re: Genealogy fans: What are some cool facts about your family's history?

I’m a mayflower descendant. He was an indentured servant who fell overboard. Pretty much sums up my life.

Eisenhower was the uncle to one of my dad's childhood friend

Three authors in the family, two famous (William Faulkner and John Faulkner) and one not. My grandfather used to walk around saying, "Up your arse with Mobil gas."

I'm so glad this thread popped up! I've been really interested in tracing my lineage back through the years for a long, long time. It took me nearly 3 years of digging through old archives, scouring the internet, and doing family interviews to get enough information to put together a family genealogy. Since everyone else is giving their interesting family history, I figured I'd share mine. But please do not let my extensive family history distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table. You never know when and where your family history story will take you. So, enjoy the story and keep all of those cool family facts flowing!

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some cool facts

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I must be the only reader/poster on here that has no heroic,royal,wealthy, famous,infamous,famous adjacent,or remotely fantastic ancestors. Just plain ole peasant folks from Eastern France/Western Germany.

I also come from a long line of broke-arse motherfrickers.

My grandfather died in WW2. He was german and slipped and fell accidently in a freak accident out of his watch tower post

I think if your family is a part of the group of British people that came to Maryland or Virginia and then settled west, the more west you ended up the more poor they were and less attached to their original ancestors English heritage. If your family stayed in Virginia you are damn close to your ancestors who from England, but as for me being a Texas boy, all of my ancestors were dirt poor in the south so they kept going west. Idk, just something I have thought about

Direct descendant of Aaron Burr’s grandfather.

My family (in the 1830s) repurposed* the logs for their own homestead that Lincoln’s birth mother was born at in 1784.

My dad’s generation was the last to actually live in the house.

The structure is still in the family and habitable.

*dismantled the original cabin and used the logs in another structure several miles away

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I think if your family is a part of the group of British people that came to Maryland or Virginia and then settled west, the more west you ended up the more poor they were and less attached to their original ancestors English heritage. If your family stayed in Virginia you are damn close to your ancestors who from England, but as for me being a Texas boy, all of my ancestors were dirt poor in the south so they kept going west. Idk, just something I have thought about

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On my paternal grandmother's side of the family, both sides came from either upper middle class or some kind of nobility. By the 1600's though they had begun to make the trek to America in the Virginia area. Eventually they were part of the great mass of South Carolina settlers who migrated south towards the Louisiana Territory.

What I find interesting is a lot of the English settlers named their new homes after their old ones and how the spellings changed over generations.

For example, a lot of my early English ancestors were from Gloucester in England. When they and their neighbors arrived here in America, they named their new towns after their old ones. There are several "Gloucester's" between Virginia and Mississippi.

However as each generation got further from their English roots and at the same time less educated on the frontier, the names of towns underwent "Americanization". For example, Gloster, MS is really named after Gloucester in England, but with the American naming convention.