As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
Options
does anybody have interesting family history?
bsjezz
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
ancestry.com paywalls aside, the internet is getting to be a pretty fantastic resource for looking up family history. tonight i nudged my own lineage back as far as the 1660s, via this guy - exactly the kind of scurvy english crook us australians love to swear we actually have nothing to do with. anyway, that guy came to the new world in 1788 on this boat:
i also sussed out a bit more about the direct paternal line, leading back to the early 1800s; apparently, at that time in sydney there was a desperate need for a classier sort of booze than beer and rum; so a bloke called wilhelm kirchner recruited a bunch of rhenish vinedressers on two-year contracts and brought them over on this boat:
that's how our german surname got to australia, from a small town called rudesheim.
since then there have been embezzlers and orphans, newspaper empires and touring bicycles - and this is all just on my dad's side of the family. that's not even going into the mysterious end-of-the-line in rural NSW, where an untraceable teenage maid was knocked up by a ring-in horse-trainer in the pub of a racing town.
i had heard stories myself, and i wouldn't have gotten anywhere without getting specific names from my parents and grandparents. but almost all of this i dug up myself - using tools like rootsweb and, especially, the national library of australia's digitised newspaper archives. i want to hear your family's stories - and if you feel like you don't have any, look closer!
i also sussed out a bit more about the direct paternal line, leading back to the early 1800s; apparently, at that time in sydney there was a desperate need for a classier sort of booze than beer and rum; so a bloke called wilhelm kirchner recruited a bunch of rhenish vinedressers on two-year contracts and brought them over on this boat:
that's how our german surname got to australia, from a small town called rudesheim.
since then there have been embezzlers and orphans, newspaper empires and touring bicycles - and this is all just on my dad's side of the family. that's not even going into the mysterious end-of-the-line in rural NSW, where an untraceable teenage maid was knocked up by a ring-in horse-trainer in the pub of a racing town.
i had heard stories myself, and i wouldn't have gotten anywhere without getting specific names from my parents and grandparents. but almost all of this i dug up myself - using tools like rootsweb and, especially, the national library of australia's digitised newspaper archives. i want to hear your family's stories - and if you feel like you don't have any, look closer!
bsjezz on
+2
Posts
My step dad was distantly related to the sixth president of the United States though.
As a teenager, Grandpa ran a supply route for prospectors in Montana.
Grandma insists she's descended from Rob Roy MacGregor but I never confirmed that.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
http://www.ancestryheritagequest.com/
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
a unique name is a blessing more than anything - it means you have less variables to filter out when trying to link your family up! spelling can waver though, so try to be flexible on that. it's tricky business but usually it's the first puzzle piece that's the hardest to place; you get back a bit further and it's more and more likely you'll be able to make use of some published family trees
She frequented speakeasy bars during prohibition as a teenager until she got married to her first husband. I don't know much about him but he was involved with the mob and she wouldn't let him in when some guys came to murder him.
Her other husband my great grandfather ran booze during prohibition but then worked as a welder until he retired. But the plant had him train younger guys in his driveway after that because he was the best welder they had.
not sure about the chinese side of my family (i've got some friends who can trace their ancestry back to cao cao tho which is rad)
That is the tricky part with that surname. While it is pretty unique in the states there are many variations of it in multiple old countries with germanic languages.
One interesting thing I've found is on my paternal grandmother's side my 2nd great grandfather immigrated to the US with his wife in 1901 from a place called Komarivka in what is now Ukraine, which was apparently a town founded by Germans fleeing Napoleon's army!
So, you know
I'm still waiting on my reparations, is what I'm saying.
Also apparently we're related to Shakespeare's neighbor, but that's anecdotal with no solid supporting evidence.
My grandfather did some searching and back in Germany, A very long time ago, we have cannon making ancestors.
the same grandfather, his father ran off to Mexico and started a new family, but randomly mailed pesos back to him every once in a while.
I don't know about much more than my grandparents in general though.
is that interesting?
but they're listening to every word I say
no but really, my Great Gandfather was in the first wave of Lake County police officers assigned to this little area of Indiana where the steel mills were getting set up. They named it Gary.
He was also working at the court house the day Al Capone broke out.
I'm going to crib from wikipedia a bit, because I'm nowhere near my family notes...
Pierre Terrail, also known as "Chevalier de Bayard" was a knight who lived at the turn of the 16th Century in France. Among his contemporaries he was known as "le bon chevalier" ("the good knight") but has since acquired the epithet "le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche" ("the knight without fear and beyond reproach").
As far as historic deeds go he was generally a badass in battle, winning numerous victories for the French, but was also known to be fair and generous in all his dealings. After one battle he was grievously wounded, and took up residence in a household in the town he had just conquered. He was tended by the family of that household, and when he recovered he returned all ransom money given to him as conqueror in payment for this service. Such was his reputation that when he was captured in the Battle of the Spurs, Henry VIII released him without ransom - confident that "the good knight" would be true to his word that he would quit the battle for 6 weeks.
Other notable actions include almost capturing Pope Julius II after the collapse of the League of Cambrai, which earned him an excommunication from the church, and knighting King Francis I after the Battle of Marignano. At the end of his days, he succumbed to a wound from an arquebus ball during the Battle of the Sesia in 1524. In the midst of the battle, we was attended by Pescara, the Spanish commander, and by his old comrade, Charles, duc de Bourbon, who was now fighting on the opposite side. Charles is reported to have said "Ah! Monsieur de Bayard... I am very sad to see you in this state; you who were such a virtuous knight!" Bayard answered,
"Sir, there is no need to pity me. I die as a man of honour ought, doing my duty; but I pity you, because you are fighting against your king, your country, and your oath."
These days, there are a number of monuments around France to his honour - such as the statue at Versailles, depicted. There is also "Chevalier de Bayard" wine, which my family took to ordering online for a while until we decided it wasn't actually that good. The name "Bayard" has been handed down my family from generation to generation - originally given to the oldest son in the family, but these days given to the oldest child in general. On my side of the family (as there have been a number of twins, where the name was shared) the name is currently held by my elder sister who has copies of some of the documents regarding the coat of arms etc.
Incidentally, I worked for a number of years in Japan and had the epithet looked at. For those of you who are interested, it translates to:
大胆 不敵 完全 無欠 の 騎士
Let us know if you suddenly experience amnesia.
...I'm guessing this is a reference I missed
I'd have to ask her for some of the meaty details, but one of my few actual convict ancestors was sent to Australia for highway robbery!
He stole a bunch of money from an Anglican Priest so that he could feed some of his family, believing that the money would otherwise go to waste with what the Priest was likely to do with it (well, that's what he claimed). He waylaid the Priest and managed to take the money without having to assault the poor man.
My Grandpa has been in two different air forces, both times he was (at some point) a parachuting instructor. I think his rough count was about 9000 jumps out of planes over the course of his service. That includes on in Vietnam where he was expecting to go into combat during a join mission with the British, but they found the outpost completely abandoned.
I haven't been able to figure out what my convict ancestors were sent here for. I know a bunch of my mum's side were German immigrants who settled in the Lockyer Valley in South Queensland, as so many Germans did, but the convicts are a bit of a mystery
I think I'm supposed to have had ancestors on the First Fleet but I'm not sure who they are
I did find out that my maternal grandfather used to run numbers for the mafia and that when my dad was around 16 he gave him a gun and had him sit outside of his shop one night when bad shit was going down. In my dad's own words, he was scared shitless. My grandfather was also interviewed on America's Most Wanted because he was the last person to see a nightclub owner alive. The club owner was murdered by a junkie because he was known to carry around large amounts of cash.
And my parents were high school sweethearts and have been married for nearly 35 years now, which I think is pretty interesting.
First story:
Eventually, he worked his way up to become chairman of a fortune 500 company. And because Italy was one of the "bad guys" in WWII, (not to mention there was a lot of bias against Italians prior to said war,) my grandfather lied and told everybody he was half French until his mom unwittingly spilled the beans to my mom when she was a teenager. My grandmother was pissed, because being the biased little WASP she was, she wouldn't have married my grandfather if she'd known he was Italian.
Fast-forward 30 years. Somebody does some digging, and realizes that my great-grandmother had lied. My great-grandfather never went back to Italy. Instead, he stayed in Detroit, married a woman with almost the exact same name as my great-grandmother, and had a son. Grandpa had a half brother he never knew about. Then my mom petitioned the state of Michigan for my great grandparent's divorce papers. There aren't any on record. My great grandmother, who had attempted to illegally divorce her husband, was actually lied to by her uncle (who was a judge) and never actually got the divorce. She may or may not have known about that, but my great-grandfather had no idea. Furthermore, my grandfather's adoption was also illegal, because his father (who was in the US, and who was known by my great-grandmother to be in the US) was never notified his son was getting adopted by another guy.
Second story:
And there is some really cool stuff in that clan's history. If you go really far back up the family tree, you can see that my family got passed over for inheriting the chiefdom because the current chief decided he wanted his second wife's kids to inherit, since she was an English princess. (We are descended from the first wife's eldest son.) And if you go back even further, you can trace our lineage back to the "first" Macdonald. Go further, and you start getting people that may have been human beings, or may have just been mythical deities. Like, some researchers are pretty sure one of my ancestors was actually the Irish Sun God. Which is pretty cool.
Oh, and one of my more recent ancestors from the Macdonell side of the family was really high ranking in the Canadian government. The guy that orchestrated Canada's independence from Britain was probably a close friend of his, too. I can't remember exactly, but either he was the pallbearer at my ancestor's funeral, or vise versa. We also came over during the Highland Clearances, because the clan chief married an English woman who wanted sheep instead of tenants.
Third story:
Several days later, he woke up at his own funeral. When he sat up, everybody screamed and ran away. After that, my great-grandmother developed a very strong belief in ghosts, and would cite that specific event as the reason.
Fourth story:
Well, my mom did some digging. Apparently, the girl wasn't actually "stolen" at all. Not according to the paper work. According to the paperwork, and letters we found in one of my aunt's houses, the girl's father had actually started a second family with some southern woman when he was sent to the south to fight in the Civil War. A lot of people went MIA during war, so he was probably assumed dead. Well, during Reconstruction, one of his old friends recognized him and made him go back to his first family up North. A year later, the first wife is dead, and Mr. Bigamist has shipped out all his children with that woman to various people and moved back down south to his second wife. (Looks suspicious, right?) The girl apparently didn't fully understand what had happened, or didn't want to because geez.
Dad's side of the family:
Some of my father's ancestors knew Daniel Boon. Like, they traveled with him, or something like that. Mom traced them to one of his settlements, which is kinda neat.
You're more likely to develop amnesia than the common cold on a soap opera.
Oh, and a bunch of uptight German Catholics on the other side. Party time!
If you haven't had every single cast member playing an evil adopted twin with amnesia at some point, you're probably still in your first season.
Oh, right. Well that's what I get for trying to trying to be self deprecating about the burning car crash known as my life.
And that's about it. Having surnames like Green and Jones in my heritage make it hard to idly research.
The captain didn't know this until the next time he came to port, and was confronted with a pregnant honey in port.
He took use of Dutch law at the time to effectively pay off alimony in a single lump sum. So now the single mother had quite a bit of money. And she spent it wisely, and got her young boy a good education.
That really paid off, as he got a job at a major insurance firm around 1905.
Around 1910 he took the chance to be the head of his own branch... in Malang, East-Java, Dutch-Indies. He went there single, which is relatively unusual as my grandmother tells it. Once he got there, he fell in love with a local girl, and they married, which was pretty scandalous the time. But she died within 2 years. So he ends up marrying the daughter of a Dutchman instead. They have 5 children, the eldest a girl, my grandmother, and 4 sons, and are basically living it large. He owned one of the first automobiles in the province, signified by a picture my grandparent has of the family in front of the car with a license plate of '13.' They had a large house with 5 servants including a cook. Her childhood stories include meeting the local Radja at his fabolous palace in the mountains and a boa eating a piglet and being visible 3x the size about 1m down and barely able to move, and thus killed.
By way of his household budget booklet we can see that he actually paid his servants to get schooling for their children, and apparently this made him a bit of an unpopular man with the more conservative portions of Dutch population.
But in WW2 the Japanese quickly roll into the Indies. And they imprison anyone of Dutch descent and appropriate anything you can't carry into camps. At this point my grandmother is 13, and her brothers are 11 to 4. Worse, they split the males and females into seperate camps, in my families case more than a 100 miles apart. These camps are cruel, with minimal medical attention and too little food, and while everyone hangs on for 3 years, in the summer of 1945 both my greatgrandmother and greatgrandfather die, in the former case after the USA had dropped the first A-bomb.
Japan capitulates, but does in such a way that basically puts the native Indonesians in charge. So now my greatgrandmother, just turned 17, has to take care of her brothers 14 to 8, in a country that is at best indifferent to her plight. They end up in a camp under British supervision and the Dutch government arranged for repatriation. Part of the journey was on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Venerable_(R63)
But the Dutch state was not really interested in helping refugees from the Indies either... the country was devastated by the war, barely able to feed and house itself, and the actions of the government amounted to basically calling distant family to see if they were willing to take them in, though they did all qualify for university grants a few years laters under orphan programs.
My grandmother ended up in the Northern, rural provinces, and her brothers were spread over 2 other families. None of them felt at home, but my grandmother was able to move to live with a different family member in a larger town where she met my grandfather. They married very quickly because it allowed to rent a house, and remain married to this day, now 66 years later.
All my greatuncles were well educated but didn't feel at home, and together with almost 200.000 other Dutchman went to the Americas. None went to the same place though, which results in me having family in California, Colorado, Toronto, Ottowa, Vancouver, Chicago and Chile. All were able to live the American dream to some extent, coming in with college degrees in the 1950s gave them great oppurtunities, from plastic surgeon to preacher to salesman for IBM in the Carribean. Those 4 brothers together have over 80 grandchildren and greatgrandchildren.
Although my grandmother is the only person who 'stayed behind' she has always been the center of the family. When the wartraumas caught up with them and relationships were strained, she worked effortlessly to get everyone on speaking terms. In the 1980s and 1990s adventurous 20 somethings would visit 'famous grandma Riet' in the Netherlands what seemed every 3 months and were free to stay over for as long as they liked.
Like many pale-skinned Americans, I have a pretty good idea of my genetic makeup and will blather on about it at the slightest provocation. One of my grandmothers was the first or second generation descendant of Polish immigrants. The entirety of my Mom's side of the family is of German origin, with my ancestors there emigrating to the US in the late 1800's. It gets a bit trickier with my Dad's dad, though. He's mostly German, but there is a strain on that side going back to what I think are original English settlers of Virginia.
One of the cooler things I've ever found, though, is this. The Census Bureau periodically releases old records that are deemed old enough that they won't compromise anyone's privacy. I searched the records when they were first put up. They were literally just the scanned pages of the handwritten census taker forms. Since my Dad's parents were, at the time, living in Philadelphia I realized that was incredibly pointless. My Mom's side is from rural Kansas, though, and indeed I was able to locate my Mom's Dad. I was able to learn that in 1930 he was still living at home with his parents and siblings, and that even though his parents were second generation Americans, their primary language spoken at home was German. Pretty neat.
Woop-de-doo, who doesn't?
I think it was national
edit: no it was state wide
either way, he didn't do it, so sayeth my grandpa
My paternal grandfather is one giant unknown because he was adopted and never let us do genetic testing, but we're pretty sure he was half or a quarter native American, especially because of his facial features and the fact that he was put up for adoption in 1930s Oklahoma
Which means you're related to a girl I went to school with, and Nancy Reagan.
But a part of my family comes over from the fallout of ww2
That's my mother's side
My Father's I don't know much about it as this is the side that wants nothing to do with me and rarely talks to me even when it's needed
So what I know is spotty at best
and i guess that made his family to decide to eventually move to what is now canada