I recently learned that the ranking FBI officer at the Wounded Knee Incident, Joseph Trimbach, was previously my great-uncle’s CO in the Marine Corps during the Korean War (stateside.)
When my uncle died, my dad gave me some of his personal belongings and old documents, as keepsakes. Among them was a USMC liberty pass from my late uncle, who was an enlisted man, signed by Trimbach, then a 1LT. I reached out to his family after discovering this weird coincidence (I googled the name on the liberty pass just for the hell of it, wondering if the officer wound up amounting to anything noteworthy.) They confirmed his identity. Trimbach actually died this year in January, age 88.
Has anyone else discovered these kind of “degrees-of-separation from notable historical events or people” - I mean discovered it on your own through research, rather than having prior knowledge of it?
Well it wasn’t research but 30 years after my father died my mother gave me a bunch of their old books. One was an autographed copy of Dianetics. When I asked about it she said my father and L. Ron Hubbard used to know each other back in the late 50’s/early 60’s.
She said Hubbard was an ass. If you asked him a question he’d just look at you significantly like you were supposed to think he was thinking something wise.
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I learned that this small Utah town we’re staying in for fam reunion was partly established by my gr-gr-grandfather, who opened a largely unsuccessful iron mine. Not surprising, SoUtah is littered with my peoples’failed projects.
One of my parents’ houses/properties is going to be featured on an episode of Ghost Hunters this fall! I’ll keep interested Dopers apprised when I know the airdate.
I found that a great aunt’s grandmother and a younger brother were the only survivors of a Texas family of six girls and two boys. The parents and the other siblings were killed for being Yankee sympathsizers or outlaws. The mother and five elder daughters were hanged or shot in 1873 in Parker County.
I don’t know if this is what you’re talking about or not…but while doing a little research on one of my great-great-great-grandfathers, I discovered that his father, a Georgia farmer, was the ACTUAL inventor of the cotton gin. Right! It wasn’t Eli Whitney, or a woman, or a slave, it was my great-great-great-great-grandfather (I think I have the right number of greats in there).
Attested to by his granddaughter (not in my direct line), but by a bunch of what she assured the reader were unimpeachable sources as well!!
So thanks to google I discovered that i am a direct descendant of a should-be-famous inventor!!!
Not that I believe the claim, you understand. STILL!!!
I can’t confirm this very easily, and I misunderstood the significance of it at the time, but when my Uncle died, one of the telegrams read out at his funeral was from then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi.
I should see if there’s anything online that might explain it.
Just today, I happened to be looking at the 1940 census. My folks were paying $25 a month rent for the house where I was born. My dad had grade 6 education, my mom grade 8, and nobody else on that page of the census book had more than 8 years.
A Friend of a Friend, who used to be in a punk band and then became an entertainment columnist for the local paper, is married to the lawyer who defended Carroll O’Connor in a libel case. I found this out by following a trail of online bread crumbs.
I always wondered whether I was related to George H.W. and George W. Bush, because we both have Prescotts in our family tree. I used Google to confirm that we are related, but not closely. We’re something like sixth or seventh cousins. I calculated that we probably share one and only one gene in common due to our common descent from a fellow named Dr. Abel Prescott who was born just about 300 years ago. By coincidence, one of my uncles on that side was a dead ringer for George H. W.
A farmer/mechanic on a not-too-distant branch of our family tree invented the snow blower. The company still bears the family name and is still located in the same place, the flat prairies west of Minneapolis.
I was born and raised in southern California, and knew only one of my first cousins. He was my age, but born in Minnesota and too bashful to really be friends with. I now live in the bay area of California, and I see online that he does, too. He didn’t like me much when we were kids, so I don’t think I’ll contact him now.
Through online searching I was able to find that Mrs. FtG is a ~6th cousin to Barack Obama.
I was also able to determine that the kid sitting next to me in my 1st grade picture became a sports apparel millionaire. And via that connection knew Obama’s brother-in-law giving yet another small degree of separation to a PotUS.
(As near as I can tell, he and I are the only two in the class of 18 that are mentioned in Wikipedia articles.)
I was playing a game on Facebook and, in order to send other players in the game materials needed to continue the game, you have to be friends with them on Facebook. So I friended a woman I didn’t know. A few months later, she sent a picture to a woman with my same last name (Kitchen). What she sent her was a picture from a high school yearbook. The picture was of my first cousin. It turns out this woman I didn’t know, whom I friended on Facebook so we could play a game together, is my cousin’s daughter.
