The thread about age differences between siblingsmade me think about my family history. One thing I have always considered a bit odd is the number and order of kids along a certain family line. My maternal grandparents had 3 children in this order - boy, girl, girl. My parents had 3 children in the same order - boy, girl, girl. I had 3 children in the same order - boy, girl, girl. My middle has one offspring so far, a boy. She can potentially make this a 4 generation thing.
Well I’m not sure what you consider oddities, but I have a pretty odd family. A nephew named Falling Rain and a niece named Tashina Rainbow. My half brother did a lot of drugs (I’d say in the 60’s but he’s still doing them today).
My father hung out with L. Ron Hubbard back in the 50’s. My dad’s first wife ran off with one of the first Scientology converts. I have an autographed copy of Dianetics.
My father was also 18 years older than my mother. She was the baby-sitter for his kids from his first marriage. They got married in Reno on their way out to California.
Going farther back I have a great (many many) great grandmother who was accused of witchcraft (As I recall it was in 1649). A relative apparently paid off the accusers to make it go away.
My parents were both only children, so I have zero aunts/uncles/cousins.
My mother was Jewish and my father was Presbyterian/Protestant (one of the two). Instead of picking one, they just went the secular route. Xmas trees, dreidels, and sleeping in on Sundays.
OK here’s an odd one. My maternal grandfather was twice a widower. My mother was the product of wife number 2. When she died, he married his wife’s sister, who became wife number 3. So my mom’s stepmother was her aunt by blood. Now wife number 3 had sons, and each of them were half brothers (sons of her father) and half cousins (sons of her aunt). Now to those children of wife number 3, I am half nephew (them being sons of my mom’s brothers) and half cousin once removed (me being the son of their cousin).
I was the youngest son of the youngest son of a man who married later in life. That meant my family was in different generations than most of my friends. Their fathers were generally in the Vietnam war generation and their grandfathers fought in WWII. My father was in Boot Camp when WWII ended and my grandfather was too old to fight in WWI. He was in his mid 30s when America entered the war and was in no danger of getting drafted. My friends had parents who were hippies, my father remembered the Hindenburg flying overhead.
“Oddities”? A great-uncle who ran an early Fascist group in the 1920s, and ended up falling out with some members, leading to a scene where he waved his cavalry sword at them and let off an unlicensed revolver he’d got from one of his henchmen - who was revealed several years later to be a woman who’d been living as a man. (The 1920s were an even odder period in social history than today).
Not, by today’s standards, so odd, but still a bit of a surprise that my seemingly lily-white family has one line descended from a mixed-race relationship in eighteenth-century Jamaica.
An ancestor on my father’s side fought in several battles in the American Civil War, became a lawyer and then shot and killed a man over a woman in the early 1900s.
My dad’s side has ties to the Italian Mafia. One relative smuggled drugs in cuckoo clocks, anothers funeral was payed for by John Gotti, and several more are still “in the family”.
My maternal Grandfather was a WW2 draft dodger, while a person with the same last name as us in the state my dad’s family came from might have been a spy for the German’s.
I have Scottish ancestors from the Duncan clan on my mom’s side of the family. When they came to the USA they joined the Quaker religion (no idea why). One by one they all got disowned by the Quakers (booted out of the meet). Every single one of them, but in different states and in different years.
If you have Quakers in the family, it is very easy to trace the family tree. The Quaker community would excommunicate you at the drop of a hat. When you repented, they would take you back. Both events were recorded.
Birth? Marriage? Death? Those records were haphazard. But the disciplinary records were meticulous. One of my ancestors was kicked out for talking back to her husband. Three of my ancestors were kicked out for joining the army in wartime.
When studying the old records, my mother noticed a pattern:
A man and woman would marry.
Every two to three years, she would have a child, like clockwork.
She would die, usually in childbirth.
He would re-marry.
Every two to three years, the new wife would have a child, like clockwork.
She would die, usually in childbirth.
He would re-marry.
When he died, his last wife would inherit the farm. The children of the earlier wives would move west, to the frontier.
And that, kids, is How The West Was Won. It was not Manifest Destiny. It was wicked stepmothers.
When my mother first got into genealogy, my grandmother tried to discourage her. “You want nothing to do with your relatives. They are all poor white trash.” Mom contacted the relatives anyway. Many of them own ranches and oil wells. It turns out that WE are the poor relations. And Grandma’s sainted father turns out to be the instigator of one of the juicier sex scandals in the family history.
My cousin, who died just about a week ago, was married to a Native American woman, whose non-Indian lineage went back to the first white man to settle in the region she came from in Oregon. He was a fur trapper with the Hudson’s Bay Company (then called the North-West Company) in their Pacific Northwest operation in Astoria, OR but wandered further up-river to settle just south of Portland on the Willamette River. Not odd, but unique.
My great grandfather was captured by the Confederates at the second Battle of Bull Run. They were going to kill him on the spot, but decided to hustle him back to camp, where he was put under guard for the night while they decided what to do with him. As it turned to dawn, in the light my GGF suddenly realized that he knew the guard from a pre-war visit to the South. They started chatting and the guard vouched for him to the commanding officer, who in turn decided to release him. (this is all contained in a letter he wrote to a friend afterward)
Well, my mother-side grandfather was a doctor. Back in Romania. He had 2 daughters (both studied medicine as well) and also my grandmother had (at least) two abortions, the fetuses being displayed in his specimen glass cupboard.
I don’t remember him (he died in 1956 a little before I was born), but the house was not seized by the communist govt for maybe 2 or 3 years, during which I have been told I visited a few times. I seemingly asked about who were the 2 old miniature people in the jars. Wasn’t told what the answer were.
I learned this from my aunt much later, after we emigrated from Romania. We were a weird family on other levels too, and I refer to them as “my Adams family”. However they were unbalanced in a healthy way and I mostly turned out OK.
My biological great-grandfather was drowned by his brother, who then stepped in and took over his brother’s wife and kids; they went on to have several more together. This being back in the hills of Kentucky/Tennessee at the turn of the 20th century no one ever did anything about it and when the wife died her headstone had just her first name, years of age and her status as the killer brother’s wife. My mom remembers that when visiting her grandparent’s house as a child her father would never go in and her grandfather never came out to him while he sat in the car. He told her later he wanted to kill him when he was big enough but knew his siblings would then have to quit school and go to work to support the family.
I was going to post a similar story about my ancestor who was arrested for witchcraft in 1680 in New Hampshire. Records are scant. Apparently, she was never convicted but she and her family were exiled to another town anyway.
I am the twelfth generation of my mother’s family to have lived in the same New Hampshire town, going back to about 1640. I only lived there for about 5 years as a young adult, but most of my ancestors lived their entire lives either on the old family farm (until they lost in in the Great Depression) or within two miles of it. My cousins’ kids and grandkids are the 15th and 16th generations to live in that town.
Prior to my parents’ marriage, my maternal grandmother had died, and my paternal grandfather had died. Later, around the year I was born, my maternal grandfather married my paternal grandmother. So I only ever knew one pair of grandparents… from both sides.