Thread: Family history Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.


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Posted by chive (# 208) on :
 
My family have been researching our family tree and some interesting things have come out of it. I had one ancestor who fought in the Afghan wars in the 1840s who managed to get promoted to sergeant and busted down to private three times in his career.

On my Dad's side of the family is the famous Rob Roy MacGregor who was a bit of an outlaw and a Scottish folk hero.

On my mother's side was Kirkpatrick MacMillan who is one of many people credited with inventing the bicycle.

The other thing of interest is that my parent's generation were the first people who didn't marry other Scots. Until then back to the 1640s where we've reached at the moment every single person is Scottish.

I named my house after my granny's house and I've now discovered that her house was named after the croft that was farmed for centuries by my family. And to round of the family connections, my sister recently got married in a hotel which, before it became a hotel was my great-grandparents house and where my gran and my great aunts were brought up.

Does anyone else have an interesting family tree?
 

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Posted by Ferijen (# 4719) on :
 
I've traced 3/4 of my family tree (I've not attempted the Irish side, for various reasons, not least the fact that records are hard to come by). I live somewhere I moved to for work, which is 45 minutes away from where my Dad grew up - i.e. same county, but no local family connections.

Odd then, to find that I'm within five miles of the dwelling places of two lots of great-great-great grandparents. The connections from the Hampshire side are perhaps not that coincidental, but that the other side - who are from the Sunderland side of my family - seem quite coincidental (although of course, you have lots of great-great-great grandparents).

I sang evensong once in the church that my greatx something grandparents marred in in the 1760s. The churchwarden pointed out that the chalice still in use is the one that was probably used when they were around...

However, I'm a paper based/computer based researcher - I'm imagining the gravestones - if there were any, I've not come across any particularly wealthy strains of my family - have long since gone.
 

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Posted by Pine Marten (# 11068) on :
 
Mr Marten does a lot of family history research, both paid work (now retired) and for his own interest. He has discovered that both my grandfathers (who died long before I was born) were rather dodgy - one absconded several times from the navy but always got caught, the other was a bigamist .

My mother's paternal line goes back to Thirsk in Yorkshire, and although it can't be proved there is a strong possibility that they were descended from Richard de Surdeval, a knight who accompanied William the Conqueror to England. I like to assume it's true .
 

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Posted by Lord Jestocost (# 12909) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Pine Marten:
Mr Marten does a lot of family history research, both paid work (now retired) and for his own interest. He has discovered that both my grandfathers (who died long before I was born) were rather dodgy - one absconded several times from the navy but always got caught, the other was a bigamist .

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So ... dare we ask which of granddad's wives you're descended from?
 

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Posted by Pine Marten (# 11068) on :
 
the second... he was never divorced from the first (who claimed to be a 'widow' on census forms), so we have discovered - though not contacted them - that I have a bunch of, er, half cousins still living in Folkestone.
 

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Posted by leo (# 1458) on :
 
My mother's side were fairly middle-classed and had servants. My grandfather was best man at the novelist Joseph Conrad's wedding, having been friends who met through dealings with Lloyd's List.

The family thought that my mother was marrying 'beneath herself' because my father was poor. So their wedding had to be witnessed by volunteers off the street. However, my father was poor, not because of social class but because he inherited three large sums of money and blew them through gambling.

There's a history of mental illness on his side.

What came as a surprise was that there was a history of churchwardens on my mother's side.

My parents were atheists; my father was especially scathing about religion. So I thought that I had discovered and chosen anglo-catholicism all by myself. But it turns put that at least two generations on my mother's side were anglo-catholics.

Makes you wonder how much our genes influence out behaviours.
 

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Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :
 
According to the Mormons, I am descended inter alia from Woden. As Woden is illusory, does that mean I am too?
 

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Posted by Net Spinster (# 16058) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by leo:
My mother's side were fairly middle-classed and had servants. My grandfather was best man at the novelist Joseph Conrad's wedding, having been friends who met through dealings with Lloyd's List.

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quote:

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Ferijen: (although of course, you have lots of great-great-great grandparents).

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quote:

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Originally posted by Enoch:
According to the Mormons, I am descended inter alia from Woden. As Woden is illusory, does that mean I am too?

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On the contrary, since you exist, so must Woden. (Or the LDS may have been misled by his title 'Allfather').
 

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Posted by Matt Black (# 2210) on :
 
I have traced most sides of both my and Mrs B's family trees back many generations, helped in part by the fact that a lot of my ancestors on my mother's side were 'Levantine' merchants in the Ottoman Empire, so I have a lot of foreign blood in that mix (Dutch, French, Italian, Greek, Swedish and German being the main components) going back to the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV(!). Aside from that, what has struck me is how little most of our ancestors have moved around eg: another lot on my mother's side are all from East Sussex (Alfriston, Berwick, Eastbourne) for many generations, whereas Mrs B's on her dad's side are all from Cornwall between about 1600 and 1900 (Perranarworthal, Truro, Camborne and Veryan) and on her mother's side an awful lot for about three centuries from...er...East Sussex: yep, we have a common ancestor in the early 1700s from Eastbourne, with my 7th great-grandfather being her 8th
 

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Posted by St. Gwladys (# 14504) on :
 
I've gone back to the 1700's on Darllenwr's ide and mine. His family came from up north, and two of his ancestors had the great name of Keyworth Earnshaw. My side came from Frome and Much Marcle - one of my ancestors also had a good name - Aquilla Cable.
It's interesting to speculate how much influence genes have - he likes the North country, and is interested in trains and industtrial archaeology - apparerntly one of his ancestors was involved in building a railway. I like the West country and crafts - Aquilla and his dad were cordwainers - leather shoe makers. Aquilla's dad served in Nelson's navy, but not at Trafalgar. He was one of the early Wesleyans in Frome, but most of the rest of the family were Anglicans. The area where Aquilla lived is now a conservation area, and so I've seen the street where he was born, visited the church where he was baptised and the church in Bath where he was married.
 

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Posted by Lord Pontivillian (# 14308) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by St. Gwladys:
His family came from up north, and two of his ancestors had the great name of Keyworth Earnshaw.

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Being the geeky type I am, I am more proud of the families link to the round foundry in Holbeck. I am also rather keen on the family legend that claims descent from the Monck family, of civil war fame.
 

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Posted by MrsBeaky (# 17663) on :
 
Turns out (after a recent conversation with my mother) that I am even more Celtic than I thought.
My father was Irish (My grandmother from Cork and grandfather from Dublin) a teacher and civil servant respectively who came to England after the Great war.
My mother is American. Dutch Jewish on my grandfather's side but my grandmother was from Welsh and Scottish roots with a little bit of Hampshire thrown into the mix.
There are a few stories of old which the family are happy to retell and one or two that they'd rather forget......
 

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Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on :
 
We have either an genuine or made-up family tree to 1100 on one side, due to German people trying to assert their non-Jewishness. We even have family crests. Thankfully my grandfather left Germany in 1936, became a British subject in 1938, and successfully fled Hong Kong with my father and the rest of them on 23 Dec 1941.

The other side consists of Norwegians who lived in the same valley in Norway essentially since the ice age (so they think) with an export of a son in the 1840s who was a very poor farmer and ended up in Canada after failures to farm in New York state, Wisconsin and North Dakota. He married a woman whose family originated in Yorkshire, and whose farm was burnt by Americans in about 1780 also in New York state, fleeing to Ontario (Brooklin area), where they made a pile of money supplying leather harnesses during the Boer War, wrote my branch of the family out of the will, and lived in this fancy house demolished I understand in 2011), and here we are today, impoverished on the prairies.

[ 25. September 2014, 18:35: Message edited by: no prophet ]
 

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Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on :
 
We are semi-traceable to a Cherokee named Bird (who somehow screwed up his paperwork at the Dawes enrollment, leading his descendants to get zip zilch nada in the way of money or land); a Revolutionary War soldier of the ordinary no-big-deal type; and a lot of random Lutheran pastors in Germany at the Reformation, who were within meeting distance of the big L(uther) himself but apparently never managed to meet.

Family lore adds in a series of bastards and horsethieves, as well as a bastard of the Duke of York. Which one, I've no idea.
 

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Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :
 
I've never really looked into this, but inspired by this thread I did a quick internet search and found a genealogy of my maternal grandmother going back to Napoleonic times! To the genealogy freaks under you this must be peanuts, but I'm actually rather excited. So far, all people seemed to have lived in the Eastern part of Groningen province.
 

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Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :
 
Update: doing simple internet searches, I just managed to trace one line back to the 17th Century. Cool! All the men are listed as arbeider ('labourer', probably farm hands) and all the women as huisvrouw (housewife) in the Eastern part of Groningen province. Their lifes and work made my existence possible. I'm proud and humbled to be their descendant.
 

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Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :
 
My father's side is on record - back to Domesday and mediaeval times. The quarter that goes back to Domesday is linked to a property that was sold in the 1960s or 1970s. A house that has obviously grown like Topsy around a Saxon hall. My baptism was at the nearby church and the party was at the house as my great-grandmother was still alive. I can just, only just, remember her.

What amused me most was documentary evidence (a series of letters) confirming a family rumour that the other half of my paternal side owned the Isle of Man and sold it on Nelson's advice! Definitely land owners on the Isle of Man, definitely involved with Admiral Lord Nelson, who made money, as did many naval officers, shipping wines back from the Mediterranean area as ballast and selling it for a profit back in the UK.

My mother's side has been tracked back to Robert the Bruce but I'm hazier about the details: Scottish heritage, Anglo-Indian links through both families working in the Indian Civil Service. My maternal grandfather's family was disowned by his upright Scottish forebears, history unforthcoming.

For someone who is ostensibly British back as far as we can trace, both my maternal grandparents were born in India and my father was born in Egypt (paternal grandfather serving in the British Army).
 

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Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
One of the very few items my grandfather brought out of China in the late 1940s, before the Bamboo Curtain fell, was his family genealogy. It is calligraphed on handmade Chinese paper, and of course only traces his descent from father to son, in the straight male line. However, it goes back ten generations; I calculate that that first ancestor could have shaken Samuel Johnson's hand, if only he could have traveled from China to Britain.
I can't read it. The original document is in my cousin's possession, the son of my uncle. However, modern technology is so handy. All of us have photocopies of the thing.
 

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Posted by basso (# 4228) on :
 
Net Spinster's remark about census records makes me think of my grandmother. Her father abandoned his family (wife, five daughters and a son) and was never mentioned again. I've found her in several censuses. In each of them she gave a different answer to the question "where was your father born?"
 

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Posted by Net Spinster (# 16058) on :
 
I think no genealogy can beat that of the Kong family in China which has a lineage son to father going back 83 generations to Confucius (this is assuming no creative invention[1]).


[1] Such as one of my ancestors (or his cousin who had a stronger incentive) who decided to add an apostrophe so Dalton -> D'Alton and what I expect is some serious creative writing to have a noble lineage back to the conquest.
 

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Posted by Barnabas Aus (# 15869) on :
 
One of my great-great-grandfathers came to Australia as a convict [having stolen some firewood] in the early 1830's, and was allocated to the Australian Agricultural Company as a labourer. Over the generations, the family have moved in an enormous geographic circuit and I now reside about 15km from his burial place.

Another great-great grandfather migrated to Australia from Guernsey during the gold rushes of the 1850's. He used his skills as a carpenter to create a successful building business, and was responsible among other things for the erection of the first Central Methodist Mission in Sydney. His Guernsiaise father is listed in a census as a resident of the asylum at St Peter Port, but it is unclear whether as staff or inmate.

One of his grandsons [my grandmother's cousin] was elected to the Australian Parliament for the Labor Party in 1906, and was for some years the youngest MP elected [at age 26]. He went on to lead the recruiting campaign in NSW during the Great War, and later conducted a successful publishing business.

We continue to research, and intriguing snippets surface at every turn.
 

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Posted by Heavenly Anarchist (# 13313) on :
 
My Grandmother told me that my Great great great grandfather was George Loveless, leader of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. I'm having terrible trouble tracing back though, as they were poor labourers and just about everyone in Dorset has the same name To make it even more confusing, they were non-conformists so don't necessarily appear in parish records, my Great great grandfather was married in a Baptist church, for instance, so no online records of his marriage/parentage. I really should make a trip to Bridport to look into it, or perhaps email the church. I also can't find a record of his birth but Loveless was often misspelled and I can see a similar record of a Lovelace with just a mother recorded so he may be illegitimate.
Dad's Dad was adopted/informally farmed out to a local couple and I wonder if I could find anything there (another thing to distract me from my work).
If I had time I might sign up to a genealogy site and do it all properly.
 

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Posted by Cottontail (# 12234) on :
 
One side of my family is supposedly descended from a chap who is a cousin of William Wallace and a friend of Robert the Bruce. He was there when the Bruce killed the Red Comyn in the church at Greyfriars in Dumfries, helping to finish the poor chap off.

Whether we are direct descendants or not would be impossible to prove. But the name is right, the geographical area is right, family legend attests to great wealth at one time, and there aren't that many of us.

Oh, and thanks to a wealthy wine-merchant in the 18th century, I am some sort of massively distant cousin to Marie Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III.
 

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Posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider (# 76) on :
 
We know that someone with our surname was hanged in Liverpool jail early last century, but other than that absolutely nothing of any interest whatsoever. We've been boring for generations.
 

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Posted by georgiaboy (# 11294) on :
 
Lots of interest in family tree in my family - mostly mother's side. One line thoroughly researched and documented goes back to 1595 in Milbroke, Bedforshire. Another line traces back (with some undocumented bits along the way, unfortnately) to Queen Margaret of Scotland -- would love to prove that one out!
Another ancestor had to be baptized (st Mildred's, Bread Street) before he was allowed to board ship for Virginia.
There's also a Huguenot ancestor who fled France for Ireland, and later to Pennsylvania. One of his direct descendants was Davy Crockett.
Nothing much exciting has happened in the family since the 1860s, when my gt-gt-grandmother saved the family plantation from being burned by flirting with the Yankee guerilla captain (or so she claimed).
 

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Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
Back in medieval days one of my ancestors donated some land to a religious order near Salisbury. Presumably he must have been wealthy enough to be able to spare it.

Fast forward over the intervening centuries which aren't recorded on the internet, and the trail picks up at 1662, still in the Salisbury/Dorset area. Nothing much happens until around 1780, when one of my ancestors won First Prize in the County Show for a particularly fine display of cabbages, and got his name in the local records.

About a generation later, a group of gypsies from either Spain or Portugal arrived in the area and married into the family. They were caneworkers and basketweavers, and the caneworking tradition carried on right into the 20th century. They were also small, dark and very un-English-looking and my grandmother's old photos bore this out. Possibly that may also be why that side of the family was Catholic, which was unusual for its time, and mostly married Irish women. At the turn of the 19th century the family moved up to London, though as most members of the family since have lived and worked in several countries I wonder whether the urge to travel, even if only on a small scale, may be an inherited tendency.

On the Irish side of the family there are generations of Dubliners stretching back to the year dot, though rumour has it that they were landowners in Wicklow at one point. We had an ancestor (or he would have been if he'd lived long enough to marry and have children) who was hanged by the English in 1789 for his part in the Wicklow Rebellion. This was considered a huge disgrace to the family and my grandfather would never mention his name, except with disapproval.
 

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Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
I barely know anything beyond my parents, know bugger-all about them, and was brought up in labyrinthine webs of deceit. One day I'll dig deeper ... in the mean time it pisses me off bigly.
 

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Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on :
 
One of the most exciting things I learned from my oldest living relative was that one of my great aunts was a registered nurse who just came to California in the 1800's and, in the absence of any doctors in the area, just started acting like one. She started the field hospital that finally became Santa Rosa General Hospital.


One half of my maternal lineage is rigorously UK-- My great grandparents on my mother's side came from Nottingham and the Isle of Man-- and they settled first in New York, then followed John Smith on the Mormon Trail to Park City, Utah.The other half (my grandfather's) is English, French Canadian and German. His people settled first in Ontario, then a bunch of them (the Ballantines) came to the North Bay and apparently made a fortune running a bakery and renting out a block of flats in the Church Street area, which later generations lost in the Depression or just pissed away in bad business decisions.

Weirdly, my mom (who was born at the start of WW2) recalls being taught a few words and songs in German by her paternal grandmother, as well as being fed traditional German foods, but was never actually told that Nana was German. She put two and two together when we did a researched family tree. I speculated to my shocked Mom that perhaps it was not wise for Nana to advertise her heritage during the war years.

I know very little about my paternal heritage. I suspect that there is some Jewish heritage, as our paternal grandfather showed us some pictures of some "Eastern European" relatives dressed in what looked like Hasidic head scarves and suits, but he brushed them aside quickly. Otherwise, a lot of Scots and Irish folk, and one Sioux matriarch back there. (my father's family was situated in the deepest or deep south America and according to my mom, pretty darn racist. They made some very ugly comments about her having an Italian American bridesmaid. This is what made me suspect the hasty removal of the photos had to do with they subjects appearing too Jewish.)


The Alves name-- which I got from my stepfather-- has a longer California lineage-- My dad's people came form the East Bay Alves's, Portuguese immigrants to Mexican California who settled in the Pittsburgh area in the mid 1700's sometime and had a huge land grant, which they used to build a huge cattle empire. All that remains of that legacy is an "Alves Street" in current day Pittsburgh. And that is in a really scary neighborhood.

Closer by in Half Moon Bay is the Alves House (on Kelly Street! )-- I haven't tracked down whether or not the Coastside Alveses are related to the East Bay Alveses, but given the close-knit marriage habits of the colonial days Portuguese community I would be shocked if they were not) Up until about 15 years ago, there was even an old sign that showed the location of the old Alves Dairy which ran from Mexican colonial days until the 1950's. Half Moon Bay is the one place in the Bay area where cashiers automatically pronounce my last name right (One syllable, silent e, pronounce the s "sh" if you want to get really fancy.)

Oh, and my stepfather was ten years old and living with his navy based dad in Honolulu at the time of the Pearl Harbor bombing-- he remembered climbing a hill to look down on the harbor as it was being attacked.
 

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Posted by Eigon (# 4917) on :
 
My maternal grandfather had a Scottish name and claimed to be descended from a rabbi - he was quite pleased about this, even to the extent of teaching himself Hebrew by comparing the English and Hebrew sides of a bilingual prayer book!
Sadly, when I had a look at the family tree that my cousin had compiled, there was not a trace of Jewishness anywhere, and any relatives with Scottish names didn't seem to have gone any farther north than Manchester! However, he did manage to get back as far as 1795. It was also interesting to see that, where my ancestors were servants, they were always the housekeeper, or similar, and when they worked in the Mill, they were engineers looking after the machinery rather than cotton winders.
The big scandal was my great grandmother, at the age of nineteen, booking herself into a local workhouse in order to have a baby, and then booking herself out again when the baby was born (I hadn't realised that could be done, but I've seen the register). A couple of years before, her sister had done exactly the same thing, and the two cousins were brought up as brother and sister by another family - which came as a surprise to my genealogist cousin, who thought his dad's name was Smith.
 

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Posted by Siegfried (# 29) on :
 
I can say definitively that the manager at the local soda fountain/game store is a cousin several times removed. Her maiden name is the same as my last name, and I know from my late grandmother's research, that all those with that surname in the US are descended from two brothers who emigrated from Germany in the 1880s. She's from the midwest, so I know she's a descendent of the other brother than my branch. (His was much more prolific for whatever reason as well.)
I also know that on my mom's side, Thomas Edison is a distant cousin.
 

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Posted by jedijudy (# 333) on :
 
My dad's many times great grandfather moved from Germany (the Palatinate) in 1741 to Pennsylvania where he married the daughter of another German immigrant. The family immediately integrated into the local lifestyle, and after not too many years fought in the Revolutionary war. The family was bi-lingual until the world became smaller. Dad remembers being taught German words and how to count. I wish that skill would have been kept up.

Mom's family was a mish-mash of many cultures. There's the melting pot! Her dad's family were Minorcan who lived in St. Augustine and intermarried with Scots, Irish and English residents. Her mom's family were of the Seminole tribe.

My great-great grandfather's name was Konip Hadjo (also Connie Pajo), known as Cornpatch. As a young man, he lived in Fort Myers as a protege of one of the founders of the town, Captain Francis Asbury Hendry, and lived in his attic. Cornpatch went to school with the few white children who lived in town, and learned to read and write English, the first of his tribe to do so.

I have a copy of the newspaper interview that was done with him. The reporter was speaking in a manner reminiscent of bad western movies, and writing as if Cornpatch was an idiot. But, only one of the two could speak both English and Muscogee, and it wasn't the reporter.

The tribe were not happy with Cornpatch living with the white folks. They came prepared for a fight to get him back, but Captain Hendry met them saying that he would respond with force if they tried to take Cornpatch away. So, being sneaky and clever, they came back later promising him the beautiful niece of Chief Osceola as his bride. He accepted the offer and left with them.

As happens sometimes, life takes us full circle. After moving to Fort Myers from Pennsylvania, I ended up instructing Captain Hendry's great-great-great grandchildren in piano. Repaying an old favor, perhaps?
 

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Posted by jedijudy (# 333) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Siegfried:

I also know that on my mom's side, Thomas Edison is a distant cousin.

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Another Fort Myers winter resident!
 

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Posted by PeteC (# 10422) on :
 
My family genealogy is dead boring, yet entirely typical for this country.

Paternal grandfather illegitimate. Father unknown. When he married my grandmother, we suspect he made up a parent of whole cloth, by using his own name, which was a dead-common baptismal name for boys. My great-grandmother was alive and possibly colluded in this deception.

Later, grandpapa enlisted in the great war - 4 times! - claiming Granny as respectively, wife, daughter, sister. From the (re-)enlistment dates, we concluded that he deserted in the spring, spent the summer getting drunk, the re-enlisted in the wintertime to keep warm. His army pension was a nightmare to sort, which my Dad finally did in 1934, by telling my granny to shut up and let him do the talking. She spent her husband's pension of gifts to grandchildren, in her old age.

Since then, we've been respectable and boring. My surviving brother is keen on the technicalities of tracing the family through the ages. Me, I just enjoy the scandal and pay no attention to the details.
 

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Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on :
 
Infamous relatives anyone? My most infamous one was likely a war criminal. He was killed as a German POW in American custody in Oct 1945. We have learned that he served in a unit on the Russian front that was involved in atrocities - killing of Polish and Russian civilians. The suggestion is summary execution of about 40 of them.
 

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Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on :
 
Our roots in Nottingham apparently go back to the Dark Ages. Mom quips that with our luck, we're related to the Sherriff.
 

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Posted by Alaric the Goth (# 511) on :
 
My surname 'Elliott' is a Border Reiver name, indeed the Elliotts and Armstrongs were perhaps the most notorious Reiver families from the Scottish side of the (at that time rather vague) 'Border'. I also have Grahams (again Scots Reivers) and Charltons (English-side Reivers) in my ancestry, so quite a 'right roguish lot'!

Unfortunately I have never traced back to any actual (named) Reiver ancestors. Someone in my Dad's family (his cousin I believe) went back as far as a Ralph Elliott in 1765 (the name was re-used a few times by his descendants).

My Mother 's Great Grandmother was Breton, one Suzannah Nanskeval Maunder!
 

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Posted by MrsBeaky (# 17663) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by no prophet:
Infamous relatives anyone?

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Well, yes, and a great embarrassment it was too at the time.
But now, my daughters dine out on the story....
Wallis Simpson was my grandmother's cousin.
My grandmother said she was "fast".
 

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Posted by Bob Two-Owls (# 9680) on :
 
There are four main roots of my family history, the Scottish bunch (long family histories of McLeod and Munro, from whom I am now irretrievably estranged due to referendum unpleasantness), the Irish bunch (including a distant link to W.B.Yeats, have got back as far as 1850s), the Welsh bunch (no-one famous so far but only back to 1930s) and the aristocratic bunch (possible links to the de Ferrers).

Now that I am no longer interested in the Scottish side I might have a crack at expanding my knowledge of the Irish and Welsh branches of the family. My Welsh grandfather used to say he was descended from Iolo Morgannwg but as he was interested in the bardic arts I do not know if it was an actual line or an inspirational one. If true it would sit nicely with the Yeats connection.
 

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Posted by Moo (# 107) on :
 
My brother uncovered some interesting information on a however-many-times-great-grandfather who kept trying to claim a Revolutionary War pension which he was not entitled to.

The pension was for men who had served at least a year; this man served three three-month stints, which meant he only served nine months. He kept refiling his application.

One of my great-grandfathers got a medical discharge from the Confederate Army for obesity. It looks like I came by my weight problem honestly.

Moo
 

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Posted by Sir Kevin (# 3492) on :
 
Not proud of this, really: my grandmother has traced my ancestry through my paternal grandfather's side to Oliver Cromwell!

On a lighter note, the Scots-Irish side, my mother traced it back to scientist James Clerk Maxwell; she made my middle name until I changed it to MacNeill at age 16...
 

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