[Congressman Billybob]

I hope you enjoy this.

Admin Mod: please move this to Chat if you think it has too little community appeal.

John / Billybob

[Clintonfatigued]

Interesting, as I have Scandanavian ancestry, myself. There was actually considerable Swedish settlement in the U.S., mainly in the northern part of the nation.

[Ghost of Philip Marlowe]

Interesting. And funny how the skeleton-hunt can end so quickly.

My grandfather was sure we were descended from English royalty, so he began to do genealogical research.

When he got back to a point of ancestry that involved horse thievery in England and the Australian penal colony, he suddenly stopped the genealogical research.

So much for being descended from English royalty.

[blam]

I traced my family DNA which led me back to Denmark and Finland (haplogroup ‘V’). That is enough detail for me.

[xDGx]

So it seems that before his adventures and success in the New World, he abandoned his wife and family in then-Sweden. And that means that his marriage in America was bigamous, and that his children here were illegitimate. That’s quite a skeleton.

At least he provided for his presumably illegitimate offspring here (no doubt handsomely with his profitable enterprise). One wonders if he ever send a dime home, to the ones he left behind.

[Islander7]

Hey, you should be relieved your family tree forks!

My brother traced ours back across the pond as far the 15th century on one line. Some very interesting and unsavory characters roamed the world in those days.

Love your story!

[seowulf]

Supposedly, one man in the family was a horse thief who fled Tennessee to avoid hanging. He relocated to Texas, and died with honor at the Alamo.

Many people redeem themselves of their earlier indiscretions.

Scoundrels and heroes can be found in any family and often the scoundrel and hero just happens to be the same man.

[niteowl77]

It has been observed that family skeletons get less scary with each passing generation, and that has been my experience. My parents and I can laugh about old so-and-sos and their antics, whereas my grandparents wouldn't even discuss such things, even if they were trivial.

I eventually shoved genealogy onto the back burner simply because it got tiresome finding out that the "worst case scenario" was almost invariably the correct one, as well as the least exciting (and, truth be told, least "hoped-for") one. I acquired the notion that many of my ancestors would simply have been appalling and/or boring; in fairness, they would see me the same way (and doubtless be just as correct).

Case in point: about a decade ago, I had received some information that one of my first American ancestors was a somewhat illustrious military personage of the 18th century. There were a few questions raised by the story, but nothing that couldn't be explained by a little "illegitimacy." A few years later, I ran across some information that pointed (and far more logically) to the line as actually beginning with a rather stolid farmer born in Alsace/Elsass. Thus was my one brief link to someone of actual renown blown to smithereens.

Mr. niteowl77