Genealogy. Anyone interesting in your family tree?

I've been doing some genealogy off and on for several years now. I'm certainly no expert at it, but have traced my roots back to the 1700's in part. Discovered that Mickey Rooney is my third cousin.

So, does anyone have some interesting people or stories from their tree?

 

My paternal grandmother researched her family in the 1970s and apparently on her mother's side was descended from John of Gaunt,1st Duke of Lancaster, the third surviving son of King Edward III of England

 

I'm a direct descendant of King Edward I, so I have Daniel beat by two Edwards

 

(Homer Simpson voice) Why the hell don't I get around?!

 

Ancestry.com (the complete, high-end, access-to-everything version) costs about $300/year. There is a tremendous amount of information there.

For me, Ancestry's fee is a business expense, since I use it to research things for my web site. I never got around to looking up my own family.

So, eventually, my wife did -- and researched her family, my family, and our adopted daughter's birth family.

There was nothing very interesting that I didn't already know.

 

I come from a long line of dirt farmers and working class nobodies, so my interest in my family tree is pretty low.

My mother likes to believe that one of her early relatives was an English scholar, explorer & adventurer who wrote a very popular (at the time, mid 1700s) book on the Indians of the Southeast USA. This has never been researched.

One of my aunts did some pretty thorough research--long, long before computers and Ancestry.com--into my paternal grandmothers family. It turns out that some of them were slave owners. Not in the large Southern plantation sense; IIRC the notes mentioned ten slaves. My paternal grandmother intrigues me somewhat because in the photos (she died long before I was born) she clearly shows a strong Native American bloodline, but during her lifetime white people didn't discuss having Native American relatives. Even to this day the few remaining older relatives won't speak of it.

 

Hybrid vigor: the USA has it. Canada, too.

My four grandparents came from four different ethnic groups. All were born in the US, but three were children of immigrants.

My father's uncle (my granduncle), a Jewish graduate of Harvard back when few were allowed, was president of a well-known clothing company, and worked in the Eisenhower White House.

 

My father's father served in the 101st airborne in WW2 (and apparently mentioned at the end of Band of Brothers), my mother's father was in the underground during the holocaust and was in Casablanca for its liberation. On my father's side we lost a lot of history to some fires so we don't really know anything else, but on my mother's someone took the family line definitively back to the 13th century or so and from there you can less confidently trace it back basically all the way.

 

That's the kind of family history most people probably hope for when they get into genealogy.

 

My father was an Army veteran of World War II, in the Pacific.
My father-in-law (my wife's father) was a Navy veteran of World War II, also in the Pacific.
My grandfather (mother's father) was an Army veteran of World War I in Europe.
His great-grandfather (my 4-greats grandfather), born in Dresden, Saxony in 1740, was a veteran of the Revolutionary War in Pennsylvania.

 

If you have a few generations, Ancestry can help you connect not only with records they have, but with other people's trees who may have had information and not lost it.

 

My brother is nuts. Like, in therapy and on medication nuts. He's certifiable. We've always known it. My grandmother was nuts, too. She ended up having to get shock treatments at one point. And as it turns out, my research into the Family Tree has revealed a direct line to both Lizzie Borden and Zelda Sayre. Therefore, our family lunacy has a pedigree.

 

Cool. You can tell people "I'm about to go family on your ass."

 

Rumor has it there are some monkeys in our family tree.

 

There are certainly some bastards in mine.