I can go back a bit further, I believe he was from Bedfordshire and some of his relatives died in poverty or something. On the other sides I have a Northern Irishman with very big hands and a beard, a Scotsman who died in WW1, at least one Welshman and perhaps another Welshman. That's roughly the set of great great great grandpas I know. There are two or three missing that are unknown to me, one of them may be a gypsy of some sort.
He would be my paternal ancestor, so he's probably the most important. Unfortunately I have no idea who he was because his son sired my great grandfather as a bastard then disappeared. A carter who worked on fairgrounds.
Aren't family histories awesome? My great-great-grandfather was a farm boy from rural NC who somehow ended up becoming a silver amalgamator (or
azaguero, in Spanish) and working at Mexican silver mines and making a fortune. Enough to send his two kids to college for a couple of years (mind you, this is in the late 1800's). And then his college-educated daughter fell for a shiftless alcoholic who gave her 12 kids and then left the family to shack up with another woman.
That would be my great-grandparents >_<.
@Vector: E-hugs, chica. Wish I could offer advice. Moral arguments with parental units is one of the toughest things in the world. Because it's inherently a rejection of what they've tried to instill in you, for better or worse. So there's a lot of guilty subtext on both sides, which leads to people being more defensive than they might otherwise be. All I can say is stick to who you are. You may never "win" that argument, but you don't have to lose it either.