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I was watching a TV show, where a woman interviewed got offended at being asked if she had criminals in her family. I correctly guessed she didn't. Later I remembered a story about my family....
Do you have any stories? Since "criminal" is a vague term, I mean things like felon or life of crime, not for example someone arrested once for a minor drunken fender-bender.
One of my mom's uncles or cousins made moonshine in the hills of Arkansas, or so I'm told. I have no details. Otherwise, I don't know of any other criminal behavior in my family.
Do you have any stories? Since "criminal" is a vague term, I mean things like felon or life of crime, not for example someone arrested once for a minor drunken fender-bender.
To me, drunk driving is very criminal since it can result in people dying.
I dislike alcohol and especially misuse of alcohol, but if a behavior doesn't result in serious legal consequences or much harm to others (or serious harm that was meant to happen but somehow was thwarted), the person doing it is not my idea of a criminal.
My story:
I was told ages ago that a relative was in organized crime. I know he wasn't a direct ancestor and it's possible he wasn't a relation (I only know the branch of the family and the last name is common), but I don't know why anyone would want to claim him as family. Maybe I hadn't searched with the right name and only recently found information about him in Google. There are many mentions of him, actually; he was a "public figure" and an associate of some very famous criminals.
Spoiler
After starting this thread, I discovered he is believed to have deviously killed more than a few people. Then it seems he shifted to financial crime and finally was imprisoned by the Feds for that and something that reads like treason to me. I'm puzzled that he didn't get more time in prison, but perhaps he wasn't the ringleader or maybe he got out early because he was dying.
He died before I was born. I'm not aware of any confirmed relative spending a day in prison and most are very well-behaved. Though some, including me, can be ruthless sometimes. It turns out my background and his overlap in some unusual ways, but I won't be living a life of crime.
Last edited by goodheathen; 12-18-2017 at 12:56 AM..
I do some ancestor research for people who want to find out about a relatives military service record.
I tell the client that "not everyone who wore a uniform was an angel ".
It is a shock to some to find out that Grand Dad never got to the Pacific as a Marine, because he was doing a 3 year sentence in a USMC prison. Or that a relative who died in France was not killed in action. They were tried and convicted of the rape and murder of a British woman . In that time period, the sentence for that offence was hanging.
Stealing, assault, desertion, and the like are quite often found in US military records from various time periods.
Well...on my mom's side, there's an ancestor who stole a horse of his soon to be FIL's, and eloped with FIL's daughter. They took a boat to America.
And then, on my dad's side, my great great uncle was the lawyer for the Barker Gang. Not exactly a criminal himself, but he lost his license to practice law because of them.
I was watching a TV show, where a woman interviewed got offended at being asked if she had criminals in her family. I correctly guessed she didn't. Later I remembered a story about my family....
Do you have any stories? Since "criminal" is a vague term, I mean things like felon or life of crime, not for example someone arrested once for a minor drunken fender-bender.
My sister has done our family genealogy. We knew my great-grandfather had been left a widower with three teenaged daughters and then married an 18-year-old and had ten more kids, one of whom was my grandfather. They had moved to the USA from The Netherlands shortly after the second marriage.
My sister was searching the ship records to find out exactly when they came. She found the passenger list that included the name of the young wife and the three daughters, but our g-grandfather was not with them. She'd made a connection with a distant relative who lives in the Netherlands, and she mentioned to her that she was puzzled by this omission.
The woman in the Netherlands had the information. Great-grandfather had assaulted a coworker and was sentenced to prison for six months, so his wife and daughters went on ahead without him. He caught up after his release.
My widowed grandmother was threatened with arrest during Prohibition when she made moonshine to support her 5 kids, aged 13 to 6 months old. My then 13 year old mother intervened (my grandmother spoke no English). Starting that week, the cops came by every Friday for a bottle for themselves.
One of my many cousins was (what we called then) a juvenile delinquent. One Sunday morning on the front page of our local newspaper was a large photo of a car's back end, with a large heavy safe in the opened trunk; the car was listing to one side like crazy. The caption was a snarky report on how 3 teenage geniuses has managed to get the heavy safe out of a store and into the trunk of the car, only to have the old jalopy's axle break. My cousin was named in the story and the next day at school everyone asked if we were related. I said, no.
My cousin went before a judge (who had seen him quite a few times before) who said, well, you can either go to jail or go into the Army. My cousin ended up in the Marines and they set him straight. He came out, got a decent job, married, etc. Never any more problems.
There's similar topics in the genealogy section if you want to read around there.
I recently found out my grandfather's biological father was arrested several times. Larceny, assault and battery, sale and possession of alcohol during prohibition, a hit and run, and finally for failing to pay the settlement for the hit and run.
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