Figures...a genealogy tangent when I'm not around.
I've got close to 1600 listed people in our family tree at this point, and it's still growing. I've been doing genealogy semi-professionally for about 20 years now. I'm 1/2
Volga German (both grandmothers' families came from different villages around Saratov and Samara), 1/4 Scottish-English (who migrated to the Carolina colony in the late 1600's/early 1700's), and 1/4 fuck-if-I-know. English or maybe Danish? They moved from Pennsylvania through various Midwest states in the 1800's before settling down in southwestern Iowa (where I was born and mercifully extracted from after six days).
Famous people in the lineage: Martin Luther, and an 11th-century Graf im Fulda (Count in Fulda. As opposed to a 'Count of Fulda', because Fulda was an Imperial landhold, so a noble there only held claim to the title, not the land itself. Compare "King in Prussia", which later became "King of Prussia" when Frederick gained enough power). Beyond that, my family seems to have been composed almost entirely of farmers. I am the Kwisatz Haderach of farmers.
My wife's lineage is a lot more interesting. She's a mish-mash of Swiss, German, Dutch, English and Protestant Irish. She's also a direct descendant of John Alden (one of the leaders of the colonists on the
Mayflower), which also makes her a distant cousin to John Adams and John Quincy Adams. That side of her family is loaded with New England blue-blood families, most of which were landed nobility back in England. There's at least three castles in Britain that have passed through her family at some point in time: Ford Castle, Northumberland; Castle Leavington, Yorkshire (destroyed); Ferniehirst Castle, Berwickshire, Scotland. Oh, and some of those English families can be traced all the way back to the Norman Conquest. Some were Normans, at least one was an Anglo-Saxon minor noble house that survived the Conquest and pledged to William the Conqueror.
Also interesting is that our ancestors were not only on opposite sides of the American Civil War (hers in the Union, mine in the Confederacy) but were on the opposite sides of some of the
same battles. I plan to tell the kids "if your ancestors had been better shots, you wouldn't be here".
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 16201409 times)