Have you traced your family tree?

The most juicy tidbit I know of is that my paternal great grandfather immigrated illegally from Poland to New York via Mexico, and later got enough money to pay for his wife to ship over.
(My mother’s side, my Irish side, has been in the States for many many generations. I hadn’t ever heard any juicy gossip about my ancestors)

I have only looked at ones that other people have done. U have been very tempted to though.

Yes I have a family tree well traced on one side…not as well documented on the other, but no mass murderers——though there are some accidental deaths (nothing out of ordinary for the time periods they occurred in though).

Has anyone here done a DNA genome test to find out where they came from out of Africa? I’d like to have one done.

Turns out that my first America-residing Irish ancestor came to the New World in 1692.

And that prior to that, my earlier Irish ancestors dropped the Mc from their surname when they discovered that there was a Scottish family by the same name.

And so now, when I see someone who has my same last name, but with a Mc preceding it, I cuss ‘em a little bit to honor my great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents.

My mother’s family likes to write books about their genealogy, so we have accounts dating back to the 1700’s that include family tales from the 1200’s. In fact, currently on Amazon.com you can purchase a book the gives interesting accounts of the family in the New World, starting around 1630. And yes, our family has had its share of scalawags and other unpleasant characters. But we managed to survive pretty well even though we always seemed to be on both sides of every issue.

The first European ancestor to get to North America from her lineage was someone who was very good at killing. He was thrown out of England because of that and so went to Holland. The Dutch being a practical people sent him off to New Amsterdam to kill bothersome natives. He apparently did such a good job that he ran out of work, at which point he was kicked out of Dutch lands and made his way to Massachusetts. Oddly enough, once there he suddenly saw the light and married a Quaker. Some of his descendants show up in the Last of the Mohicans and two survived the Deerfield Massacre.

Another ancestor was a Scot who left England with 6 children and a husband and arrived in New York as a widow with seven children. She had promised her husband that she would take the family West, so she bought a team of oxen and a covered wagon and set out. She got as far as Illinois.

One of her descendants married, fathered five children and then went off to the California Gold Rush and didn’t come back. He was running a lucrative mercantile, selling stuff to miners, and somehow the tent it was in succumbed to arson. His partner died and he vanished. Many, many years later he showed up back home, where his wife promptly shipped him off to an insane asylum, where he died.

Yet another set of ancestors were French Huguenots who came to the New World for religious freedom. One of them was a Woleben who was scalped by hostile natives when he went out to gather firewood but who survived long enough to sire several children before succumbing eventually to blood poisoning. For some reason they developed a tradition of naming the first-born son Nebelow, which is Woleben spelled backwards.

We also relatively recently discovered a black branch of the family in Kansas. One of the family members several generations back went to Kansas Territory and married a freedwoman after the Civil War. My cousin moved to Kansas City some 20 years ago and discovered that there was another woman with the same last name who, like my cousin, was a performer. They figured out how they were related and for a while the two of them worked as storytellers, billing themselves as sisters, even though my cousin is 4’ 9” and so white she looks blue, and the other woman is 5“11” and very, very black.

My father’s family didn’t keep such good track of things but my father has been writing a family history over the last few years. He even got so into things that he sent off a DNA sample to try to track our origins. It didn’t go as far back as Africa, but it did show that as we sometimes have suspected his family was originally Jewish also.

The one big surprise was actually a fairly recent one. My father discovered that his uncle was jailed in New York State. He apparently was a con man who was successful for a while but then got caught. He also discovered that a great uncle ran a hat store in New York City for a while.

My dad also found the ship that brought his German grandfather from Bremen to Ellis Island, but hasn’t yet been able to trace the ship that brought his Scottish ancestors from New York through New Orleans to Galveston and the Republic of Texas.

The original Scot in his family left Scotland because he was too fond of taking sheep that weren’t his and because as a Monroe he was too closely allied with the “bluidy Sassenach.” He ended up selling guns to the Indians during the French and Indian War. One of his descendants (but not one of my ancestors as he had no children) was James Monroe, the fifth President of the United States.

And apparently, I am related to @dalepetrie in that this is a really long post. But every word’s a pearl.

no. i have no idea what my “family tree” looks like. nor do i care.

@ragingloli Don’t you want to learn that your great, great grandfather invented tentacle porn?

@Sarcasm
that’s bull and you know it.
I invented tentacle porn when I travelled back in time to Japan and drew the Tako to ama

My ancestry like many of Mexican heritage is a mixture of Spanish and Mayan blood. I’ve never actually looked into it. I wouldn’t even know where to start.

When I was quite young I assembled a family tree based on information obtained from grandparents and one living great grandmother. There were no tales of anyone being notorious but I ascertained my make-up as half Spanish, quarter German and quarter Transylvanian (Hungarian and or Romanian). I guess it’s possible I have some Dracula blood in me, but I show signs of aging and no sign of immortality. Maybe I need to drink blood to trigger it…..hey @sccrowell, what are you doing right now? Well, gotta go….got a thirst to quench! See ya….Gary/wtf

I don’t know anything about my family tree. Except that a great great uncle got a dentist drill lodged in his throat and my great grandpa was a turkey farmer.

I took a genealogy class as a general ed elective in 1979. Going in I knew of some paternal aunts and uncles but had never met them. I had met my maternal uncles a few times. We had visited with my mother’s mother a couple of times a year for most of my life. At that time my grandparents were all dead and my Dad was my only source. The more I talked with him the more little nuggets emerged. I also remember my grandmother telling me family stories about her parents who were Irish immigrants and her in-laws who were Swedish immigrants.

I started with the LDS library and the National Archives spending scores of hours poring over records. By Christmas I had put together a 42 page book of trees and stories that I had put together for my siblings. I was pretty much stopped at all lines before they arrived in America. However 1 line I was able to trace back to their arrival in PA in 1720. I worked at it sporadically over the next 15 years and every so often hit gold. I had the “H” line back to a county in MO in 1880. I called 411 in the county seat and asked for any numbers with the “H” name. The only one was a cemetary which I called to see if it was related to me. The lady who answered said no but a few months before a man from TN had called and asked about the same names. The TN guy and I connected and sure enough we were related.

My father had never talked much about the emotional toll the Depression had taken on his family. He had been very close to his maternal cousins who one day in 1936 left OK just like the Grapes of Wrath and were never heard from again. I was able to find them living just 200 miles away (we came to California in 1947) and gave my Dad a reunion after almost 50 years.

Then the internet arrived and genealogy exploded as the National Archives and all historical documents are available. People all over the country started transcribing everything. The world has opened up with international forums. I had been puzzled that my Ggrandmother had different lasy names although the had the same name. I broached the question in a Swedish forum and got the explanation along with documents showing what part of Sweden they came. I went to the LDS library and confirmed the information. This eventually led to 4 generations back and the descendants of my ggrandparents who are still in Sweden today.

The story about my Dad’s grandfather was that he had been killed by bandits while working on the railroad in Indian Territory. A little bit of digging showed that a 26 yo ggrandpa married 15 yo ggrandma in Arkansas 3 mos before grandpa’s birth. The young couple moved with followed her parents into Indian Territory. 3 years later ggrandpa had 2 warrants issued against him, 1 for selling liquor to the Indians and another as a material witness in a murder case. He then disappears. 10 years later he pops up on the eastern border of Arkansas married (but never divorced) and ends up shot down in the street in broad daylight.

I have traced several lines back 400–500 years and most interesting we are represented in almost every important movement or event in US history from when some of us arrived in 1634 VA until today.

I was given a genaeology computer program a couple of years ago, when I had to provide proof of ancestry for membership in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. I did some background work, but it was very boring.

The only interesting part was the news that my Father’s grandmother and great gramdmother were both married to the same man, at the same time. (Common among Mormons at the time)

I did some family tree research a while ago, and found some interesting stories. One of my ancestors was orphaned at a young age, raised by Native Americans, and then stabbed to death in a saloon.

A more recent ancestor, from England, was cut off by his family for marrying a serving girl. He came to the US where he earned enough money to send for his wife and children. The wife (my great great grandmother) had a china demitasse set that, according to my grandma, she carried on her lap during the voyage from England. I have the demitasse set now, but it’s packed away where one of the kids can’t accidentally break it.

The last time I went back home to see my family, my grandma showed me a big pile of scrapbooks and newspaper clippings. An article concerning the death of my great great grandfather (the one who left England) admonished readers to regularly check their health so they wouldn’t end up walking around fine one day but end up dead the next. My grandma also has a hand-written collection of recipes for “medications” invented by some other great great grandparent of mine. Several of the ingredients were toxic. I keep meaning to look up how and when he died.

The strangest thing that happened to me while researching my family tree concerns my father’s family. My dad’s parents divorced when he was a baby, and he never met his father (my grandfather). I didn’t want to ask my grandma about him or his family, so I turned to the message boards on a family tree website. I saw that someone had posted something about the family members I was looking for, so I contacted him. Long story short, he turned out to be my half-uncle. My grandfather had remarried and had a few more children. None of them knew their father had been married before and had a child. They were shocked, to say the least. My grandfather had passed away some time before all of this, but their mother was still alive. It turned into an awkward situation, with them seeming suspicious that my dad or I would ask for a copy of the will or attempt to run a scam on them. Sadly enough, we’re not in contact with any of them. I guess it was too much of a shock for them, and they had a hard time reconciling the dad they knew to the man who divorced his wife and had a son he never met or supported in any way.

One more thing, and then I’ll finally end this answer! My mom always told me her grandmother was full-blooded Native American. Shawnee and Chickasaw, to be exact. I think this may be true, simply because there are no records of this woman. However, she also always told me that her grandfather “came over from Ireland, met a Shawnee woman, and had 12 kids.” In doing research, I found out that her father’s family had actually come from Ireland several generations before. There were quite a few of my mom’s stories that I found were false when I started doing research.

I have ancestors traced on my father’s side back to Riga in Latvia in the late 18th century and on his mother’s side through Leeds UK back to London and before that, Amsterdam, also in the late 18th century. My mother’s side is a big blank going back more than 4 generations.

One reason for the difficulty, and why my research on my Dad’s side is so fascinating, is that we are Eastern European Jews (all except the Amsterdam branch) and in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires Jews were not required to have conventional surnames until around the beginning of the 19th century, So the oldest ancestor on my Dad’s side is Berka, son of Solomon, not Berka M…..

The big surprise is on my wife’s family tree. Through her paternal grandmother, going back paternally (father to grandfather to great-grandfather, etc) she is a direct descendant of one of the original group of Puritans who left Boston, Lincolnshire, England in 1630 and founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, present-day Boston, Mass.
This ancestor was one of the founders of Stonington CT and also lived in Providence RI with Roger Williams, a Puritan expelled from Salem MA who founded Providence.

On her tree is the Governor of New York during the Civil War and the inventor of Vaseline and the founder of the Cheseborough-Pond company that marketed Vaseline for many years.

Her family did not know of the Puritan connection until I found it at the end of 2007.

SRM

I don’t have much on my mother’s side of the family, because my great grandfather was illiterate, and we don’t have any information on his family before he migrated in 1907. There as also a name change. He did come through Ellis Island, and I found him in their records. I have my dad’s family in Romania back to 1745; they were part of the Donauschwaben and were from Horb Germany before migrating east to Romania.

I met a woman on Facebook who has the same maiden name as me and is from the same village that my father’s family is from. We have a shared resemblance.

My grandmother is currently working on our family tree. So far the juciest piece of info we have come across is that my great great great (not sure exactly how many greats to put here) was beheaded! Also we think that one of our relatives was onboard ship with Napoleon but we are still trying to confirm that.

I started doing genealogy with my mother when I was in third grade. I have some interesting history in what I have found in my tree. Like I am a direct ancestor of Woodrow Wilson (28th president 1913–1921)

I have been doing genealogy since 1970, and found a few odditys. My great grandmother married her cousin, and covered it up when family tree questions came. My Great-grandfather’s cousin was Robert Ford (who shot Jessie James), and my wife is a cousin of Marilyn Monroe.