been illegal for as long as it is legal. The vast majority of slaves alive at the time of the Civil War were several generations removed from their last African born ancestor and most likely had never known any slave actually born in Africa.