Forgot to include the best story about one of my ancestors. Shipwrecked and attacked by native americans, but survived to see 502 descendants.
My dad’s family shares a Mayflower ancestor with a prominent political family. DH’s family shares a last name, but is in no way that we’ve seen, related to that same political family.
I can’t believe I didn’t know that. Next time we have a ‘who was Shakespeare’ debate…
I can go back to great-great-grandparents on all my lines, and one is a great-great-great-grandparent.
The line of my maternal grandmother’s family can be traced to 1681, the year my most distant known ancestor was born.
My maternal grandmother also told me about her grandfather, who served in the Union Army in the Civil War, and was incarcerated in the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia. He survived but had health aftereffects for the rest of his life.
That distant ancestor came to the American colonies in 1722 with his wife and kids. Two sons fought in the Revolutionary War, and the one I am descended from was court-martialed when he refused to fight with the French soldiers who came with Lafayette. They were Catholics and he was Protestant. He later was pardoned.
My tip is to hook up with a genealogy expert that a fellow board member - who happens to be from your home area and the same general nationality of origin - recommends to you. 
Qadgop the Mercotan and I are from a similar background, and he gave me contact info for a woman who does a lot of genealogy around that heritage.
I already knew a lot about my dad’s side as a great-great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother were fortunate enough (for livelihood as well as recording info for future generations) to survive a ship burning and sinking in Lake Michigan, during the last leg of their immigration to the US. But due to ignorance or other reasons on my mother’s side, her parents couldn’t tell us much about their genealogy.
I got a lot of names and dates, and gave that info to my mom so she and her siblings could explore further. No fun anecdotes. In fact, the whole lot of them pretty much stayed in the same two small ‘provinces’ of the same country until some of them got it into their heads to up and move to the US. Going back 12 generations or so in some branches, I think we found two that - gasp - actually came from the country right across the border.
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I have a copy of a geneology tracing my paternal grandmother’s ancestry back to 1360 in Germany. It is very factual and detailed, as in George had a shop in this town, married Greta in this year, etc. What I found fascinating is the stories you can surmise based on the data. For example, George marries Greta. One year later a child is born. The following year a second child is born and the first one dies. You get similar events for 10 - 15 years until Greta dies at the age of 35 with four surviving children, several others having died in childhood. A year later George marries Hilda. Repeat.
There are more details as you get to the 20th century. A number of family members moved to the U.S. around the late 19th and early 20th century, with additional folks following in subsequent years. In 1914 a few families from Germany travelled to the U.S. to visit with a couple celebrating a 50th anniversay. World War I broke out, and they could not return to Germany until the war was over! The older folks moved back, but the younger ones stayed in the U.S.
My mother’s and brother’s middle name of Howard is from the same family as all the Howard Taft politicos.
My knowledge of my family tree doesn’t extend much before the early 20th century. I do know that I am fully irish on my mother’s side, and irish & german on my father’s side. My mother’s side of the family is the archetypal curly red-haired irish types, but my father’s side (whom I take after) are 'black irish."
On my mother’s side, my great-grandfather (or perhaps great-great-grandfather?) came to America in 1890. He went from Ireland to Canada first, then emigrated to Buffalo, NY. He was a fully licensed (in Ireland) doctor, but because he was Irish & Catholic, he was refused a U.S. medical license and had to work on the Erie Canal.
On my father’s side, I know that his grandmother (my great grandmother) came to America in the 1910s. She worked as a live-in maid in a well-to-do family’s house. When the matriarch of the house died, my great-grandmother married the man of the house, he was my great-grandfather. After he died, there was a huge fight over his estate, and the children from my great grandfather’s first wife never spoke or communicated with my great-grandmother or grandmother again. Thus there is a whole contingent of relatives my family has no information about. (That story I didn’t know until after my grandmother had died.)
I had no idea that they were related to each other. Having said that, I’m friends with one of your cousins.
My paternal grandmother did some extensive work on the family tree, and my father tried to do some follow-up. It turns out that I’m related to a former US president, a former FBI director, and a vacuum cleaner guy. One line was traced all the way back to British royalty in the 15th century.
I have an elderly relative on my mother’s side who started a family tree project when she was a very young woman. It goes all the way back to a Swedish immigrant from 1850-something. There is a book with some info on every descendant. It’s about 5 inches thick. A few years back I offered to put it all up on the 'Net. About halfway through the first page I reneged on my offer. That would have been a HUGE project!
That’s awesome!
On my dad’s side, all I have are names and dates, the earliest being a Joseph Richardson born in 1789.
On mom’s side, a distant cousin has found a lot more details but going back only to 1785, a Robert Jacques born in Orange County, New York. She found:
[ul]
[li]a farmer killed by a bull[/li][li]one given “Doc” as a middle name because his parents wanted him to become a doctor (he didn’t)[/li][li]a few who died in car accidents at a time when you’d think cars didn’t go fast enough for accidents to result in fatalities[/li][li]a “blue baby” who died after a few hours – what’s a “blue baby”?[/li][li]several deaths from flu in the early 1900’s, including one WWI vet[/li][li]an engineer on the first space flight[/li][li]a Civil War vet – 52nd Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers, died of typhoid while a POW in South Carolina[/li][li]a Civil War vet in the 4th New Jersey Light Artillery Battery D - the enlistment record gives a physical description![/li][li]a great-aunt who committed suicide by swallowing lye[/li][/ul]
Mostly farmers, lots of soldiers, and a couple of doctors and a few bankers.
WAG: blue/purple coloration due to cyanosis, probably due to some sort of circulatory problem, or perhaps choking. Could have been a birth defect of the heart, I suspect.
My earliest European ancestor in the New World was a Dutch farmer in Harlem on Manhattan Island, then a part of New Netherland. A local Indian girl married one of his descendants (giving me one part in 1024 Indian 
).
Another of my ancestors was a prominent mathematician, who may have invented the division sign. His son had a large estate in what was by then New York.
I have a bunch of German ancestors who settled in Pennsylvania and Maryland before and after independence. Many were Dunkers. A lot of them moved west with the frontier. They met a village of Christianized Indians in central Ohio (giving me another one part in 32 Indian).
Somehow a Frenchman also got mixed in with my mostly German, English and Dutch ancestors (with the occasional Indian). And an Irishman in the mid-1800s was my most recent immigrant ancestor.
I’m married to a Korean, so my descendants will have an even more mixed ancestry.
On my mother’s side, to a man born in Amsterdam in 1599, well established in the New York area by 1638. (Twelve generations back.) Also, same generation, an “early Connecticut settler”, whose granddaughter married the grandson of the Dutchman.
On my father’s side, to a person born in Worcestershire around 1250. (Twenty-two generations back.)
A wreck in Bermuda. The crew had to build a smaller ship from the wreckage and sail home to England. Shakespeare references the wreck in The Tempest. Granted, it’s not like that ancestor stayed on this side of the Atlantic, but he was here, dammit!
My dad’s parents and my mom’s grandparents came to the US from Poland in the early 1900s. Before that, I think they were all either farmers or miners. We’ve probably still got relatives in Poland, but no one alive knows exactly which city or region holds our roots.
That’s all I’ve got.
My father’s grandfather fought with an Ohio regiment in the Civil War. He had part of his upper lip shot off in a friendly fire incident and wore a thick mustache for the remainder of his life. After being mustered out moved to northeastern Kansas and homesteaded, and there my grandfather was born. This much we knew. When we were contacted by a distant cousin who was looking for information for the genealogy he was working on, we told him what we knew and he was able to place our “twig” in the tree.
We have an unusual surname, so going back along that line from son to father, I can go back to about 1640 in New Amsterdam, which automatically gets us back to The Netherlands in about 1610, since he was a grown man when he left Europe. In the region where they lived, near Utrecht, most of the land was owned by the Church and leased out, often for generations, to the area’s more established farming families. Ours was one such family, but before about 1600 the records become spotty and the best the genealogists could do was to make assumptions based on Dutch child-naming and other customs, for example the fact that grandchildren might assume the surname of their mother if her family was more important socially. Coats of arms also provide some clues. Going back this way we reach–putatively–the mid 1300s. In general they included numerous civic officials, a few minor landowners, soldiers, and so on. Nothing terribly exciting all in all, but it was certainly gratifying to learn about this even so.
I’ve only been able to search a little bit online, and what I’ve found has been somewhat sparse. All I’ve used is Google. Additionally, none of my relatives come from England/Ireland/Scotland/Wales, so the records are usually in another language. The furthest back I’ve been able to get is a great^7-grandfather and grandmother in Germany. That takes me to around 1670 or so. Everything else dries out in the 1800s. My grandma was an orphan, so that actually dries out around 1900 (she knows who her parents were, but nothing further).
I envy people who can go really far back.
The usual reference was to a heart defect called tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart malformation that robs the blood of oxygen, causing the baby’s face to turn bluish. The babies just about always died very early.
One of the first, if not the very first, open-heart surgeries was a bypass operation performed in 1941 at Johns Hopkins by Dr. Alfred Blalock, assisted by a young black man, Vivien Thomas. The made-for-TV movie “A Thing the Lord Made” was about their groundbreaking surgery, which everybody else at the time said couldn’t be done.
You may now return to your regularly scheduled topic.
Oh, we’ve got blacksmiths, seamstresses, preachers (Quaker–I didn’t even know they had preachers), a president (McKinley), and the odd black sheep…
Really? Who? PM me if you prefer.