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My father's family had aways been proud of the fact that they had never owned slaves, even though they lived in the middle of many large cotton plantations. They had their own white farm helpers.
Well, while doing his history, I looked at the Slave Schedules out of curiosity. Imagine my surprise on finding out that they did own slaves. Two. She had about a dozen children still at home and 13 year old "house slave." I can't say that I blamed her. My great gr-father had a a "body servant", male, also a young teen. I have no idea what he did.
Anyway, I sort of delighted in telling my uppity cousins that the family DID own slaves.
I did the opposite of this. I found that an occurrence my dad mentioned in his mother's family, while unfortunate, was not nearly as bad as he had thought.
Nothing in my family that I know of beyond a couple of shotgun weddings, but while reading a history of a small town in SE MO, Bloomfield maybe, I read about a widow woman who married a man 20 years her junior and after a few years she wanted him dead, and the book didn't say why. She talked her 15 yo daughter into bashing him over the head with a sledge hammer and then they both hid the body, but not well enough apparently. It's stuff like that that makes my mind go crazy. Was it justified? Was she crazy? Was her daughter crazy after her mother forced her to commit a murder? Was the man a pedophile? I'll never know.
My uncle Jack was sent from Glasgow to Ireland by his father,for stealing a horse and cart when he was 12...back in the early 1900s... he then went more upmarket at 14 by taking a bus for a run round the countryside in Ireland....
I found out that one of my ancestors may have been a Jamestown settler. He was also might have been the first white person in America to be executed.
Very interesting. I discovered one of my (not completely verified yet) ancestors was supposed to be hung during the Salem witch trials. She ended up having her execution delayed and then ultimately stayed.
Very interesting. I discovered one of my (not completely verified yet) ancestors was supposed to be hung during the Salem witch trials. She ended up having her execution delayed and then ultimately stayed.
One of my ancestors was an accuser in a nearby community inspired by the Salem witch trials.
Happily, the whole mess unraveled before the women he accused were charged with anything.
I found several newspaper articles from 1905 that show that one of my distant cousins, who was about 50 years old at the time, ran away and eloped with the 22-year-old wife of one of his nephews (a neice by marriage). This cousin was a successful building contractor in the Midwest, and his 24-year-old nephew worked for him before he stole his wife.
On the morning they eloped this cousin had finished building a Masonic lodge. He went to the bank, cashed a $7,000 check, and bought two train tickets to St Louis. The nephew's wife then met him at the train station and they set off together on a five-month cross-country odyssey. After they arrived in St Louis, they were married under assumed names. They then went on the run, living in hotels in St Louis, Denver, and Albuquerque, NM. They were eventually caught in San Francisco, where they were charged with bigamy. They were sent back to their hometown in the Midwest and were put on trial, but the judge threw it out and no one was convicted. (The cousin and judge were probably good friends and owed each other a favor or two.)
Surprisingly, the cousin's wife and her nephew took back their wayward spouses. There were no divorces among them, and they spent the rest of their lives trying to hush up this episode.
One of my Polish great-great-grandfathers had a younger brother who was a Catholic priest. The guy ended up having four daughters out of wedlock. The mother was from Madeira. Because they were illegitimate, the daughters inherited their mother's surnames. We recently resumed contact with the family after years of ignoring them. The youngest daughter is turning 102 in October, and she invited my parents to her birthday.
Another Polish great-great-grandfather had a brother who shocked the family by marrying a black woman. Interracial marriage was always allowed in Brazil. But my uncle's choice was shocking, as even today blacks are virtually nonexistent in Poland. Most of the kids married blacks or mulattoes, so I have fourth cousins who are black. Some still have the Polish surname too.
I'm Anglo and I found out that one of my ancestors killed a black man....don't know if it was in self-defense or not but Im thinking it was a murder and my great grandfather was a womanizer who left his children to his inlaws and divorced his wife when he moved to West Texas.
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