Coolest story/member in your family tree

My wife is a direct descendant of Zebulon Pike of Pike's Peak fame. She also was directly related to one of the people who defended witches in Salem.

Custer is a distant relation on my side of the family.

That's all I gots. :shrug:

 

On my dad's side, I'm related to Pocahontas (I have a family tree that traces it all the way back). That same side of the family, I'm distantly related to Lady Astor, the first woman to sit as a member of Parliament in the British House of Commons.

 

I think my daughter told me just a few days ago that her fiance claims to be an ancestor of Pochahontas'.

 

Of note...I have not seen a dime of that damn 5 (or 10, according to some stories) grand yet!

 

Nobody on the tree did anything cool in modern times. I do have one ancestor that died mysteriously in 1913. My grandfather's sister, aged 3. I have seen her grave and have looked for official documentation regarding cause of death, but the government does not have her records. There are also no obits on record in the local papers.

My grandfather was born after she died. He claimed she choked on a penny. I also heard a story about a fire. I don't buy any of it. Whatever it was it was particularly hard on the parents as both were dead by 1936.

Not sure I will ever find out what killed her.

 

He must be pretty damn old.

 

Don't claim Debbie? Whatever.

 

Jack Stapp? That's pretty cool.

 

Same here!!

My genealogy is pretty extensive - and includes a lot of medieval royalty and nobility - but most of it was done for me by others thanks to being able to trace my history to a prominent Mayflower passenger (a longtime Plymouth colonial governor) and numerous other early New England settlers. Both sides of my maternal grandfather's family were established in what would become Massachusetts by about 1630.

A bit closer to me, my father's father was reputedly a small-time gambler who was part of the Detroit underworld in the 1920s and '30s, maybe even later than that.

 

I've got a lot of the usual, a juror from the Salem Witch Trials, the Green Mountain Boys Regimental Surgeon, Al Spalding (instrumental in founding the National League, sporting goods magnate, invented the Doubleday myth). My grandfather's brother was a member of the 101st Airborne killed in action at Bastogne.
The cool stories though are my dad and my grandpa. Dad was a teacher for 40 years, taught math and physics, coached football, baseball assisted with track and cross county. Taught computers and coached wrestling - in both cases he knew little about it before hand but no one else wanted the job so he volunteered and learned everything he could over the summer. He even wrote one of the first programs to keep track meet team scores on computer. When he died, there was not an empty seat in the church for the funeral.
Grandpa kept his job as a factory foreman during the Depression. Guys who had been laid off would routinely come by the house. My grandma thought it was to socialize. She found out later he was giving them money. Not much, but enough to make sure they had enough to eat.

 

I didn't have anything to add to the Family Secret thread and I don't have much to add here.

My dad's a little bit prominent among farm magazine journalists. We were on vacation in Breckenridge when I was about 10 and stopped in a sports bar for dinner or something. Some Mizzou student in the bar saw the hat my dad was wearing with the name of the magazine and called him out by name, even though they'd never met. I thought that was about the coolest thing I'd ever seen at the time. One of my dad's stories also appeared in a grammar book my grade school used.

My grandpa on my mom's side worked at the Topeka Capital Journal for many years and, I think, helped build/invent/program the computer formula that predicted the outcome of HS football games there. He also umpired a baseball game JFK played in while both were at Harvard and, as a boy in New York, walked into the Yankee clubhouse while attending a World Series game and got everyone's autograph on a program (Babe Ruth included.) My uncle has the program now and I highly doubt I'm in line to inherit it, or frankly even see it.

I don't know of anyone in my family that's famous though. A great something on my mom's side was supposedly a cavalry man with a Penn. unit in the Civil War. A great something on my dad's side was supposedly a surgeon in Napoleon's army.

 

I'm a distant cousin of Abraham Lincoln, on his mother's side. She was a Hanks, which also makes me a distant cousin of Tom Hanks.