Stuff about your ancestors you never knew growing up

[Lagmonster]

I grew up never really knowing anything about my family at all, apart from unique things that made the family news like my mother's pool-walking sharks, and my dad's Borlaugian work trips to Africa...until recently. As some here know, my dad's health is waning, and he's been growing more chatty about his life as he gets closer to its end. Now, he was never a talkative guy - did his work, played with his kids, but didn't really talk about the family, ever. Now that he's opening up, I'm finding out stuff that causes me to do double-takes.

For example, I knew my dad's brother was a professor. Physics, Guelph University. So lately dad started talking about his brother, but at one point he talked about going there to see him in Boston. Confused, I interrupted with, "Wait...why were you visiting Uncle James in BOSTON? I thought he lived in Toronto?", to which dad replied, "Oh, he worked there". "Oh?", I said, "I thought he was a professor at Guelph U?". "He was later," came the reply, "but back then he was working at Harvard." WHAT? You didn't think I'd be interested in knowing that anywhere over the past few decades?

Anyone else have any, "Holy shit, those were MY family members!??!" revelations in their lives?

[Liberty]

My great-great grandfather was the head of the KKK in his county in southern Indiana. Not cool. It's only slightly balanced by the fact that his granddaughter (my grandma's cousin) was the head of the Barack Obama for President campaign - in the same southern Indiana county.

[Aaron]

I suppose the only notable thing would be that my Dad's father was a cabin boy on a Hudson's Bay Company schooner.

[adam_grif]

I found out that my dad used to do illegal street racing in Brisbane before he was conscripted into the army, only to then be pulled out before he saw any action on account of Whitlam getting elected around the time he was deployed.

[tim31]

Grif back in those days everyone that got their licence was involved in illegal street racing, and Whitlam did them all a favour... My dad probably wouldn't have gone to university if they hadn't made it free.

Speaking of the old man, his father had died when he was about 21, and he'd never said much about him. I had a vague understanding that my paternal grandfather was a hard man to get along with, and that he and my father had never gotten along, especially after the elder had gotten remarried.
So last year when dad and I were having lunch and I brought the subject up, since I knew very little of the man. I was very surprised to learn that he had started his working life as a junior clerk for the New South Wales Department of Education, and finished is as the head of the department, second only to the Minister for Education. Jesus! And all I'd known about the man was that he loved model trains.

[Kanastrous]

My maternal grandfather was the leading scholar and unofficial community leader of his town in Siberia. One of the young men from his town (who was...not entirely right in the head) deserted the Imperial Russian Army during the First World War and made his way back to Siberia, where he was promptly arrested. My grandfather managed to get face time with the district military commander and succeeded in getting the deserter remanded to his custody to take home - rather than facing a firing squad the next morning as planned.

My paternal grandfather volunteered for service with the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army in the First World War. Now, at that time Jewish families were assigned 'proper' names by the Austrian government; while the family name was actually 'Mencer' the assigned name was 'Herness.' Meaning that his papers bore the name Karl Mencer 'r' (for 'rechte' literally 'straightened' or 'corrected to') Herness. Apparently the induction officer was nearsighted or something because he mis-read the 'r' as a 'v' so Karl Mencer (rechte) Herness became Karl Mencer von Herness, and if your name contained 'von' you were clearly upper-class gentry and eligible for officer training - in which my grandfather went ahead and enrolled. He did eventually inform the army of their mistake - after he had mustered out. He related fun experiences like being the honored guest in a town priest's home during some deployment, where his host spent the evening railing on about 'the Jews.' Grand-dad asked him have you ever met any? The priest said no, he'd *never* allow a Jew into *his* house. Hardy har-har, to that...

[Liberty]

My paternal grandfather was in naval intelligence when the whole Cuba thing went down in the late '50s/early '60s.

My maternal grandfather flew with the first planes to bomb Vietnam, way back in the early '60s.

[Mr Bean]

My Grandmother was there for the Pearl Harbor attack, my Grandfather fought the entire war aboard the USS Enterprise before transferring to the new USS Hornet in 1945. He also ended the war with two kills to his credit and three planes lost. Two to him running them into the ground one to enemy fire. Yes my dear grandfather ran first one Hellcat into the ground, then was shot out of a second and then for luck ran a Bearcat into a mountain in dense fog

[Temujin]

It may be bullshit considering the source (i.e., my Father), but I found out one of my uncles not only was a criminal, but also did work for a local Cleveland crime boss who apparently died when the he suddenly met the inside roof of his car via the bomb going off below.

Edit: If true, it looks like it would have been Alex "Shondor" Birns.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

I've known for a while that my family's a huge sprawling mess of German, Polish, Irish and British heritage. I have an Aunt who lived under the Mt. St. Helen's ash cloud. I found out recently that I have a small portion of Native American blood in me as well, as a great, great grandfather married a member of, I believe, the Seminole tribe. Most recently, I discovered a huge branch of the family I never knew existed living in Florida, connected to my grandma's first divorced husband (but still my father's biological parent). Apparently a long line of various psychoses runs in that portion of the family.

[Enigma]

All I know of my maternal grandfather was that he was a prison guard in Portugal.

My father was an MP in the Portuguese army and was a corporal(?) by the time draft term was up. He told us stories that he was not the most disciplined soldier in the army with his frequent drinking, smoking and picking fights (some of the fights were retaliatory in nature). I do not know if this was before being drafted in the army or after he served his time that he was invited to one of the secret anti-government meetings (at the time Portugal was under the dictatorship of Salazar). My father was tempted but declined and found out later that the secret police had taken some of the people that attended the meeting and according to my father the secret police, when they took a person away, you'd never see them again. I do not know if that is true or not but that was what my father believed the secret police did.

Oh, my maternal grandfather's first wife (before marrying my grandmother), was killed by lightning. She was ironing during a thunderstorm and a bolt of lightning crashed through the skylight and struck her. Apparently when she was struck she ran down a hallway with her arms outstretched because there was a scorch mark along each side of the hallway. Her feet were also burned and so were her slippers.

[Flagg]

I know my ancestors on my moms side came over on the Mayflower, so Pat Buchanan can get the fuck out of my country. On my dads side there were a bunch of Confederate war vets. Oh and on my moms side there were also slavers who shipped slaves from Africa to the Americas.

[Kanastrous]

I don't know, Flagg...I feel where you're coming from but it sounds like some of your ancestors were Pat's kind of people...

[Pelranius]

My maternal grandfather's side are a part of the aristocratic clan than used to rule the area around Kinmen Island, I think they were probably Manchus. He also worked with Chiang Ching Kuo, which suggests some sort of secret police connection (my mom won't say what he did, which supports my suspicions) and was probably involved in some Allied business during the War.

I think my maternal grandmother is probably part Malay somewhere back in her family tree.

My paternal grandfather was some bank official with a lot of money and land in Taipei, though you would never know looking at the way he lived. I guess he just didn't care about the money. His brother was a professor at National Taiwan University, had attended Peking University and was probably associated with one of the KMT's puppet political allies. Some of their relatives were officers in the Japanese military during WWII.

[Flagg]

I don't know, Flagg...I feel where you're coming from but it sounds like some of your ancestors were Pat's kind of people...

True, pretty much my entire family history is full of Indian killers. Still, I get a heap of satisfaction yelling at the TV for him to get the fuck out when Pat goes on about the Mexicans.

[Akhlut]

Hey, Flagg, we might be related, as some of my family comes from the Mayflower too.

As for my own family, I found out that through my father's side that our family name used to be "Athanasiou," before my great-great-grandfather changed it to "Papachristou." Why'd he do that? Because he was an Orthodox priest and his name was Christos. So, it was kind of interesting to learn that my g-g-grandfather was an Orthodox priest. I'm curious about his father, though, as Christos was born at the tail end of the Greek War of Independence in the portion of Greece that was liberated from the Ottomans. So, I need to get back into contact with my family in Greece and find out if Christos's father fought in that war.

I also found out that my grandfather was a shepherd in Greece before he emigrated to the US. Of course, seeing as he was born in 1893, that wasn't an unusual occupation at the time.

[CarsonPalmer]

My grandmother basically grew up as a peasant in Northern Ireland (County Down) for the first seventeen years of her life. She'd never talked about it before; I knew she grew up in Ireland but it wasn't until I interviewed her for an oral history project that I found out that she was dirt-fucking-poor (as in playing with chicken bones for fun and climbing a mountain to get peat for the family farm poor). I never knew that...and then she came to America after seventeen years in rural Ireland and was in New York City working on the stock exchange.

[White Haven]

My grandfather died before I could get many stories out of him, but one I do remember finding out was from his time as a B-17 pilot. Apparently he personally demonstrated that hes, the B-17 could fly with both engines out on one wing, dodging through cloud cover to get back to base again. It's sobering to realize how close I was to not existing as a result of that.

[Phantasee]

I found out I had a great great grandfather who lived in Australia for thirty years before he went back to the Old Country. My father says that he might have had a second family there, but he never said anything about it after he came back. Dad saw a picture of him from his time in Oz though and that's where the idea comes from. We have a copy of his landing papers framed in the house.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Didn't know until my granny's funeral that she was one of the ATT operators that spent the War working on breaking Japanese codeded messages.

[Dartzap]

Until very recently I had little idea of my maternal sides history. We knew they originally came from the border regions and some parts of Scotland, but it turns out the name is on the 'Bishops Curse' stone in Carlyle! Border Reivers! Huzzah!

[Ilya Muromets]

My maternal grandpa was a child guerrilla during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. Knows definitely that he killed two Japanese soldiers, possibly more.

I never knew until college when I interviewed him about his experiences during WW2 for a class project. He never, ever brings it up unless asked apparently. Judging from the quiet and extremely reluctant tone he was using when he told me about the brutalization of a neighbor by Japanese troops that he witnessed, it's understandable. Those experiences were hard for him to talk about, and I felt guilty bringing them up afterward.

After the war, he eventually enlisted in the Philippine Air Force as a P-51 pilot. I didn't learn of that until high school, when I was rumaging through a bunch of my grandparents' stuff and found a pic of him in uniform, standing in front of a Mustang.

[Night_stalker]

My fahter's side of the family is relatively interesting. First, we have the fact that dad's ancestors were apparently some of the Swiss mercenaries (Note, NOT the Papal Swiss Guard)that were all the rage in Europe up until they were forbidden in, and a bit further down the line, one of my anscestors could've signed the Declaration of Independence as a NY representitive, but the idiot forgot to sign a letter, which would've made him famous. That's life for you.

[Stofsk]

My paternal grandparents helped save some Jews during WW2. I never knew that until the last few years. I really need to get the full story one of these days.

[Bakustra]

A great-aunt of mine was one of the first policewomen in the Berlin police department. She escaped East Germany shortly after the war with the help of a family friend (her father, uncle, and brothers had all been purged as members of the Nazi Party and industrialists), and she met my great-uncle (an American soldier) when he was in the drunk tank after he learned about his then-wife's drug habit.

A great-great-grandfather of mine may have been murdered over his gambling debts, but that's a family story.

I'm related via marriage to George Armstrong Custer, but I knew about that as a kid. My dad, of very mild Cherokee heritage, would usually rib my mom about that.