What surprising family folklore stories have turned out to be true?

[SuperGinger]

Every family has some random family folklore that just seems wild, what is yours?

I'll start, my great maternal grandparents were friends with Mahatma Ghandi, checked it out and it is in fact true.

My paternal great grandmother was a childhood friend of Queen Mary when she lived at White Lodge, they kept in touch throughout their lives including during the war when my great grandmother was in Nazi Germany, she married a German.

My children have two relatives featured on UK banknotes, one from my side one from my husband's.

Great uncles and aunties worked as low level Mafia members .I thought it was a joke but nope!

That my husband's great uncle survived the Titanic - yeah right! Turns out he did and lived into his 70's.

There was talk that my husbands side are related to a famous comedian but nobody has done a family tree. Same surname, same area. Wasn’t until we saw her on Who Do You Think You Are that we realised, yes, definitely blood related (third cousins, I think it was) and actually our niece has turned out to be a dead ringer for her!

A town in America was renamed to honor my great great grandfather's brother.
He also fought in the civil war.

All true .

That we (we being any blood linked relative )should never go walking on the moors after nightfall, doing so would put us at risk of being attacked by a giant hound. My great, great grandfather Sir Charles Baskerville made this quite clear

My nana was an early girlfriend of Tom Jones. Every woman of a certain age in Ponty claims this. But it turned out to be true, we found photos and a bouquet was sent to her funeral. (That said- perhaps, given his reputation, every woman was telling the truth and over the course of 20yrs his secretary has sent many many flowers to many a funeral!)

@worstnotholiday

My family is also from Ponty. My grandfather was a special constable and arrested Tom Jones when he was still Tommy Woodward, celebrated local pain in the arse. 😁

I'd love to know what he arrested him for, but he's dead now and nobody alive can remember.

That my gran and grandad met during WW2 when my gran stole army supplies and had an illegal party. My grandad defended her honour and she got away with it.
She never admitted to him that she was guilty.

My great grandfather on my father's side was very high up in 'the railways'

He was paid to sit in on meetings by the great train robbers and spy on them

I thought this was utter bollicks but turned out to be true (a Google search years later confirmed it)

It can't be confirmed, but it's rumoured that my blood maternal grandfather was a Polish P.O.W. Bio maternal grandmother never spoke and took the secret to her grave.

It's also rumoured that my maternal great grandfather (my mother's mother's father) once killed a man in a brawl. He was from Port Glasgow, which is known for being rough, so... 🤷‍♀️

@canuckup, my mother married her brother in law after my dad ( her husband) and her sister died within 9 months of each other . The wedding was in 1998 .

Amazing stories, thank you to everyone who shared.

My American cousins went to Yorkshire, they were told to stay on the road and to keep clear of the moors.

was told im related to famous golfer Wakefield turns out he play for England in ryder cup He wrote a book

related to either Gilbert or Sullivan - Not confirmed

My great great great grandmother committed suicide. We only found this out recently. Her husband was a drunk and she went out one night and didn't return, a few days later they pulled her body out of the river.

My 14th grandfather was the 3rd Duke of Norfolk, yes that Duke of Norfolk, Henry VIII's right hand man, stood by while two of his nieces face execution.

My mother used to bathe Winston Churchill’s feet and cut his toenails. He always gave her a packet of Rollos

That an old eiderdown we had when I was a kid had belonged to Clement Atlee's aunt. Yeah right, I used to think, when DM told this story. Except that we got it from my great aunt - and when I started doing a bit on Ancestry.co.uk, she showed up as a general maidservant in the home of a Miss Atlee.

That my dad was the illegitimate son of a servant that worked for his (named) Father. He was born in British India in 1930. His parents (my grandparents) divorced when he was 6 and he never saw his Mother, My Grandmother , again, until he was 23 and bumped into her entirely by accident in Aldershot. (He was doing basic training and she had married another army man).My dad had dark skin and very black hair which I’ve inherited, but otherwise Caucasian features. We all suspected there was something different in our heritage to which we’d been told, but my dad wouldn’t hear of it having been bought up the son of a colonel in the British Raj where such things were never acknowledged.

He died last August, aged 95, Without ever knowing that my sister and I did an Ancestry and me and we came out 37 per cent Gujerati. We have since traced the child that my dad’s mum (our grandma ) went on to have in her second marriage, and she confirmed that her mum (my gran) had indeed told her she had had an affair during her first marriage, with an Indian man and that the disgrace of it (at the time, in British India) meant that she was sent home, immediately, divorced and left without any means to contact her child (my dad) ever again. It was only that chance meeting that meant they were reacquainted but they never really became close again, which is really sad.
my dad was lovely but so repressed about this aspect of his life. When I sat with him last summer , when he was dying, he talked about his mum a bit and how sad he was that he never really knew her, as he wasn’t allowed to, and it was very sad indeed.

I’ve always had a grudging admiration for the Duke of Norfolk. He was a great Military commander and an ambitious politician with the Courage of his convictions at least (even if those ambitions weren’t always very nice).

There was a tale about my great grandfather being rather cantankerous and the relatives he lived with got so fed up that they dumped him on the steps of the local police station.

I thought it sounded a bit far fetched bit recently found a folder of papers in my parents house that included a letter from the social services department that ended up having to place him in a home confirming the whole thing.

Great thread! Nothing this exciting passed down in my family

DP's great grandad was a genuine Peaky Blinder. I was researching his family history and found newspaper reports and criminal records relating to his involvement in illegal gambling and gang violence at racecourses in the early 1900's.

My Mum always told me that her Dad wasn't around because he became a millionaire, left her Mum and moved to Lanzarote.

I never really believed her. My Grandma wouldn't talk about him and the rest of the family said they only knew as much as I did, but with no concrete proof.

After my Grandma died, the house went to my Uncle. He recently passed too, and upon going into the house and having a look around after inheriting, I found my Grandma's diaries and photos stating when he left her, and the letters they used to send - along with photographs of him in a massive house in Lanzarote.

He also told her he owned a hotel chain there, and after googling it I found out that it now belongs to his step children and their children. He left absolutely nothing to his own children.

My husband was brought up on and around Balmoral, met the Queen and some other Royals on shoots, etc. DH always told me that his parents were at the Coronation.

We found a letter of condolence to my MIL, written by the Queen Mother's equerry, on Clarence House notepaper telling of how the Queen Mother had enjoyed walking through the gardens my FIL kept.

After DH died, I found a letter to my FIL giving him an official invitation to the Queen's coronation and instructing him to wear the enclosed Coronation Medal plus his military medals.

Gosh that is terrible all round, it seems it was a brutal existence.