Have you found out something that happened with your past ancestors.

[Yahoo968]

Mum died in 2021 and left paperwork of the family history.
It was compiled by mum, her sister and 2 other cousins.
There are over 300 pages and lots of letters.
Unfortunately they have all died now and they were the last of that generation.
This has been sitting in my spare bedroom. Last week my cousin and I started to read it.
This is just a small snippet.

Our mutual great great great grandfather was the son of an earl, he was disinherited as he fell in love with a shop girl.
His sister was a small person (in the paperwork it says she wasn't a dwarf) and her parents sold her to the circus.
Fortunately brother got her back. (We think she was bought back)
She became a money lender. But for some reason she was deported to Australia and was never seen again.
Now we are going to read through history of the family and see if we can out other things.

Have you found out something about your family if you can please share as what we have read so far is very interesting. Pity we don't have anyone to ask for more information.

Our mutual great great great grandfather was the son of an earl, he was disinherited as he fell in love with a shop girl.
His sister was a small person (in the paperwork it says she wasn't a dwarf) and her parents sold her to the circus

Bloody hell!

Which Earl?

It wasn't me doing family history research but know some things due to speaking to grandparents. I watched the programme who do you think you are. I discovered that I am related to the person on the show as their great grandfather had our family name and lived in the house that my grandparents lived in and my dad grew up in. It was a home that passed through the generations. However, my dad and his siblings all left the village so the house isn't in our family any more.

Nothing as exciting as that.
Grandfather spent time in a camp during WW2 ( here in Australia) as he spoke German.
His family came to Australia from Germany to escape religious persecution only to be persecuted for keeping their language.
He was a farmer with 8 young children at home and he suffered, what I now suspect to be PTSD/depression, for the rest of his days.

Great thread idea op.
Our history is really interesting.
My family on ddads side were Romany gypsies, my great grandmother was imprisoned three times (1890) for stealing, a hat, a ladies blouse, meat from a butchers and for fraud, there's a description of her in the court records, she was described as 5' brown hair, brown eyes and a domestic servant.
My great grandfather was killed when a V1 flying bomb dropped on a pub during WW2.
My family are recorded on census of Romany gypsies in Kent.
Really interesting stuff, I even have some photos but can't upload as I'm on my phone

I love family history research and have a few stories. Great great grandfather was the 5th son of a very rich family. His 4 older brothers each inherited a massive farm/lands, he inherited money with the will stating it was to set him up so he could buy his own farm once he was old enough. He was very rich (equivalent to a multi millionaire today) and spent his life pissing it up the wall and died penniless hiding from those he owed money to.

Fascinating!

My 7x (or 8, not sure) great grandfather was a slave in Martinique, he was enlisted to the French navy and captured by the British in the Nepolionic wars, sent to POW camp in the UK and eventually settled in Kent. One of his sons was on an Antarctic expedition and spent several years trapped in ice? The papers wrote an obituary about him. I’m very fair skinned and had no idea until recently I had African ancestors, my grandfather must have known but never spoke of it.

I found a few bigamists and one of my not sure how many times great grandad kept getting sent to Australia for nicking sheep.

My prim and proper Catholic side weren't actually as prim and proper as my grandma made out.

My great great grandma is listed as dead on her son's war grave death certificate. She died 4 years later but not got to the bottom of that yet.

So nothing grandiose but certainly amusing given my parents are very straight laced.

@wonderstuff your ancestor who was on the Antarctic expedition, I wonder if it was the Imperial Trans- Antarctic expedition 1914-1917? Their ship Endurance became trapped in pack ice in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica, and eventually broke up and sank in 1915. All the crew were saved. If you want to post or PM his name, I have a list of the crew.

I have yet to get to the bottom of one tale. MIL always used to say that when she was a child she had been told that great-grandparent X was a (landed gentry name), and she tried for many of her later years to research into the family to see whether she could prove the link. She has sadly passed on now, so she'll never know, but one day I hope to continue her research, as of course her descendants (including my own dc) are also in the tree.

I have a great great Aunt who survived the Titanic. She worked on the ship and afterwards carried on working on liners. She must have been a fearless woman!

Six of my ancestors were Holocaust victims. Found out not deliberately searching for this.

My maternal grandfather was a travelling salesman and had four families, none of whom knew the others. I only discovered this through DNA on Ancestry.com and heard from a first cousin in Australia who luckily for me had done a lot of research on our family and we share the same maternal grandfather.

I found an entire side of the family who had become estranged and changed their name because one of the sons had stolen some jewellery from a pawn shop and then tried to pawn it elsewhere! The trial was reported in the Times, he got sent to Australia.
Another character, also on my father's side, got prosecuted for firing a water pistol at a policeman on his way home from Epsom Races.
Rather more disturbing, on the Irish side, a baby died while in the care of my grandmother. It was her first grandchild and it was an accidental death but again it caused a total rift and my grandmother was rejected and never spoken to again until the day she died. This was in a small Irish town. A sad story and a family secret that I didn't know about until I did the research.
There were brighter sparks such as a professional footballer, an early pilot and a relatively well known journalist. Deeply fascinating to do the research but you have to be aware that you might find things that resonate uncomfortablly.

@Yahoo968 I have some Earls, I wonder if we’re related. You can probably trace your ancestors back to Edward III and the royal houses of Europe!

I love family history and I am starting the part time MSc in Genealogy at Strathclyde Uni in October.

Some disturbing stuff though….

I have a plantation owner in Barbados (not nice). His son in law a slave trader; someone else who committed genocide in Ireland. Found out yesterday that my ggrandfather x 3 died of smallpox in 1851. Other gg grandparents were divorced in the 1870s and there is a description of the places my gg grandmother committed adultery. Some random bloke tried to murder my grandmother and was acquitted at the Old Bailey in the 1940s. I also found out some unsavoury stuff about my dad from newspapers. He’d been to prison which I didn’t know about and I am sure my mum has no idea!

At the moment we are skimming the paperwork and reading when something jumps out to us.
My cousins mum and my mum were sisters. One thing we read as well last night.
Their great grandfather was born in Tipperary Ireland. He was the youngest son and moved from the farm which went to his older brother. We are going to search out the farm don't know if it's still in the family. Don't know what happened to the other brothers and sisters. Neither of us remember relations from that side of the family.
We are mid 60's. Mum and her sister died towards their late 80's. So it's 1850's and earlier.
I think we have opened a mindfield of interest in this.

It was that expedition. I have his name. Incredible story.

Although must have been a grandson with those dates? I can’t remember, my mum has all the details..

I’m actually talking rubbish. My ancestor was on Investigator which was in fact an arctic expedition in the late 19th century!

I'm related by marriage to an acting dynasty. Some of my ancestors were in workhouses and asylums. One distant uncle died in abject poverty but was found to have sovereigns, diamonds and bank notes sewn into his coat, a fortune for those times. Faginesque! A distant Huegenot gt x 5 grandfather & his wife fled Catholic France and he was master chef to a couple of Dukes, Northumberland and Somerset I seem to remember. Another set of gt x ? grandparents were some of the first Quakers in the UK. My gt uncle was in Bertram Mills circus in a trapeze troup.