Obscure Family History…

I don't know but it absolutely could have been. The timing would be about right, I think.

 

Almost all the detailed information in my genealogy research comes from the 1/8 of my tree which comes from colonial England.
The other 7/8 of my tree essentially emigrated from Ireland to the US between 1845 and 1865 in the wake of the potato famine.
The information trail pretty much stops cold at that point. Most of my ancestors were farmers or blacksmiths living in small Catholic villages in the northern regions of Ireland. Most baptismal records from those days have been lost. The official British government took little interest in documenting the local population.

 

I think someone has to be hard core to do a deep dive into all branches of your family tree. There's just too many. I think it's best just to choose one or two. For example, most of my family background I've traced through my maternal grandfathers. My dad's side goes cold pretty quick because both of my grandparents were illegitimate. Heck, my last name shouldn't even be my last name. I hope great granny got it on with JD Rockefeller and someone comes calling with a big check one of these days!

 

Are you this guy?

The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

 

I'm adopted and knew it growing up, but wholey embraced my "family heritage" and did a lot of digging with my grandma.

Our original "North American" ancestor moved from France to a small fort near Quebec in the mid-1600s (he was scalped and lived to tell about it) and his descendants eventually filtered into the US in the 1700s. There is a town in Indiana named by a family member and it was cool to discover this and share it with my folks one Father's Day weekend as a surprise.
That family has had 2 MLB players with one being banned by baseball.

10 years ago I discovered my birth parents and on my mom's side, I am related to Thomas Jane (Punisher, 61, The Expanse). I tweeted this news to him and he didn't respond. Oh well ...his loss. Sorry cuz!

 

My grandfather for years had season tickets for the Red Sox, first row at the business end of the home dugout. When Ted Williams homered in his last Fenway at-bat, my grandmother and uncle are right there in the photo on the backpage of the Globe, cheering as Williams re-entered the dugout. I have a framed original somewhere.

I'm also related to Leopold Godowsky, the self-taught Polish-American pianist whose virtuoso compositions have been compared to Franz Liszt. He was born in Vilna, Lithuania, the great Jewish cultural shtetl of Eastern Europe.

 

Got one of the periodic DNA updates from Ancestry today. I took the spit test 6-8 years ago, and three or four times a year they send me updates with new ethnicity analyses and contact info for genetic cousins, etc etc.

Anyway the other day I get an update that a new 6th-8th cousin has been identified, and they have ancestors from BOTH my parents.

That in itself wasn't surprising. When you get back to the great great grandparent generation, we start seeing some common surnames.

But a minor bombshell was lurking. It now develops that two of my great great grgrandparents on my mother's side were ... first cousins.

It's a little more disquieting than that: my great great grandmother in question had nine children, but five died either in birth or before they were five days old -- including a stillborn daughter to whom a a she died giving birth at age 37.

Infant mortality and childbirth mortality rates were pretty awful in the 1870s, but still I gotta wonder if they rolled the genetic dice and crapped out. No hint of any genetic problems in any of her descendants down to me. At least as far as I know.

I think that means I'm technically my own fourth cousin.

 

I think one of my ancestors was hanged as a horse thief in Kentucky. That’s about all I got.

 

Same thing happened with my mom's side of the family. In Italy, the family name started with an I. Now, in America, it starts with a J.

 

No, all the cities have the same name.

I also had three great-great uncles die in the Civil War: One at Chancellorsville when OO Howard's XI corps was overrun by Stonewall Jackson, one in captivity at Andersonville and another at the battle of New Bern, N.C. All served with the 154th New York infantry, mustered in at Jamestown, Chautauqua County.

Somewhere I have paperwork tracing my paternal side back to 1300 or 1400; came to the US in 1639 from Devon, sailing from Plymouth and landing near Barnstable.

 

Fiddling around a little more in genealogy -- I find I usually do this stuff at about 3 am -- I found some news stories regarding the death of my GG-grandfather, the lumber baron, in 1890. He keeled over dead at 57 (from a stroke/"apoplexy") on the docks watching one of his lumber barges being loaded in the U.P.

He died intestate, so shortly enough there were news stories regarding the disposition of his estate. Court papers listed his estate as no smaller than $3 million.

$3,000,000 in 1890 would be equivalent to ...

$100,777,252.75

... today.

No, I don't have it.

 

I recently found out two of my gg grandparents (my maternal grandmother's grandparents) were first cousins.
That explains a lot about more than a couple of people on that side of the family.