My in-laws were born in the same hospital on the same day.
It was in Kentucky, but no, they weren’t twins.
When I started researching my great-grandfather William R. (mother’s grandfather), I found discrepancies that I’m still trying to resolve.
William’s tombstone says he was born in 1853, and all his family believes this, but records indicate he and a twin sister were born in 1850. The family admits he had an estranged twin sister.
I suspect he shaved a few years off his age when he married a woman 20 years younger than himself. She was not Catholic, and for some reason, they married outside the Church. Later William came to (obsessively) regret this and petitioned the Church to recognize his marriage so his children would be considered legitimate. The Church’s response was that William and wife were welcome to be married by a priest at any time. This was not acceptable to William, and he battled the Church until they excommunicated him.
William died at age 76 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. My mother’s family says the Catholic Church drove him to it. My father, who knew William briefly, says William suffered from life-long depression and killed himself when he became unable to care for his now-blind wife, who refused to leave him. After his death, she went to live with her daughter, my grandmother.
My oldest brother and I are the only ones with a middle initial. The other three were not given anything
The reason is that my father’s family is from the south and all kids were called by their first and middle names as in “Billy Joe,” my mother did not want us kids called anything but our first names.
My oldest sister, named Jean, grandma called her Jeannie. My name is Janet but she spelled it Jannette, yeah. Julie, was always called Julia which is her legal name but everyone else called her Julie! John was Johnny of course, my brother Joel was the only one called Joel with that southern family line! But we still loved our grandparents so much no matter what we were called! My mother, that family…not so much.
Don’t worry, that happens to everyone if you go far enough back. One branch of my ancestry a few generations back happens to hook into a family known as the Pedens, who have done extensive genealogical research for generations (there is even a book by/about them from 1899 on archive.org.) I don’t remember the exact details without looking them up, but there was one Peden who was a direct ancestor of mine from the late 1700s who had 7 or 8 sons, two of which married one of their other brother’s daughters. Yes, uncle/niece marrages. Two of them. (I don’t remember off the top of my head if my lineage is through one of those couples.)
Also through that line, I’m a distant cousin to a dude named Alexander Peden who has some degree of fame in Scotland (though I don’t know if he is an obscure figure or a household name.)
My parental grandmother’s family married first cousins in three generations. My grandmother’s sister married their first cousin. My grandmother’s parents were first cousins. THEIR parents were first cousins.
My parents have 3 kids, 2 kids-in-law, 2 grandkids for a total of 9 people in the family. None of us share a birth month. The odds of that are like 1.55%.
My great grandfather was married to two sisters at the same time, and had a dozen children between them.
It’s widely believed that divorce used to be uncommon. My great-great-uncle George (1847-1919) demonstrated that divorce was not really that hard to obtain. George was married six times and divorced five.
His sixth marriage was to his first wife, solely for the purpose of attempting to leave his military pension to her. The government thought it was a scam, and she never got a penny.
George suffered his entire adult life from injuries and illness incurred during the Civil War. His father enlisted in the Union Army and died from rubella several months later, leaving eight children. Veterans and surviving families were not well treated by the government. War widows, like George’s mother, were not considered competent to manage death benefits. The benefits to George’s mother and siblings were given to a male neighbor to manage, and he basically stole the money.
Maternal Great-Grandma Katherina immigrated from Germany via Russia and married into a german family already in the US.(no I don’t know the story on how that worked). The other set of Maternal Great-Grandparents migrated from Germany and entered the US at New Orleans, moved to South Dakota, had 6 kids (Grandpa being the youngest) and died of flu? pneumonia? not sure, when Gpa was 6 years old.
GGma Katherina had $15 when she arrived and promptly bought the most fabulous hat for $12.50, my mother has the only known photo ever taken of her and she is wearing the hat, which is still owned (with receipt) by one of her cousins.
Dad’s side of the family, his maternal ancestors came from England mostly, and the paternal side of his family has been traced back to Ireland at about the time of the potato famine. At that point the record becomes rather murky, but there are some indications that the first of the Guest family may have been fleeing for his life from the law and that the family name historically may not have been the family name in the “old country”
Oh boy, where to start.
I don’t know how many greats-grandfather was the first person executed in Plymouth colony and his son nearly blew up the Mayflower.
When my several greats-grandmother’s first husband died she married his father. She had kids by both husbands. Untangle that branch of the family tree…
I think I shared this one before. We recently found out that my great-grandmother was my great-grandfather’s third wife, not the second as we had always thought. First wife died in childbirth, the baby lived and was adopted by great-grandpa’s brother. Several years later great-grandpa remarried great-grandma and had nine more kids. At some point in the few years between wife #1 and wife #3 he married wife #2 and had at least two kids with her. My cousin the family historian has yet to find any record of a divorce from wife #2, and from her death record she outlived him. Great-grandpa may have been a bigamist for all we know.
This is all on my mom’s side of the family, Dad’s side was fairly normal.
There’s one blind alley in my genealogy. All four of my grandparents emigrated from Ireland in the 1920s. But is my ancestry wholly Irish? Maybe not.
My mother’s father had a non-Irish name. All we know is that one of his female ancestors showed up in County Kerry with a child, a non-Irish name, and a claim she’d just come from Australia.
Which means I may be descended from a female convict and an English prison guard!
I have (OK, had, one is unfortunately deceased) one, and only one, of each of the following variations of Aunt:
Parent’s full sibling, parent’s half sibling, parent’s adopted sibling, parent’s sibling’s wife, parent’s sibling’s ex-wife.
My first American Ancestor started out in Prussia, & deserted from the Prussian Army to
[ol]
[li]Avoid fighting Napoleon[/li][li]Get married to his Best Girl[/li][li]Emigrate to America, thus avoiding the Napoleonic Wars altogether.[/li][/ol]
When he snuck back to get the girl, she ratted him out to the MPs for the reward, & he had to jump out a third story window onto a nearby roof, & flee, rooftop to rooftop.
He realized that, lady-wise, he could do better.
And sailed for America on a neutral vessel, landing in Philadelphia.
Another Doper with polygamous Mormon ancestors. A girlfriend in college was a 4th cousin from one polygamous family. The father has three wives, 20 some-odd children and there’s a huge family organization which keeps track of the multiple descendants. I also met another 4th cousin by chance on an airplane.
My maternal great-grandmother was extremely proud of the fact that we were direct descendants of King Christian VII of Denmark, and through that family related to many of the European monarchies.
It wasn’t until I was a little older that my father let me know that the mother was actually one of the maids and there may not have been any supporting evidence.
I suppose I’ll have to have my DNA done to see if that family legend is actually true or not.
Here’s a good one I just thought of: due to a bend sinister, I am descended from people who came over on the Mayflower. My grandmother tried to get into the Society of Mayflower Descendants in the 1940s of something, and was turned down ostensibly for the bend sinister, but I suspect because they didn’t want any Jews-- the ancestor family who traveled over was not Jewish. My father and uncle got an apology letter in the 1990s, after her death, saying it was wrong to reject her, and our family was welcome. My uncle said “Eff that,” but my father joined because it was something his mother had really wanted, and he remembered how much. It involved paying dues. I had some sort of honorary child membership, but it expired when I turned 18, and I didn’t pick up an adult membership.
Also, speaking of people disappearing, my paternal grandmother’s sister’s husband disappeared. He went on a business trip and never returned. She went searching for him, and couldn’t find him. It made her what was known as a “grass widow,” unable to divorce or remarry. No one knows if he deliberately left her (they didn’t seem unhappy, and he wasn’t having mental health problems), or if he somehow was the victim of a random crime or accident, and died somewhere without being identified-- this was during the Depression when there were a lot of homeless transients, no fingerprint databases, no knowledge of DNA, and so on.
I wonder every now and again if we’ll get a call about a skeleton someone found some place that could be him, because someone just got around to putting the cases from the 30s into some database. They had a child, and he had two children, one a boy, so there are X-chromosomes to match.
He was declared dead, and when she was past childbearing age, she married a man who wasn’t Jewish in a civil ceremony.
The only oddity I can think of is that my son was born a hundred and ten years after his great grandfather on my side of the family.