I feel like this can be an interesting thread.

Tell us anything you find interesting about your ancestors, could be something of historical significance or something that your family thinks is cool.

My grandfather was a member of the US Coast Guard and was aboard the Spar (WLB-403) who, with sister ships Bramble and Storis, was the first American vessel to circumnavigate North America within a single year. Left Seattle in May 1957 and landed in Rhode Island in September. He passed away before I was born, but my grandmother kept a lot of his letters and journals from the trip, as well as brochures and newspaper clippings.

I am a descendent of Captain William Riddle - a half Indian scout during the Revolutionary War in the Carolinas area. It is thought he played both sides of the conflict and was hung after getting caught kidnapping a Colonial Colonel for ransom. The rest of the family fled to the Kentucky wilderness and eventually made their way into East Texas after the Texas Revolution.

I have a 8x (or so) G-Grandfather who built wagons for the Continental Army in North Carolina during the Revolutionary War.

I believe it's his brother who built a 1766 stone house in Granite Quarry, NC that still stands

https://rowanmuseum.org/the-old-stone-house/

An ancestor on Mom's side is reputed to be one of the (European) discoverers of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Supposedly some cave still bears his name (Houchin)

According to my maternal grandfather, his paternal grandfather of German descent joined the cavalry and was assigned to John Joseph "Blackjack" Pershing. When he joined, he didn't speak English well and with a very heavy German accent. As a result, the Army misspelled his last name (even on his tombstone) and when he passed, the family eventually changed the last name to a more recognizable "Americanized" name - even though it was totally different.

According to my grandfather, he went into Mexico with Pershing in pursuit of Pancho Villa and was Pershing's personal interpreter as he had learned Spanish. He also served with Pershing in the Spanish-American War and later the Philippines. I have a program from the Christmas meal in 1917 that lists the men of the unit. He is listed as a cook there.

On my paternal side, one branch of the family is traced back to the Figgins or Feagins family. The same family, they just changed the spelling over time. One of those forefathers was in the group of men that was George Washington's body guards before and during the Revolutionary War. Unproven, but written in family history documents, a few generations later, one of them invented the crawler tractor.

Nothing as good as some of y'all have put on here before, but I'm proud of the heritage I do have.

My grandfather on my Dad's side was married five times, which is sad and impressive all at the same time.

My other grandfather was wounded on Okinawa while building the airfield there, I believe. When he was a kid, there was a fire on the family farm and his brother and father were injured badly. He put them in the back of the truck and started for town but ran out of gas on the way there. I can't imagine that. Unfortunately, he passed before I was born.

Good Scotch/Irish stock on my mom's side. My cousin traced that side back to to when they came over in the late 1600s to Virginia and as they migrated down to NC, Alabama, LA and eventually Texas. Lots of military service from the American Revolution to GWOT including a pair of direct relations who fought at San Jacinto.

Dads side is a bit harder to trace and no one has really sat down to do it, but my great grandfather was one of TR's Rough Riders and in their famous picture atop San Juan Hill one of the guys bears a very striking resemblance to him. He was hanged by Mexican Revoltionaries in 1913 on the border when he was working for Western Union telegraph Co, for not sending a fake message telling the US everything was fine.

Mother's family line ancestor landed at Jamestown Colony in 1622. Settled in central and western Virginia until the 1830s when they migrated southwest to settle in Alabama, then continued to stop in Mississippi for a while before continuing west to the Tyler, TX area of east Texas. After the Civil War they headed west to Erath/Eastland counties where they faced Comanche Indians. Also we have French Huguenot and Dutch ancestry in this line. We are related to the American firearms pioneer John Browning although I did not know this until a few years ago.
Dad's line were apparently Ulster Scots, perhaps originally Normans from France who apparently overstayed their welcome in Ireland as Protestants and came to Pennsylvania, then migrated into western Virginia and the Ohio River valley. They settled mostly in Kentucky and southern Indiana and Illinois. They also had German ancestry. My 23 and Me genetic profile confirms matches in northern and central Scotland, Ireland, England, Eastern France and western Germany.

Nobody i know of that stands out. But we hail mainly from the Manchester area in England and came through SC to Alabama to Texas. We do have an actual coat of arms in England. But I don't know of any famous actions or people.

Robert E Lee's father cut off some fingers of my grandfather during the American Revolution. Lost two Uncles from two different family members at the Alamo. These of course were just a few generations back though. Dub your grandfather obviously knew my relative also. Johnathon Lindley was with Andrew Kent when they left Gonzales.

On my dad's side, they were a bunch of criminals. One uncle killed one of his brothers in a bar room fight. He ended up being president of his union in the stockyards. Another went on a ride and was found the next day with a gunshot in the back of the head.

On my mother's side , they were farmers and owned a large part of Grapevine. They came from Georgia were he was the sheriff in Dade county.

Some interesting lives.

I've got a few stories because my mom was huge into genealogy.

The first interesting one is two generals from back in Europe. The first one is Michel Ordener, a French general in Napoleon's Imperial Guard. He commanded the cavalry at Austerlitz that pushed the Russians onto the ice and caused them to drown (they weren't on the ice initially, as the movie suggests). Despite being from common origins, our genealogy showed that he was somehow descended from a Swedish general in the 30 years war, though I can't remember the details on that. Anyway, his descendant (I think grandson), moved to the US in the late 19th Century.

My dad's side, minus this Frenchman, is almost all German, mostly just poor immigrants. My dad's dad's side came from Northern Germany, where they were Catholics in Lower Saxony, which was protestant. They left (presumably for religion, but possibly also due to poverty), spent a generation in Holland, then came to Illinois, coming down to Texas after the Civil War. My dad's mom's side was already in Texas. They came at the very tail end of the republic. They were also Germans, from Westfalia. Our clan on that side is huge and well-organized. Somehow, my ancestor's house survived and is now the home of the "Texas Polka Lovers Museum." Although it's been relocated to the Czech Heritage and Cultural Center in La Grange, my ancestor was German, not Czech. Whether he loved Polka or not, who knows. He probably didn't look up from a plow too much all his life.

My mom's side is mostly English. They were also Catholic and in their case almost certainly fled for that reason, settling in Maryland, which tolerated them because Lord Baltimore was pretty enlightened. One ancestor was an officer at the Battle of Yorktown (on the good side). That he was there is awesome, that he was an officer is particularly amazing. But whatever wealth our standing he had didn't pass down by the time the family came to Texas in 1824 and settled here. Because my family has been here for 200 years, I can say with truth that my family has lived in Texas longer than the Comanches did. There are some characters in mom's side. One was a pretty successful rancher South of San Antonio in Wilson County. One was actually a woman who ran a ranch after her husband died and had good success at it.

There are other ancestors of interest, but I don't really claim them too much because they're not on the main line. We've got Francis Scott Key in there, somewhere, and one of the early Apollo astronauts is a cousin of some kind.

Thanks BQ, I will be making a play for the throne…

Damn frogs….norman frogs but still frogs.

Another interesting tidbit I learned recently - we always assumed our last name (Dyke - yes I was made fun of lol) was a Dutch surname - mainly because my great grandfather that my family barely knew was called "Dutch". So we assumed, wrongly, that we were of Dutch ancestry. When I started doing genealogy research, we hit some roadblocks on that side of the family and could not figure out when/from where they immigrated to the US.

One day we had a breakthrough and realized we are of German descent and our ancestors had come over and lived in the Pennsylvania Dutch (Amish/mennonite) community before making their way west. We also realized that when they went through immigration, the last name was "changed" due to the fact they could not write English and immigration probably could not understand their accent. Most likely our surname is really Dichte or Deck or some other version than what we ended up with.

gigemhilo said:

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Another interesting tidbit I learned recently - we always assumed our last name (Dyke - yes I was made fun of lol) was a Dutch surname - mainly because my great grandfather that my family barely knew was called "Dutch". So we assumed, wrongly, that we were of Dutch ancestry. When I started doing genealogy research, we hit some roadblocks on that side of the family and could not figure out when/from where they immigrated to the US.

One day we had a breakthrough and realized we are of German descent and our ancestors had come over and lived in the Pennsylvania Dutch (Amish/mennonite) community before making their way west. We also realized that when they went through immigration, the last name was "changed" due to the fact they could not write English and immigration probably could not understand their accent. Most likely our surname is really Dichte or Deck or some other version than what we ended up with.

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Interesting. Ancestry research has changed so much with DNA. My family name is Ballow. We were always told we were descended from French Hugenots that immigrated to escape persecution. One of the family did a lot of research in the 60s and 70s and had us descended from someone that fought in the Revolutionary War with two of his sons. But it was always a bit unclear since my gg grandfather didn't seem to fit. There was someone with the same name born where it shows he was from on the census, but that person died and is buried there. We can't find a grave for my gggrandfather. With DNA we have got in contact with those that are descended from the other person and there seems to be no connection per the DNA. Also my tests show no French ancestry. But about 20% from Scandinavia. Which makes me wonder if I am descended from vikings who came to France and spent some time there before the Battle of Hastings.

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One day we had a breakthrough and realized we are of German descent and our ancestors had come over and lived in the Pennsylvania Dutch (Amish/mennonite) community

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My grandparents would have called anyone of German descent "Dutch".

I believe I read that it was a common corruption of the term "Deutschlander", which meant they were of German descent.

CanyonAg77 said:

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One day we had a breakthrough and realized we are of German descent and our ancestors had come over and lived in the Pennsylvania Dutch (Amish/mennonite) community

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My grandparents would have called anyone of German descent "Dutch".

I believe I read that it was a common corruption of the term "Deutschlander", which meant they were of German descent.

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Correct - I never made that connection until recently though and had always believed our verbal family history.

Another thing that is kinda interesting. My paternal gggrandmother was born in the Sabine DIstrict of the Republic of Texas in 1839.

Maternal gggg grandparents were Anabaptist Germans living in Switzerland. They were forced to leave Switzerland b/c they refused to join the Catholic Church. William Penn contacted them offering a new start in Pennsylvania. Many descendants ended up as Amish and living in Lancaster County, PA.

My dad's side immigrated in the 1850s from Oldenburg, Germany. Came straight to Galveston. 3 brothers and their families. Settled in mid-central, TX to farm. At least 2 of them were conscripted into the Confederate Army and fought in Galveston. Survived and moved with a big group of Germans to the area near Cameron, TX where they've been for the most part since. My grandfather grew up there, but moved his family to Houston to work in the refineries in the 30s and then also worked in the shipyards during the WW2.

My dad has spent a lot of his life buying old family farm land that we run cattle on near Cameron.

I have all kinds of weird things in mine, given I had one Jewish Eastern European grandparent, two British Presbyterian, and one Irish catholic.
I am descended from King Bela III of Hungary, who was apparently one of the wealthiest people in the world at the time. It didn't exactly funnel down to me. And recently through a genealogy test, my sister found out we had at least one ancestor from the Faroe islands. Not many people can say that given its population is only 50k or so and they don't exactly intermingle much these days…but probably came from the Viking incursions into England. Might also help explain how I make Casper look like he just had a week at the beach comparatively.
On the less whimsical side, I am sure I lost a bunch of relatives in the SS massacres of Jews in Eastern Europe in WW2 (they would have been in the area that had alternatively been parts of Germany Poland and Ukraine) or even the pogroms in Russia. I've just never had the heart to really research it. Same with the potato famines in Ireland.

Sounds like your ggggrandfather knocked someone over the head and then became Pierre

Maybe so.

In 1919, some American aviators were scouting along the Rio Grande and got disoriented. Instead of following the Rio Grande, they followed a different river into the interior of Mexico and wound up being captured and held for ransom by Mexican bandits. My grandfather served as a civilian scout for the army when they went into the interior to pay the ransom and bring back the aviators. The army got into Mexico and captured some bandits (but not those holding the aviators). They turned the prisoner bandits over to my grandfather and another scout to take back to the U. S.

The prisoners did not make it back to Texas alive. Hopefully there was an escape attempt. I have also been told that the other scout with my grandfather, had a grudge against the prisoners for a past atrocity against one of his family members.