Just Discovered Something Interesting

[Racket_Man]

My sister did a bit of hunting down both or our parents lines. I think she was only able to go back into the 1800's.

[Teefies2]

AFAIK there aren't any famous people in my family, but my great-great-great grandfather (from my mom's dad's side) came to America from the part of Hungary which was at the time called Transylvania (late 1890s, I can't remember the exact year). On my mom's mom's side of the family we have some pretty significant Cherokee heritage, and it's unconfirmed but some family says our family was the result of a Cherokee "princess" (chief's daughter) running off and getting married. Quite the scandal.

I have the exact same Cherokee heritage! Was your "princess" named Indiana Chisholm (after marriage) by chance?

[Kogarashi]

My family seems to be mostly nobodies, but I'm okay with that. I did find two places several generations back on my mother's side where cousins (second or third, I think) married. And it turns out that despite going through high school thinking I was half or more of German and Austrian ancestry, I'm actually more Dutch than anything else.

Hubby has one ancestor he's been trying forever to track down. I joked that said ancestor must've been an outlaw of some sort, on the run. Turns out I was more right than I thought, as Hubby finally found evidence that a whole chunk of that family just up and moved at one point, leaving behind family members and changing names in some cases.

[Sliceanddice]

Well here's where Mormon families can come in handy, I'm a descendant of Prudence Crandall https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudence_Crandall for starters

[Seanette]

My family seems to be mostly nobodies, but I'm okay with that. I did find two places several generations back on my mother's side where cousins (second or third, I think) married.

My husband has a first cousin marriage in his father's family, around the Civil War era in Mississippi. I joke that this explains a lot about that side of the family.

As for my own, I'm beginning to think my paternal grandparents dropped in from another planet. Again, this would explain a lot about their descendants. My family are stubborn, difficult, and obstructive when they're alive, and death does NOT mellow them. At all. Seems to me like they deliberately hide.

[Erinesque]

I didn't start my genealogy search until after my dad had died last year, and it's become my way of processing that grief. He'd always told me that we were related to the actor Edward Everett Horton, and that his great grandmother was Native American. I was able to find out that the tidbit about Edward Everett Horton is true, and also that George W. Bush is a cousin, too. While I've been able to locate my Native American ancestor, I only have her name, and the ancestry site never gets any hits on her, so I can't go back farther on her line.

[Victory Sabre]

My family has been traced, on both sides, back to the 1700s. Mom's side were Germans who settled in Russia, then moved here in the late 1800's.

Dad's side came over here in 1751. My 5th great grandfather acquired some land in western Virginia, and hired a young man from eastern Virginia to survey his land. That man's name was George Washington. My 5th great grandfather's land was coveted by the Brittish during the war. They tried twice to take it, and were driven off twice.

[BlaqueKatt]

my only familial "fame" is my 9th great grandmother. Sarah Osborne

[dalesys]

The very first google hit on my full name is in Descendants of Wolphert Gerretse van Kouwenhoven, 11th ggson...

[Seanette]

I discovered I share an ancester with Barrack Obama even though I am white. I also have a couple of ancesters who came over on the Mayflower.

Remember, Obama's maternal family is white.

[AccountingDrone]

Well here's where Mormon families can come in handy, I'm a descendant of Prudence Crandall https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudence_Crandall for starters

And I life in Canterbury CT =) I drive past her house frequently.

Mom's side is easy - first run Amish, they got here from Altenkirchen in the late 1600s and she rumspringa'd in 1942 to work in an aircraft factory in the engineering department. She met my Dad just after WW2 in university - the Army sent him to get a degree so they could keep him commissioned instead of demobilizing him.

Dad's side gets .... complicated. I apologize for Old Billy ... though we do have Mayflower blood [yippee, you know how many Mayflower descendants there are knocking around the country?]

And the one lineage-thread we have bops back and forth in the border countries of France, Germany, Holland and the mass of Belgium/Luxemburg/Flanders as various sons and daughters were swapped around in marriage [yay politics?] and finally tapers off in the early 1100s as the only reference found was a mention of a Count and Countess with no way of actually telling who the poor Countess was originally, she had a fairly generic Marie and nothing else. We would have to actually go and hope the church record books were somehow miraculously intact to find a marriage record, or at least some sort of mention of more name to go upon than just Marie.

Rob and I joke about being related other than by marriage because he shares a lot of the same colonial US heritage and we have similar bone structure, skin tone, eye color, hair color and texture [when he had hair, he has alopecia now and is bald as a cue ball =) ] His family, he jokes, is the reason for the Last of the Mohicans - one of his ancestors decided to marry a son to an indian girl and used the resulting festivities for a festive massacre. Nice guy. His family milled around in the NY/NJ/PA corner of the colonies, though his more recent infusion of blood were some bog Irish named Dunahoo who were tossed into the surf off South Carolina [literally, the boat didn't moor anywhere, people and belongings were just offloaded where they were when they got to within wading distance of shore] and ultimately ended up in North Central Missouri [there is a state park with the last remaining original prairie grasses, that was one of her uncles farms, he donated it to the state when he died. He figured it the native grasses were good enough for buffalo, they were good enough for his cows.] Rob's great grandmother also had nasty things to say about 'that Wop <Italian> Bastard' as she sat in the wreckage of their house in San Francisco preventing looters. Yup - he was a profiteer and targetted the Italian immigrant population of the city, and was known to have sent thugs around offering cheap loans to rebuild ... with horrible interest rates and lots of people lost their land to him because of that. We also still have her revolver =)

I love family histories, you get a different view of history than what is in the books =)

[Kit-Ginevra]

rumspringa'?

[MoonCat]

I have a good friend whose lineage was traced back to Charlemagne. I thought that was cool; my friend wasn't impressed

[Aragarthiel]

I have the exact same Cherokee heritage! Was your "princess" named Indiana Chisholm (after marriage) by chance?

My mom says as far as she knows it's just Chapman and Ferrell but she's going to ask my grandma later, so I'll let you know! I actually don't know much about that side of my family, my mom was out of contact with her mom for over a decade and my grandma doesn't really stay in touch with any of her (10, I think) brothers and sisters, so it sort of dead-ends at her.

[AccountingDrone]

rumspringa'?

A time when an Amish kid hits majority and is not yet baptized so they tend to go out to the English [nonAmish] world and explore options. Generally guys, though not unknown for women - Mom says that a bunch of 'recruiters' for lack of a better term were circulating around to the rural schools looking for people to go to work in war effort factories. A fair number of Amish boys also volunteered because factory work in a war industry let them not have to be drafted into the armed forces [Amish tend to be pacifists, like Quakers.]