General Chat

What's the most suprising or unexpected discovery you have had when tracing your tree?

I was thinking about this last night when I was trying to get to sleep and I think I worked out that in mine it seems to be three:

Some of the medical conditions suffered by various members of the current generation were the causes of death in a number of instances....

I have found an uncle who seems to have kept marrying the sisters of one family when they predeased him! (Just as well it was a large family)

The fact that I have found a number of Catholics in the tree despite family history insisting that everyone was either a Presbyterian or a Methodist!

Unfortunately no links to anyone really famous or rich lol!

What's yours?

Did my grandmother ever know that her parents were not married when she was born in 1900. They actually married in 1914 so did she find out then or was it a secret from the kids.

I just found a member who was blind.

Also have been surprised by the amount of illigitimacy. Some couples just never bothered to get married.

Also was pleased to confirm family legend that we were survivors of the Plague in Eyam in 1665-6

Unexpected
This week's discovery that the child with my GGuncle and his family in 1891 was NOT the child of his wife, but more than likely his illegitimate daughter, born to the servant girl of his 1881 household. We think the natural mother died....a bit more investigating needed to complete this story.

I was surprised to find that one set of G grandparents married in a Zion Chapel, although both had been Christened in parish churches and Mum could remember her grandmother going to church rather than chapel in their Welsh village...... I still wonder why they wed there.There is a parish church just down the road.

Most of mine were Ag labs, and stayed in the same general area, but c. 1859 one of them sailed to New Zealand and married a part Maori lady.
Great to find someone who did something really out of the usual pattern.

Gwyn

Some divine intervention inspired me to look in a hospital register where I discovered that one of mine was admitted feeling very unwell and weak.He had a large lump on his side and his joints ached.

After treatment he expelled a tape worm which was.........wait for it.............
7 YARDS,yes yards, long!

Discovering why my gg uncle was in prison in 1851 - the same year my gg grandfather joined the Metropolitan Police was a bit of a shock.
I thought he'd been caught poaching to feed his family.
NO! He tried to derail a train so he could thieve from it!
Not only that - he was living in the same village - but not at home - was he thrown out by his parents because he was such an awful teenager?(He was 18)
From the newspaper reports, he sounds a right foul mouthed thug.
He also wasn't the sharpest tool in the box.
His alibi was that he was in a pub in the next village - but he also stated that he saw 'some strangers' leaving the track where the iron bars, chains etc had been laid on the line. D'OH!!

Ooo Sharron - bet he was slim!! LOL

A lot of my ancestors came from the north of England, were ag labs and fishermen, apart from my mother's gfather (who is also my father's ggrandfather!) who we knew came from London. A 'cousin' in Canada who I met through Ancestry pointed me to a book written in 1898 by an American guy with the same name, all about his genealogy, which linked with our Londoner. Turns out they were descended from William the Conqueror. Exciting in itself, plus various titled people including the secretary to the widow of King Henry vii.
But most exciting of all was that a cousin of mine bought a ruin of a manor house, and it turns out that it was owned by our ancestor in 1650! Spooky or what!

sharron, that makes me feel very squirmy!

Wow this is great...so many interesting stories...tapeworms..gross!

I first started genealogy on finding, at my grandmother's house, what looked like a 'carbon copy' of a newspaper report from 1842 about the death of the heaviest man in England!
Gran said he was something to do with my late grandfather, but this man didn't have the same surname.
I started tracing forward - this man had 2 daughters - hence the 'unknown' surname'
He was my 6 x great grandfather!! His coffin was 'nearly 7 foot long', and he weighed 32 stone.

I always have to sign off after mentioning this, that I'm 5'3 and weigh less than 9 stone!!"!

maggie

Just giving a bump because this is interesting!

My most surprising discovery was to find that my OH's paternal line originated from London and that his gt grandfather was a world record breaker for continuous piano playing...that is without any sheet music or performing a piece of music more than once and without a break.

Knowing nothing about OH's gt grandfather I found that he was b1855 St Pancras and was educated at the London Academy of Music.

His first attempt at breaking the world record was in 1887 which he did for a £10 bet...playing continously for 25 hours. 24 hours was the previous record by a military man in Calcutta.

The last successful world record I can find was in 1906 when he played continuously for 48 hours although according to a newspaper article he had been approached to consider doing a further attempt in Berlin the following year!

Linda

My surprise and sadness was finding my 2gt grandparents on my fathers side died from smallpox 3 days apart

My 2x.gt grandmother on mums side died from burning when her clothes caught fire which was common I have been told. Imagine the worry with large families and crowded conditions keeping children safe.
No wonder they made them play outside

My gr grand mother on my fathers side gave a false name on her marriage certificate, also gr grandad put down his father was in the army I have found no record of that, they got married in Halifax Nova Scotia. Prehaps thats where my grandad got the lies from.

lynn

Finding one great grandmother was a bigamist. Her father was even a witness at this supposed marriage. The first husband died 5 years after the supposed second marriage. Most of my family are catholic, which also inherited from this branch of the family. Did not divorce and was never caught or arrested for bigamy. The marriage was also in the same small town as the first.

Gail

What a different world it all was... but how interesting were some people's lives!

My Dad always said that I was the first girl in 5 generations in his family,
(he had 3 daughters.) When I was investigating the passenger lists from UK to Australia,I found that there was a toddler in his family who was almost my namesake,who died from marasmus on the way out here in the 1850's,so I was in fact the first girl in 4 generations,not 5.In another branch of his family,I had grown up hearing Dad's stories about the Rev.
Thomas Williams,who took his 16 year old bride to Fiji to spread the word of Methodist Christianity to the natives.He was eaten by cannibals,and his family had to flee the island in a hurry.It's mostly true,except his bride was 22,not 16,he was not eaten by the natives but as he had insulted the chief of the tribes by daring to touch his head,there was a major uprising by the enraged tribes and he did,in fact,have to leave the island in a hurry with his family.His diaries make interesting reading!Then he settled down in Victoria and lived a relatively quiet life with his wife and 12 or 13 children.One of his daughters,Janey,married Dr. Robert Lindsay,from Creswick,near Ballarat,and they produced the famous Lindsay family of bohemian artists,painters,writers,sculptors etc.That is also true.

My great grandfather killed his next door neighbour and got away with it!

This man had behaved 'inappropriately' with my great aunts (they were 9 and 11) and my great granddad, not surprisingly, lost his temper having consumed half a gallon of ale!

We have a number of failed marriages, too, where they simply separated.

A great uncle spent the last 23 years of his life in an Asylum and his notes make sad reading.

Not just the BMD's I expected to find when I first started all this over twenty years ago!

Birdi

Ifound out my grandmother had ababy girl before she married my grandfather,but on the birth cert her mother is the parent of the child and her father also,but i suppose him being church beadle it would not have gone down to well,but sadly the little one died age 5yrs old she was living with her mum at the time but the grandmother signed the death cert as the childs mother that was in 1892

Margot, The Lindsay Family, I am just so envious of you. What a history, and Australian Icons.


Gail