I found some guy who emigrated to South Africa having been born in England in the 1830s, a Jewish man about 250 years ago in what I suspect was Austrian Poland, Ukrainian Mennonites who lived in Zaporizhian (not kidding), people from Danzig, and Brandenburgers who lived in the 1550s, and one woman who managed to be born in the Russian Empire and died in Paraguay 100 years ago.
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I’m 1167 years back. I have lords and ladies, royalty, slave owners, probable slaves, native American royalty, medicine women, mafia, and some all around awesome people.
I know as far back as a few of my great-great-grandparents. Everyone lived their whole lives in the same county in central Scotland. Pretty boring stuff really.
I grew up with stories about my father’s side of the family but mostly just my great grandparents and younger. My great grandfather was killed at a prison camp during the Finnish civil war and there’s some slight mystery about the events that led him there, was he really just a very unlucky victim of circumstances or was he actively involved in the war? We have some documents about his arrest and apparently he was behaving in a bizarre fashion (naked but then they also list the contents of his pockets, what pockets?). He was working at a newspaper that seized by the reds, some think that he didn’t have any other choice but to continue working there. I’ve seen a few of the newspapers though and there was an awful joke printed about his wife talking too much which kind of makes it seem a morerelaxed work environment. My father’s theory is that he had lead poisoning as he was a printer which might explain all of his strangeness (apart from the joke which I guess is explained by the general misogyny of the time).
I also heard stories about his wife who built a small business empire (a cafe, a stationary shop and a public sauna) after her husband’s death and was such a strong personality that none of her daughters ever married and moved as far away they could.
I know that some people have made family trees but I’m less interested in lists of names than stories. The exception is an ancestor in early 18th century who studied in a university and became a priest, it wasn’t very common at the time. He also changed his name which seemed a bit strange to me as he already had a name that was associated with priests (Stickelius, they added a sort of Latin sounding ending to the name Sticke at some point). He changed his name to Lindblad (linden leaf) which made sense when I learned that his father died when he was young and his stepfather was called Lind (linden tree). I don’t know why he didn’t take that name but maybe he felt like a small leaf compared with his stepfather?
I can trace my ancestors back to great-great-grandfather, although my cousin has managed to create a family tree that goes all the way back to the early 19th century. They were peasant families, not particularly illustrious or wealthy, however, legend has it my ancestors (from a different branch from my cousin’s) lived in an area of the Apennines where they made trained bears dance at fairs.
Probably 1760s? In some branches. Not many odd stories, my ancestors were usually rural people. But on my dads side, there are a few drunk accidents.
1200s. It gets kind of difficult after that since we have many more surnames just based off your father’s name. A name like “Andersson” is just the last “son-of-Anders” who didn’t change his surname after that. You can still follow it generation by generation but it is a lot more work than simply following a surname. In my case you can follow it until there are no churches in the area which, since the vikings in my area didn’t really note these things that well.
Stories and stuff? So many that there isn’t room here really. Like every single person has a story with something interesting more or less. Mostly military people and three titleless (knights) noble lines (knighted for heroics in one case).
The Viking stories from my area are well documented on runestones and a famous story is that many in my area went to plunder some place in the east and they all died. It can be read on many different stones raised by their wives or children, so it must’ve been a great thing in my area.
I did a DNA test to see if this ancestry story was true, and yeah I’m like 98% from this area with the 2% being from a German mercenary in the 1400s, which we know well. It even listed the specific area in Germany where he came from lol.
On my mother side, my uncle is a genealogist and went back as far as the 5th century on some branches (I made a post on with every first names on namenerd but it was only back to the 9th century then) and you could see how name change from classicals like henri or pierre to medieval germanic one like gilda and even “weird” one like dragonette!
There are not a lot of stories found, especially because until the 11th century they were mostly peasants. But a random prince appeared in the 11th century, you can still fin the ruins of his small castle, at 200km from my home.
The most amazing thing to me is that all of them lived in the area and that we could find info so far back while not being nobles!
On my father side no one made the search but even if it’s more aristocratic and even noble, it’s so full of change, mistresses and different countries that it’s, somehow, more difficult than on my mother’s peasant side .
I know for sure my paternal ancestry until the Peninsular War (Guerra de Independencia) more or less, because part of my paternal family wrote a book about the ancestry of the people of their village. They lived in the same village in Extremadura most of the time, the last known ancestor was born in France, so to go further we would have to ask for more info at the archdioces, so we kind of stop there, I think it was before the war nonetheless, so up until the independence war. Another thing we know for sure is that we are probably of Jewish descent, because of surnames and the history of the village.
My mother side is more tricky. My grandma is an illegitimate daughter of an opera singer or something like that, so growing up, we were forbidden of searching more, even though we know who he was. All we know is that he got my great-grandmother pregnant and then married another woman because she was poor.
On my grandfather side we know that they lived in the same region of Castellon for a long time, as they have some surnames that only exist there, and we also know that they may have Jewish descent because part of the family was from a region with a lot of Jewish converse migration from the Balearic Islands (chuetas).
So it’s kind of a mix bag, I know most of the modern history of my father side but not that much from my mother’s. For sure, I’m partly Jewish.
My mothers side is the offspring of a King and a whore. Fathers side is very boring with mainly fishermen until 1685 where records become few and far between but one possible line leads to a 12th century priest that got imprisoned for theft and debauchery , and subsequently expelled from church. Although it is quite unsure if that guy really is my ancestor I love the story so as long as I have nothing better to go on, I stick to it! 😀
About the 1850’s on my father’s side I think and 1760’s on my mother’s side.
Compared to your story the only “odd” things in my family tree are that I’m Hungarian all the way down on both sides. There is not a hint, not a foreign sounding family name or odd document hinting of any recent foreign addition. They also lived in the same general part of the country that as we do today although some family got stranded in Romania after world war 1 that we have lost touch with since.
DNA test confirmed as much although the original Uralic strand is much stronger on my mother’s side.
The other thing is that my mother’s family converted to Lutheranism from Catholicism sometime after 1790 while the rest of my family is straight up Catholic.
I mean, I know my grandparents and they told my some stories about their parents and such obviously.
Other than that, never looked into it, I know enough to know I’m probably from the region for a couple of generations.
Depends what branch. Up until 1800-1750 practically all my ancestors are known. (So that’s around 500 people). Before Napoleon it gets more messy and only a couple of lines are known. The oldest going back to around 1550.
The only story I can tell from those 2000 people or so is that 90% of them were farmers and all of them lived within a 25km radius of my birth town. So we are not the traveling kind of people. 😉
Until now, I have traced my maternal side back to the 1600s. As far back as I have traced, I found that on my grandfather’s maternal side, the first born son in every other generation was named as he was (first and surname) – even though he due to normal Danish tradition should have carried his father’s surname (and he was born within wedlock). This tradition was by chance continued when my cousin received my grandfather’s name as a second first name only because he was baptized in Ireland where it is common to have two first names and they came up with it rather on the spot. We never knew of this tradition untill much later.
To the late 1600 or early 1700, depending on the line. That is probably connected to the power changes, in 1645 with [the Second Treaty of Brömsebro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Treaty_of_Br%C3%B6msebro_(1645)) we went from Denmark to Sweden and in 1721 with [the treaty of Uusikaupunki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Nystad) we went from Sweden to Russia. (To make matters more confusing, most of estonians were still the slaves of local [German landlords](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Germans) during all these times, slavery only ended in 1810s).
Everyone I have looked at has been living on the islands, just like we are now. Of course, the interesting people are the ones that I have actual oral family stories about. Like the ancestor, who operated a bigger official sailing ship between two islands and died in a storm in 1870s, as did half of his passengers. Or my great-great gradfather, who operated a village school in his own home at about the same time period.
My dad side back to around 1500, all just working people. All lived in same part of the country.
I don’t really care beyond the ancestors I’ve met while they were still alive.
Family members traced genealogy back several roots. On one side to Ireland (migrated to England around the First World War), another to Welsh miners, another back to the Woodvilles around the 15th century (same family as Edward IV’s queen came from).
I’ve managed to get back to the late 1600s down a couple of lines, but there aren’t all that many interesting stories there, as is expected from a bunch of weavers/miners/stonemasons/farmers. Mostly Scottish (no one particular region), a good chunk of Irish (mostly Donegal, Down and Antrim) and even one strand of *gasp* English.
Turns out my great (x3) grandfather got my great (x3) grandmother pregnant, took fuck all to do with their son and ran off down to England with another woman from near him. The pair of them started a family down there and to the best of my knowledge my great-great granda never really had anything to do with his dad (although surprisingly still had his last name).
On another side there was similar drama regarding a guy running off and taking no responsibility. Their son took his mum’s name though. I’ve got copies of documents from the 1880s with her petitioning the (court? records office?) to have him not be recorded as illegitimate.
A more recent family member owned a bear, so that’s a bit odd I suppose.
A whore in 1745, that is the first mention of her, we have no birthdate for her but we come from her second son, whom the priest took in as his. Now , she lived in a tiny mining settlement in Sweden, she the only single woman of the 3 women there and the rest was men. In the church book it says she is out of blame because she doing good work calming the men and sorting out disputes. She had 14 kids in the end and 9 of them lived to adulthood and got for the time decent jobs.
I’m guessing the Priest also got calm by her.
My father has done some research and I can with certainty say that in recent history my ancestors were unsurprisingly mostly Danes, though I have an ancestor on my mothers side that came from northern Germany in the late 1700s, he was some kind of “forrest ranger” in lack of a better translation, IIRC his title was “Waldmeister” or something to that effect. My great grand father on my fathers side was a sailor from East Prussia (now north-eastern Poland or Kaliningrad) but settled down in Denmark, got married and had kids, he died in 1962 so I never got to meet him, but I got to know some of his other kids who had moved to northern Germany, my grandmother stayed in Denmark.
And then I’ve heard rumors that there would be some kind of connection to the Russian ex-Zar family but I’ve never seen any actual proof, I means it’s relatively recent history so I guess it should be fairly easy to prove or disprove? So I don’t think the rumor is very credible, but it’s there.
And then in my fathers research he came across the results from some very distant cousin that had done research that showed that we at some point had a connection to the Danish Royal family leading back to Harald Bluetooth, I haven’t seen the sources for his research and neither has my dad, so I can’t confirm that either, but statistically speaking I think there’s like almost a 100% probability that you’re somehow related to anyone that was alive about a thousand years ago, so I guess there could be something to it.
I know up to my grandparents, and the most interesting story I’ve heard from them is that my paternal grandfathers both witnessed crimes of nationalist paramilitaries in the 50s as children but they remember them as sort-of normal events.
A decade+ ago I made a family tree and uploaded it to a genealogy website, by cross-referencing it with other people’s trees I was able to expand it to early 19th century (I could possibly discover more/earlier ancestors, but that would require paying for a premium subscription lol).
That’s just names and numbers though, the stories only go as far as living memory (so around WW2 era), anything beyond that is pure speculation.
I have one line traced up to 1347. Not the best time to be born in.
For the others, I only know up to the early 1800s at the very most.
The oldest ancestor I can trace back was born in 1576 in Switzerland. There are no odd stories, all of my ancestors were peasants.