"Has anyone found anything interesting in their family trees that they weren't aware of?"
Quite a bit that I find interesting, I don't know if others will however.
I don't know about interesting, but certainly the most obscure thing I've learnt is that a distant relation of mine was the step-father of Dick Whittington.
Dick Whittington (the pantomime character), aka Sir Richard Whittington, was actually a real person. The pantomime story is very vaguely based on some parts of his life.
" the latest thing that's surprised me is the sheer size of my family ... but between the other 3 we've found 111 cousins!"
I can almost double that. My grandparents had between five and eight siblings each and had between 41 and 68 cousins each for a total of 205 cousins. For context, my grandparents were born between 1906 and 1915.
My parents had rather fewer cousins. My dad had 32 cousins and my mum only has 28 cousins. I have one sibling and 16 cousins. I have two DC and they have seven cousins, so the number of cousins seems to be halving each generation.
Although I also remember (just) my great grandmother who died in 1974 when I was nine years old. My paternal grandmother died at a young age and I remember my grandfather and his mother living together.
I have since found out that she was born in 1892, so was nine years old when Queen Victoria died. Obviously, I wasn't aware of this at the time; to me she was just some old lady. But I do remember that she was always very chatty and always had time to speak to me.
Looking back on it now, I just find it amazing that I knew somebody who was alive at the time and would have remembered the death of Queen Victoria.
The most surprising things though have come from more of a mix of both DNA test and family trees.
For example, one of my mum's cousins I couldn't trace at all. She was just a name with a date of birth and that was it.
However, I did a DNA test (my parents later did them as well and that makes a huge difference getting dna from an earlier generation).
Having done the dna test I came across a woman in the USA that Ancestry said was quite a close relative (2nd cousin or something like that) and that was very confusing because I knew nothing about her.
It turned out that her father knew that his mother had been adopted while living in England but that is all. The adopted child later married a US serviceman and emigrated to the USA but died at a relatively young age.
After we worked out how closely we were related, combined with what little information they had about his mother, I was able to identify who she was. It turned out that his mother (the adopted child) was my mum's cousin that I only had a date of birth for. So I was able to give them a whole load of information about their family that they had no idea about.
It absolutely blew her father away. He had resigned himself to never really knowing anything about his mother's birth family (she died quite young) and was overwhelmed that just from his daughter doing a DNA test he was able to find out about his real family.
As a result of following this up, I also found out that the adopted child's sister, another of my mum's cousins (who got placed in what we would call "kinship care" these days), got pregnant at the age of 15 by a 19 year old US soldier some time around Christmas 1945 and became one of the earliest US war brides to be shipped off to the USA in 1946.
In a second example, a DNA test showed that I am related to a woman living in London whose mother and aunt had both been adopted. It has been an interesting story to unravel. She was keen to find out who her mother's birth parents (her maternal grandparents) were.
It turns out that the grandmother was born in County Galway, Ireland and then married while she was living in Wexford.
Her husband was a policeman who had recently returned from China where he had served for six years in the Shanghai Municipal Police (many Shanghai policemen at this time were Irish or British).
After marrying, they then relocated to what is nowadays Kenya where he joined the British East African Mounted Police based in Nairobi. Unfortunately he died two years later and her grandmother returned to the UK.
About five years after his death, her grandmother gave birth to two daughters (my relative’s mother and aunt) in London and they were both adopted at an early age.
Normally, if a woman was unmarried then no father would be shown on the birth certificate. But in both cases her widowed grandmother gave the name of her (five year) deceased husband as the father.
In reality, given the DNA test, it appears that it is some relation of mine (likely from my grandparent's or great grandparent's generation) that was the father. I’m still working on exactly which relative of mine might have been her grandfather.
But leaving DNA aside there are still plenty of surprises as well (although having the DNA information really helps as well).
If you can connect to a well established family then the older records become a lot easier (the hard work has generally already been done), that is how I found out about my obscure connection with Dick Whittington.
On my mother's side of the family, several family members went over to America in the 1600s (not with the original Pilgrims but about 20 or 30 years later) and settled in what is now Maryland to become tobacco farmers.
Looking at the later records, especially the censuses, it has been a real surprise (it probably shouldn't have been) to see that their descendants were slave owners and that the slaves included very young children.
If you can establish a link to early US colonial families then it becomes a lot easier to trace family as they are very keen on genealogy over there.
That side of our family apparently now have two main branches in Baltimore and Ohio and there are a couple of them who even have Wikipedia entries.
On my father's side of the family, people later emigrated to the US in the 1850s and were part of the Mormon Trail where the Mormons migrated to Utah. I now have lots of distant relations who are Mormons living in Utah.
Later on, I found a couple of relatives who had been forcibly emigrated to Canada. This came as a huge shock to me that this happened.
Between the late 1800s and early 1900s around 100,000 children who had been placed in care with organisations like Barnado's and the Salvation Army were given some basic training; boys were taught things like basic farm working skills and girls were taught basic needlework etc and then, between the ages of 12 and 14, they were shipped out to Canada to be used as indentured farm workers and domestic servants (think something like "Anne of Green Gables" but not as nice and no going to school).
https://canadianbritishhomechildren.weebly.com/
Another thing that surprised me (and really shouldn't have) when I first started looking at my family tree is the number of children born very, very shortly after the marriage of the parents (even right up until recent times; my dad was born 4 months after his parents married and on my mother's side the eldest daughter was born 5 months later). It really is surprising to me just how many of my ancestors gave birth around 3 to 6 months after getting married.
In a similar vein, what we would nowadays call "kinship care" (ie a child being looked after by a relative) definitely happened.
If you are ever missing a child in a family tree then have a look to see if they are living with the grandparents or other relatives. I have more than one female relative who was an unmarried mother and then left the child with the grandparents while she went off and married some other guy.
Also, the number of my ancestors that were petty criminals and the rather harsh penalties they received was surprising. For example, back in the 1850s, my great great grandmother worked as a domestic servant from the age of 14. But, at the age of 18, she was sentenced to three months imprisonment in Gloucester prison with hard labour for the crime of “larceny from her master”. She had stolen half a pint of gin (about a third of a modern day bottle).
It seems like the whole family were a bit dodgy. Her sister was also convicted of theft on a separate occasion (she had stolen some clothes and bed linens etc) and her mother (my 3 x great grandmother) was convicted of receiving stolen property. So the mother and two of her daughters were all in Gloucester prison at the same time for various different crimes.
Entirely coincidentally, another ancestor of mine was a prison warder in Gloucester prison at this exact same time. So one side of my family were a bunch of dodgy, petty thieves and the other side were prison guards keeping them locked up!
On a different note, I also have several male relatives who fought in various wars including World War One, the Boer War in South Africa and even fought against the Russians in Ukraine (Crimean War). Others were stationed in India and China at different times.
But perhaps the thing that surprised me the most was to learn, shortly before my father died, that his grandfather had been awarded a medal for gallantry in World War One.
In his later years, my father started to be very forgetful about many things. But when I mentioned to him about his grandfather being in the army and having some medals his face lit up.
He had forgotten all about his grandfather being in the army but with my prompts he started to tell me about stories that he remembered his grandfather telling him about his time in the army and fighting in France and Salonika.
Hearing my father talk about his own grandfather and his memories of him is one of the things that I really do treasure from the time before he passed away.
Sorry that this got so long, I just started typing and it all just sort of came out.