A lot of us grow up hearing the same couple of stories about our extended family members….until an unexpected piece of family lore resurfaces. It may contain a plot twist, a scandal, or just a fascinating, fun fact. Whatever it is, it makes our family tree seem a lot more interesting!
User xloganmoose on Reddit asked, “People who have researched their family tree, what is the most interesting or ‘badass’ thing you discovered about an ancestor?” Here are some of the responses:
2.
“My great-grandmother stabbed a neighbor lady during a fight over a chicken.”
3.
“Not from researching a family tree but once during a conversation with my mom, she casually said, ‘But didn’t you know you come from a line of circus strongmen?! Your grandfather’s cousin used to lift a car as a party trick.’ FANTASTIC.”
4.
“My great-grandfather was knighted by the king of Greece for inventing a way to save the grape crops that were dying rapidly. He basically built an easy-to-replicate tenting system to protect them from a drought/heat wave that also worked to preserve irrigation water. When he came to the United States, he got the government contract to manufacture all of the tents for our soldiers in World War I.”
5.
“My great uncle was on the cover of Time magazine for being Harry Truman’s Secretary of Labor during WWII. He was appointed by FDR and served under Truman.”
6.
“My uncle got arrested and used his one call to order a pizza.”
7.
“I had an ancestor from the Midwest thrown out of the church for refusing to stop playing the fiddle on Sundays.”
8.
“My great-grandmother killed a Peeping Tom. She was sentenced to two years as a cook at a residential school in Canada. The joke was on them! They needed a maternal figure, and she got to keep an eye on her own kids, including my grandmother.”
10.
“My 10th great-grandmother was accused of witchcraft three separate times, beat the charges, sued the accusers for damages, and won!”
11.
Grandma lived in London during WWII but refused to take shelter during raids. The siren would go off, and she would go outside to enjoy life. Apparently, she thought that if it was her time to go, she would go while enjoying life. She was a bad*ss. She also built war planes.”
12.
“My great-grandfather was one of the all-time great hurlers of Ireland. Was on the 1911 championship team.”
13.
“My great-great-many times over uncle is E.T.A. Hoffman, who wrote The Nutcracker story and is considered by many to be one of the original modern horror story authors.”
14.
“My great-great-great-grandfather was the only surviving member of the family after a serial killer killed his entire family with a hatchet. Five siblings, his mother, and his father. Grandfather happened to be staying at a friend’s house that night. He ended up having five boys himself, so the family line continued, but damn.”
15.
“I found out I’m a 30-time-great-grandson of a monarch. That means I’m approximately 8,000th in line to the throne, which is coincidentally a lie I used to tell girls so they would text me.”
16.
“My great-grandma shot my great-grandpa because he cheated on her. Then she stitched him back up before leaving and staying with a neighbor. After a little while, she came back home, and they lived the rest of their lives together.”
18.
“Turns out an ancestor was listed as ‘missing at sea,’ then showed up years later in a different town with a new job and a new name. Family rumor says he survived a shipwreck, but the paper trail is wild.”
20.
“My grandfather had two families and they lived across the street from one another.”
21.
“My grandfather was not actually my grandfather, but an OBGYN who used his own sperm for IVF treatments in the ’40s until the ’60s.”
22.
“Had an ancestor who came home from months away trapping and found his wife cheating. The man who his wife was cheating with had a really nice rifle so he traded it for his wife. Got married again and had a new family.”
23.
“My dad’s side of the family included a bunch of drug dealers. Specifically, they sold opium in China (which was banned) and were part of the chain of events that led to the first opium war.”
24.
“I found out a female ancestor of mine was a journalist during the Boer War (at a time when this wasn’t really a ‘thing’ for women). I’m a female writer/editor, so it felt extra poignant when I found out.”
25.
“An aunt on my father’s side was the ‘Queen of Rumrunners’ during Prohibition. She ran a fleet of 6 to 7 trucks that made weekly trips between Chicago and Northwest Arkansas and Northeast Oklahoma. Most drivers were family, and most officials were bribed to look the other way.”
26.
“My great-grandparents owned a restaurant with a back room for gambling and slot machines. They had been outlawed at that time and were illegal. They always fed the cops for free, so when there was a ‘raid,’ they just put sheets over the top of the machines, and magically the cops never saw hide nor hair of any illegal gambling.”
27.
“I found out I’m related to Charles Arther Floyd, more commonly known as Pretty Boy Floyd. He was a bank robber in the ’20s and ’30s and died in 1934 in a shootout with the FBI. He’s an uncle several times removed.”
28.
“We had a family story that someone’s great-great-uncle was a cyclops (one eye in the middle of their face). After looking back to the mid-1850s, we found someone whose death certificate mentioned a tumor in the middle of their forehead, which was probably the source of the story.”
29.
“We owned a castle in England for almost 1,000 years. It burned down just a few years before I was born.”
30.
“My great-grandmother was one of the first female Black business owners in her small southern town. Jim Crow was in full effect. She ran an illegal juke joint on an abandoned farm. White folks would come over, and it messed with the white nightclub owners’ earnings, so they went to the police and got it shut down due to a lack of a permit. So she got a permit for a pig farm and stunk up the whole town out of genuine spite.”
Which of these family lores did you find the most interesting? Do you have any of your own to share? Let us know in the comments or via the anonymous form below!
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