Interesting discoveries in your tree

[SecondStarOnTheRight]

Has anyone found anything interesting in their family trees that they weren't aware of?

We've been researching our for a long time now, and though we haven't found anything worth of an episode of who do you think you are, the latest thing that's surprised me is the sheer size of my family.

Grew up believing my grandparents had relatively small families. Struggling to trace the cousins from one grandparent at the minute, but between the other 3 we've found 111 cousins!

I discovered my grandfather had 5 other siblings none of us knew about. Stranger still, so did his wife, my grandmother. That’s 10 great aunts and uncles that didn’t feature in our Iives at all. I only found out because one of the uncles on my grandfathers side died intestate.

I will always wonder why this happened and if it was a result of them going no contact but it’s still strange that it happened on both sides.

We found a woman who had been tried and killed as a witch only a few miles from where I live now/ my surname is the same as the village so you can guess how long we have been here for

I discovered a sister of my FIL who no one knew existed.
She’d disgraced the family by becoming pregnant, killed herself and there isn’t any record of her burial.
A surviving family member, now long dead, flatly refused to talk about her, it’s like she never existed. So incredibly sad.

Potential 1800s serial killer on husband’s side who was hanged for their crimes!

It was always rumoured that this person was in the family and when I put together our tree on Ancestry, I discovered someone else (unknown to us) had already built a tree that included some of our family members, and a person with the same name and birth year as the known killer is indeed there. It shocked me more to find that one of the immediate family members of the potential killer is recorded to have died suddenly at a railway station on the very day the actual killer was found guilty and sentenced to death. No other details to go on but it seems to me that it could very well be the same person.

Unfortunately, as a novice, I’m struggling to find the sources that would actually prove it. I don’t think the person who has made the tree is aware of the potential killer link as they haven’t added the date of death, which is well known.

The actual killer led a life of crime and used many aliases, so there’s no clear trail of their family history at all. There are many records of someone in the same small area of London with the same name and year of birth being in and out of court and workhouses at a similar time, and I thought I was making progress, but the dates of these records go past the date that the killer was put to death. Perhaps this person is our relative, and because of the similarities in area/name/birth year/criminal lifestyle, it was joked about that they were the killer?

It would be great to find out for sure, but I seem more enthusiastic than anyone on my husband's side of the family are about the whole thing!

That's really sad. It's one way I'm grateful that attitudes have changed to young pregnancies and those outside of marriage. It's such a shame she felt that was all she could do.

I found out I'm related to someone famous!

I really hope you can find something! Part of me would hate to find a serial killer in the tree but it would be interesting to find information out also. Most of our ancestors we've only found information from official documents so you don't always get a feel of who they really are.

Yes. I discovered a cousin because she herself had discovered she was not who she thought she was.

We've just found record of a two month old baby whos cause of death is syphilis! Now all i can think is that mother or father had cheated.

Mother died of a haemorrhage in childbirth, twin brother died at 2 of measles, and older sister of Pneumonia at 12 months. The Grandmother died a year prior from what appears to be depression.

They seemed a very close family from what I've been told, it must have been a tough few years for them.

A boy put into the care of my gggrandmother’s brother, subsequently committed a murder when he was eighteen. It was a huge national story in the 1860’s. The boy was sentenced to hang and at his public execution, his cousin and her lover sold printed ‘ballads’ (florid poems written about the murder) to the waiting crowds. The cousin made a lot of money from this rather unpleasant act, but she suffered an even worse fate some years later when she died at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Her name was Catherine Eddowes.

I'm related to one of Henry VIII's wives. However I later found out we were related to someone sinister locally from a similar family. Big scary legand, beautiful house but no longer in the family.

We found that the man named as his father on my dad's birth certificate, died 4 years before he was born, so a little white lie had been told there.

I’m descended from the Dukes of Norfolk. Believe me, any wealth and aristocracy is way back. Strangely enough this line ended up as the poorest branch of my family.

My grandad became a genealogist after he retired. He did our family tree. He went back to 1700’s on both his sides.
Through his research he discovered one side of his family were originally from a small town in Scotland.
His grandfather came to our current town from there and a brother went to America. There is a town now in america named after the family surname.
He also did my nana family which was harder as her mum’s side came from Ireland in the late 1800’s.
After grandad died all I wanted was the family tree and i got it as no one else was interested. I find it fascinating.
Ive now been doing my mum’s family and a bit of DH’s.
I discovered my great granny on my mums side lived in the same tenement stair in 1890’s as DH relation. My great granny had a sister whose first and middle name was my DH’s relations first and last name. We think she was probably the godmother or something.
20 years later both families had moved into a different tenement stair and were neighbours again.

Say my great parents were named father A Smith and mother nee B Jones, they had four children out of wedlock before they married. Three children were given the father’s surname Smith, as if the parents were married. My grandmother’s birth certificate is strange - she was called say C Jones (ie she was given her mother’s maiden name for a surname), and her father was put down as A Jones, so he was given his wife’s maiden name for his surname. Meanwhile her mother was put down on the birth certificate as B Jones, nee Smith. I don’t know why her both her parents lied about their surnames on the birth certificate; and why they did something different for her, when the other three children took their father’s name?

Her parents married the year after she was born and the next three children were just given their father’s surname in the normal way.

It wasn't actually uncommon for children to be given their father's name if they were illegitimate. Especially if he went down and signed the birth certificate. In the majority of cases I've worked on the child bore the father's name if he was around, especially when a pair had multiple children.

A lot of what happened depended on the registrar. So perhaps when your grandmother was born there was a different registrar.

I have one case of a child who was adopted by his own parents after they married. They were informed by the registrar that only the mother could register and the only way was for him to be adopted by them later. That wasn't remotely the law, but it happened several times in that area and imo was clearly the registrars way of punishing women who had children out of wedlock.

In another case the birth was registered twice. Once where the parents were openly listed as unmarried and then again (just a few days later) pretending to be married. My only guess is that the person who did the first registration knew they were not married. The second certificate was signed by a different registrar.

I imagine there was quite a range of attitudes to unmarried mothers as there is now, but in general it was probably more of a stigma than now.
My great grandfather died in the late 1890s. By 1904 my great grandma was living with another man but not married. They had several children together all of whom were given her name ie that of her deceased husband and their birth certificates do not name a father. It was a long term relationship. They married in 1919 and were together til death. My great grandma changed her name on her 2nd marriage but the children all retained my great grandfather's name even though they were not related to him. I find it very strange and feel really sorry for my great grandma's second husband, it must have been difficult to be living as a family unit and not be acknowledged. He is listed as a lodger on the 1911census even though they had 4 children together by then. On the 1921 census they're married and he filled his children's names in as double barrelled on that, but I know they never used it and his son's son and grandchildren still have the "wrong" surname even now. On the Banns for one of his daughters' wedding there is a dash in the space for father's name even though he was actually there! I never knew the man, he died before I was born but my Dad loved him as a grandad and I was really saddened to think that his own children virtually denied his existence, presumably because of the stigma of being illegitimate then.

What does it say/mean please.

@Weepixie under occupation it says "chatterbox"

@Turkeyhen thank you. I couldn’t make it out.

It's the seven year old daughter, the name looks like Emilie Bowerbank. But the thing that is so cute is what is written in the field for occupation.

Normally with children it would say something like "scholar" or "at school" etc but here the person completing the census form has put in "chatterbox" as the occupation.

I think @SecondStarOnTheRight was right when she said that likely when the enumerator came round to record the details he must have had quite a chat with this young girl.

We found a relative of my dh who was a crew member on the titanic!!! No further record of him so it's assumed he went down with the ship . He also had a relative who buggered off to America (pre titanic) and committed bigamy and never came back. On my own side we found a sister of my great grandma that no-one knew anything about my mum actually met her new found relatives and then was very sniffy about them as they came from the 'wrong' side of town 😆

DF traced our family tree back and it included the bishop who was guardian to the Princes in the Tower at the time they disappeared.

I've just done some research for a friend and managed to trace them back to Henry VII. They were really pleased as they thought the royal connections their father discussed were just a family myth.