I’m into genealogy and have many family oddities to share. I’ll start with one of my favorite ancestors, my ninth great-grandfather, Thomas Pasmere Carpenter, born 1607 in England, died 1675 in Tennessee.
Thomas was well educated, but did not want to participate in the family business in England. At age 20, Thomas departed England, arriving in Jamestown, Virginia, in late 1627. Because of his age, Thomas could not apply for a land grant. He found a small, unoccupied cave a short distance from Jamestown. He brought many supplies with him and managed to live throughout the winter in the relative comfort afforded inside the naturally insulated home. By trial and error he learned many different trapping methods that first winter, and managed to process a moderate number of valuable furs. By 1630 Thomas had married a Shawnee woman named Pride.
I married two women who had birth mothers with the same last name and first initial (one married name, one maiden name). That last name is not on the list of the 1,000 most common surnames in America. They were from families that came from different parts of Canada, and I married them 20 years apart. Both wives middle names were the similar first names of their mothers.
Three women in my family (an aunt and two nieces) married men whose surnames were all different, but started with the same two letters and were on the same page in the phone book of a metro with over 2-million people.
I posted once before about my grandmother’s identical cousin. Patty and Cathy Lane, I swear, but 15 years apart, so you can tell them apart. On lives in Slovakia, and one lived in the US until she passed away at 98 1/2.
I think I’ve also posted about my Irish ggg-grandfather who was excommunicated from the Catholic church for nunnapping. His best friend’s daughter was in a convent at age 16 or 17 as a novice, and wanted out. They wouldn’t let her, so she slipped a note out with someone during Sunday mass, which got back to her father, and he and my ggg-grandfather busted her out of the convent.
Ggg-grandfather had married a Jew (a Southern Jew, so I have questionable ancestors; however, I am NOT related to Judah Benjamin), whose family disowned her for marrying a Catholic. So they decided to move to New York, where he converted to Judaism. I’m glad her possibly slave-owning family disowned her. I can pretend that I’m not really related to them.
The Irish streak in on my father’s mother’s side. The family has actually been here a long time, and were members of the first synagogue in the US. My father’s father’s family has been here since the turn of the century, and came from England, not in steerage. Most of them remained Jewish, but they spoke the King’s English, and a few moved to Boston of Connecticut, and quietly began going to the Episcopal church. A distant cousin who had just discovered her Jewish roots contacted me about ten years ago to reconnect with her Yiddishkeit. She ended up converting back to Judaism (she probably could have produced a genealogy, but conversion was easier).
Once in a while, blue or green eyes pop up in the family. Irish eyes.
The Irish are one of the few ethnicities besides Ashkenazic Judaism that has Tay-Sachs disease, but so far, we have escaped this scourge.
One of my ancestors was convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to hang; somehow they didn’t hang her on the assigned date and later the governor pardoned her. Another ancestor was captured by Oliver Cromwell and sent stateside as an indentured servant. He later married and developed a business that sometimes took him away from home for several days. His wife was lonely and started an affair with a neighbor; when this was discovered she was sentenced to wear a “B” (for bawdy) around her neck and her husband was told to pay her more attention.
A distant cousin in Iowa also had a business that took him far from home. He was married but fell in love with another woman a few counties over and married her too. He got away with bigamy for a while but eventually his first wife somehow found out and divorced him. He remained married to the second wife, grew prosperous and enormously fat, and died of a heart attack one day while climbing into his carriage.
Well, my older sister had a daughter at 16 and disappeared from the family, came back four years later an radical feminist lesbian with a partner who had three daughters, raised all the daughters as a single mother when her partner died, later hooked up with another woman, they had two daughters together and took in a dying single mother with her two daughters, who they adopted, and then took in a granddaughter of sister’s first partner and her new born twin daughters, rather than have the babies go into foster care.
And she is the most (now legally) married and happiest person I know.
My parents have a box full of Nazi memorabilia and told me my grandfather got it off a German soldier he killed in North Africa. My mother recently revealed that it was a partial payment for a house my father sold when he was a builder.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I don’t have a middle name. My siblings don’t have middle names. My paternal cousins don’t have middle names. For some reason, my parents and paternal aunts/uncles just didn’t give us any.
This is pretty common in some cultures and ethnic groups, but we are all English/German/Scottish descendants of families that emigrated to the US before 1830.
Other than having to convince a lot of institutions that you have nothing to put in the space labelled “Middle Name,” it did bring about one fairly irritating situation.
I worked for a large company that assigned e-mail addresses in the format “firstname.middleinitial.lastname@companyname.com.” Since I don’t even have a middle initial, which is mandatory for the format, I automatically (and without consent) became “john.x.doe@companyname.com.” I was forever being asked, both by clients and coworkers, for my middle name. “Is it Xavier? Is it Xerxes? Is it Xenon?” I even received some awards from the company, including some printed and engraved ones, that dutifully showed me as “John X. Doe.”
Does a mystery count as an oddity? My maternal grandmother had a mentally handicapped brother named Joe. Their parents died relatively young and my grandmother became his guardian. Joe had a menial job of some sort - my grandmother used to pack his lunch and he’d go off in the morning then come home for supper.
One day around lunch time, Joe’s boss came to the house to find out why Joe didn’t come to work that day. He had, in fact, left as usual. He was never seen again, at least not by anyone who knew him. After 7 years, my grandmother had him declared legally dead.
I can’t imagine that he’d have been kidnapped, and even if he’d fallen into the river, chances are his body would have washed up somewhere along the way. Maybe someone offered him a ride and he ended up in some far-away city. We’ll never know. This all happened over 60 years ago and as far as I know, the only people still living who knew him are my mom, her brother, and a couple of cousins.
Not exactly “oddities”, more like salacious stories.
My sister was deflowered by a musician who is now in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. To this date, 30 years later, that band’s name is not spoken in my parents’ house.
My niece (my sister’s daughter, not by that musician ) was married, for a time, to one of the world’s leading Elvis Presley impersonators.
My Great-great-great Uncle was quite the legend in the area of his small town in Indiana in the mid 1800s. He was known as “Wabash Jim” and is described in a book from the period thusly:
He was a Justice of the Peace, but apparently wasn’t very peaceful. He was in fights where a gun barrel was broken over his head, a pitchfork driven into his skull with such force that it took two men to remove it, and he bit off an opponent’s thumb in a bare-knuckle boxing match that had both boxers laid up for days afterward.
Apparently it was drinking that set him off because (from the same book quoted above)
In doing my family tree research, I discovered that my great-great grandfather and his brother lay in wait and shot and killed their brother-in-law. GGGrandpa escaped Tennessee with his family and fled to Tennessee, and then to Indian Territory. “Lit out for the Territory”, as they called it in that day. His brother somehow managed not to go to trial.
On the other side of my family, a GGGrandfather had two women with whom he was having multiple children, all at the same time. Sisters. When his first wife died, he just married the second one.
It’s possible that my maternal grandmother holds the record for voting in the most straight presidential elections. No way to know for sure though.
She was born in December 1904, and in those days you had to be 21 to vote. So in 1928 she voted in her first presidential election. She continued until 2012. That’s twenty two straight US presidential elections. Even now, when you can vote at 18, you’d have to live to 102 years old to equal what my grandmother did. Grandma was just short of her 108th birthday when she died.
When we think of how much change she saw in a long life we mention she was born one year to the day after the Wright brothers flew at Kittyhawk. She lived to vote for POTUS in 2012.
For starters, my parents are seventh cousins (both on their mothers’ sides). Have a thread about it here somewhere.
Three of my great-grandfathers were significantly older than my great-grandmothers (8, 13, and 18 years, respectively).
One of them may have been a bigamist; my grandmother often remarked how she’d never been able to find a marriage record for her parents. We figured they may have gotten hitched on the road from western Massachusetts to Cleveland (where my grandmother was born) but a couple years ago I found some less-than-circumstantial evidence that he was already married to another woman and had had a daughter; the divorce was finalized a year or so after my grandmother’s birth.
Great-Grandma was only a month over 18 when Grandma was born, and she was one of the ones significantly younger than the father of her children.
Maybe not an oddity, but it certainly raised a few eyebrows when the pieces fell together.
Remove wife number one and you’ve got my grandfather’s family. Grandpa was from the second wife. Other than for purposes of keeping the family tree we just consider that whole generation as siblings, though, which would be the case even if the wives hadn’t happened to be sisters. The two sisters were very alike in looks and temperament; their younger sister, who lived with the family for many years, was very different. We joke that the one Grandpa really liked was this youngest sister, he just kept getting railroaded by the more-energetic ones.
Not me, but some friends of mine:
Joe married Sally, and they had several kids. Sally died.
Joe married Emma, and they had more kids. Joe died.
Emma then married Bob, and more kids arrived. Emma died.
And Bob married Janet, and they collaborated in making more children. Both died of old age many years after their wedding, within a few weeks of each other.
My friends were children of one child from the third marriage and of one from the fourth (plus respective husbands); biologically speaking half-cousins but culturally speaking full ones.
Exclaiming “oh, then you and [non-biologically-related sibling or cousin] aren’t really family!” when you hear the story is bad for your health. Nowadays they’re more staid and will merely describe your personal and familiar faults in detail, but thirty years ago you would have taken an unexpected bath in the canal, “to help your brain cool down”.
Similar to yours, my great grandfather was the oldest of three boys, his daughter - my grandmother, the oldest of three girls, my father the oldest of three boys. I’m the oldest of three girls.
I have a boy and a girl. When I was pregnant with our daughter I was taking odds it was male twins, since we knew we only wanted two.
My widowed grandfather - on the other side - married his widowed sister in law (his wife’s sister). I don’t think that was that uncommon.
My grandfather and his cousin married my grandmother and her sister (respectively). So I have a variety of distant cousins that I’m multiply related to.
One of my ancestors was hanged for stealing several shillings and several yards of fabric.
) was married, for a time, to one of the world’s leading Elvis Presley impersonators.