What's your favourite ancestor story?

[GulesMeansRed]

Mine isn't a direct ancestor, a distant great uncle on my mum's side. He grew up in a large family of about 10 children in the 1850s/60s in a very rural part of Scotland. He obviously decided he didn't want to be an ag lab like everyone else and joined the merchant navy aged 14. I have found him on records at ports in Sydney and Shanghai in the 1860s, the things he must have seen and experienced as a teenager, so different from his siblings.

The very BEST thing I found though was the captain's diaries included in the Liverpool, England, Crew Lists 1861-1919 collection on Ancestry, it is an account of the voyage full of people deserting, drunken cooks, people refusing to work and a grisly account of Joseph's death from some sort of tropical disease. The captain describes his burial at sea and gives the exact latitude/longitude at the time, somewhere in the Indian Ocean off Madagascar.

I have a lot of good ones but maybe only interesting to me? And so many are incomplete, I only have have half the story, wish I had the rest. Not sure how to choose !!

Our family is connected to the Frank family, as in Anne.

It's actually my Grandad's story from when he lived in India and worked on the railways. He had to shoot a bear that was dangerous and left it close to the railway tracks, the local villagers were delighted. When he passed by on his way back a couple of days later the villagers thanked him and said that all of the bear had been used, for feeding them, their animals, for making clothes/rugs etc. Not a bit was wasted.

One side, the entire extended family emigrated to Canada back in the 1800s. My direct line grandfather and his family hated it, describing it as either freezing or being devoured by insects. They returned to England. His brother and family stuck it out and founded a town in Central Canada.

My grandma discovered this story in the earlyish days of Internet genealogy. She and her sister flew out there for the town's 150th anniversary and were apparently guests of honour. On their return they confirmed there really were lots of midges and biting flies!

I’m related to Jane Austen. My dad’s family was descended from one of her siblings. I guess that makes her my Aunty Jane?

I confirmed the family story that a former prime minister was fathered by my great uncle and then deserted by him and brought up by another man.

I want to discover the full story of my great great grandparents coming from Ireland to Scotland in during the Irish Potato Famine. I've seen hints on ancestry linking to poor law applications so they obviously had a hard time.

My Mum was interested in family history and discovered that one of my Dad’s ancestors, a farmer, was regularly fined for “leaving dung heaps on the King’s highway”! We suspect it was deliberate, my Dad’s family are a curmudgeonly lot, he’d probably fallen out with an neighbour and wanted to be a nuisance. 🤣

My great grandmothers brother was an abortionist.

My grandfather rescued a member of the Royal family when he worked on lifeboats

My second cousin was a Lt Col in the US army. Lt Col Oliver North.

On t'other side, I had a relation die of dysentry in Tblisi, unfortunately before the Light Brigade charged.

My df had a great-uncle, one Charles Raspberry who was a non-conformist preacher, travelling around in a trap pulled by a blind pony. The pony stopped at the pub on the way home, somewhere in rural Norfolk.

My uncle can trace his mother's family back to Mme Pompadour and his cousin's fil was a French marquis, now his son, who's an admiral.

I mostly only remember the macabre ones.

A direct ancestor killed himself in prison the day before his scheduled execution for treason (desertion during US civil war). His brother was executed by firing squad for the same reason, leaving (I think) ten fatherless children.

From here on there is a continuing line of seemingly inexplicable suicides (and one murder) among their descendants, all the way to the generation before mine.

Meanwhile another direct ancestor on the other side of my family got the Medal of Honor for rescuing lots of injured people whilst under heavy fire on the front lines in Cuba during the Spanish-American war.

Wow, that Ollie North (!?)

I have no famous relatives.

Actually... I am a very very (like 15 generations ago) distant cousin of Presidents Bush, and an assembly of other random celebs descended from some of the Mayflower Pilgrims. Bob Hope or Bing Crosby iirc.

Not a known distant cousin to Obama, though, boohoo.

My Grandfather's father was an immigrant and my Grandfather told me that he heard that he had taken a gun and threatened to kill himself unless his girlfriend would marry him. So they got married.

On Googling his unusual surname I found someone of the same age and surname as him, and a similar first name, similar location, went to prison for 5 years for shooting at a man who had been out with 'his girl'. He would have got out a few months before their marriage.

Not sure if it really is the same person though.

On my mums side a distant female relative was deported to Australia for stealing 3 silver spoons and a handkerchief. There doesn't seem to be any record of her arriving, so assuming she died before she got there. A male relative was involved in the Gordon Riots in 1780, he was sentenced to hang, but it was commuted to serving in the armed forces. Apart from that we seem to have been very law abiding agricultural workers and other lowly professions.

My ancestor's brother was one of the Cato St conspirators. Vive la Revolución!

Found a famous Roman treasure that’s now in the British museum whilst messing about in a river

DH family are rampant drunks and criminals. They are fascinating. Or they were dull as ditch coal miners who didnt seem to do anything of note except repeat the pattern of their parents. There's some real characters in there.

My Mum has a murderer with a historically significant story which doesn't fit with the era (he got done when similar murderers walked free - there's a pile of stuff there I've been unable to establish as to why he was the exception to the rule). She's also got a pile of missionaries who travelled the world and have huge stories and some noteable townspeople from the Victorian era too.

My Dad's family were law abiding. They are full of very strong women and men who don't seem to fit with the era (the women ran the businesses and were years ahead of their time whilst the men were very quiet). They'd be interesting stories in other families but other branches of the family definitely outshine them - for mostly all the wrong reasons!

@Nellieinthebarn On my mums side a distant female relative was deported to Australia for stealing 3 silver spoons and a handkerchief. There doesn't seem to be any record of her arriving, so assuming she died before she got there.

You don't say when this was, but people were quite often pardoned. I had an ancestor who committed a nasty fraud in the early 1800s and was sentenced to transportation. He was at Newgate for some time, as there wasn't always the space on board the ships, and they deported the more violent or habitual prisoners first. Then he committed another crime in prison, and was sent to the prison hulks en route to being deported, but was eventually pardoned and released. The authorities regularly pardoned prisoners at that time, as a carrot to encourage good behaviour.

Thats good to know, thank you. I do hope she got pardoned.

One of my ancestors was a doctor in the navy and the journals he wrote on convicts ships to Australia are in the National Archive and online.

Found yesterday that one of my relatives was sued by Mrs Simpson’s husband for slander (settled no trial).

I have a few ancestors judicially murdered at the Tower of London and elsewhere including Margaret Countess of Salisbury, now a Catholic martyr. An alleged botched execution.

My great grandmother was tried at the Old Bailey for arson and found not guilty though all the evidence points to her having done it so I don't understand the verdict.

An ancestor of mine worked on some of the exhibits in the Natural History Museum.

Another one decided to leave the east coast of Scotland, come all the way down to Essex (presumably by boat), finally ending up in Colchester, and got married on the way, but I don't know where. Haven't quite got to the bottom of that one yet. Super-common surnames the pair of them.

Very distant ancestor signed Charles 1 death warrant!

My great, great, great grandmother had two sets of triplets and three sets of twins.
“ Only” 😲 nine of the children survived.

My granny's auntie married JM Barrie's nephew (eventually, once her first husband died...)

The diagram of who married whom in the twenty years around 1790 in the village where I was born is fascinating. Haven't yet managed to avoid a big loopy line denoting "same person"

My 3-greats uncle with an unusual surname married Angelina also-distinctive-surname and ended up living the other side of Birmingham and presumably never saw the rest of the family again. They had five children in eight years, only two of whom were still alive by the time he died aged 39. Angelina was imprisoned for concealment of birth, dying a few years later, and Emily and Hannah went to the workhouse. Emily was in service, which is where I'm assuming her illegitimate baby comes from, and Hannah dies aged 14. Baby dies aged 18 months. I'm not sure the word "favourite" is entirely appropriate here, tbh.

Emily eventually appears to settle with some consistency of employer, and accompanies them to New York twice. I do hope her later life was better than her early years.

https://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/DEV/NorthMolton/WithypoolMurder

not a direct ancestor but part of the ancestors of the Reed family.