My great, great, great grandad :)

[Dave7]

My Bro has been researching the family history. I take my hat off him to him.....its just too much hard work for me.
Anyway, he has now got back to the gt gt gt grandad, found out he was in the army and approached them for his record......they were very helpful.
I said to my Bro "if he was like me he will have been a senior rank".
Turns out he was demoted for being drunk.
Anyone else unearthed interesting family history ??

 

[Cathryn]

My husband researched his family. One ancestor was middle management at a coal mine (they’re Yorkshire folk) and he died when he fell down the main shaft!!!

 

[winjim]

My Bro has been researching the family history. I take my hat off him to him.....its just too much hard work for me.
Anyway, he has now got back to the gt gt gt grandad, found out he was in the army and approached them for his record......they were very helpful.
I said to my Bro "if he was like me he will have been a senior rank".
Turns out he was demoted for being drunk.
Anyone else unearthed interesting family history ??

Ha. My grandfather got accidentally shitfaced on some ridiculous strength homemade Italian spirit when he was supposed to be the officer in command of the airforce base. After several hearings where nobody knew what to do with him he managed to escape court martial and demotion as the war ended, he was demobbed, and you can't court martial a civilian.

 

[Rusty Nails]

My GGGrandad run a brothel in Dudley, and owned the British champion Greyhound.

 

[winjim]

One of my ancestors was an Irish privateer who originally worked for the British, but then switched sides to fight with the French against the British in the American war of independence.

 

[Dave7]

My GGGrandad run a brothel in Dudley, and owned the British champion Greyhound.

Now that IS a claim worth having

 

[Rusty Nails]

My Grandad buggered off/was sent by his family back to Italy when my Gran got pregnant in 1925. She was kicked out by her family and my mum was born and spent the first year of her life in the workhouse. My Gran was forced to work in service to survive and my Mum was brought up by an aunt.

Times were very hard in those days.

 

[oldwheels]

My sister has gone into our paternal family history. She got definite records to one who died in 1395 and a doubtful one which may have been the father born in 1303.
I those days some of them are recorded as killed in battle. Scottish borders family so probably a bit of cattle thievery on the side.
Constantly under threat from the Hume family who eventually won by murdering the males and forcibly marrying the females thus taking over the castle and lands which they had coveted for years.
Later there were notable Covenanters and in James 1V time one was Archbishop of Glasgow.

 

[Chris S]

A second cousin traced our family back to 1790. One of my ancestors, Charles Irwin, was awarded the Victoria Cross but was buried in an unmarked grave. When the local British Legion found out about it they put a stained glass window in the church in his memory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Irwin

 

[Tail End Charlie]

One of my ancestors is buried in Westminster Abbey - William Shield, Master of the King's Music and may have composed Auld Lang Syne.

 

[BSOh]

My g g grandfather and grandmother were arrested for accessory to murder after the fact 😲the murderer shot and killed the local gamekeeper who was known for handing out rough justice to the locals who were struggling to feed their families and poaching to survive.

The murderer was hanged, but they got off completely. They also lost 2 children when they ate rotten food, and were later imprisoned for child neglect.

Times were very hard in those days.

Indeed

 

[tony111]

My grandads family in Ireland sold the cow that they owned to enable him to escape the potato famine and move to Castleford in Yorkshire as there was employment to be had in the coal mines there. Fast forward a lot of years and 2 of my brothers went over to Ireland while tracing our family tree. They called in a museum dedicated to the famine. The girl who worked there said she'd never met a direct descendant of a famine survivor and wasn't sure if they were telling the truth. They explained that our grandad became a father in his 50's as did our own father, once she realised the maths worked she believed their story.

 

[swee'pea99]

A second cousin traced our family back to 1790. One of my ancestors, Charles Irwin, was awarded the Victoria Cross but was buried in an unmarked grave. When the local British Legion found out about it they put a stained glass window in the church in his honor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Irwin

 

[postman]

Right a bit of scandal.My dad told me his dad was the result of a visit of some soldiers to a little town,where a bit of a fumble and nine months later out popped grandad.Well that was not true.Mrs P has looked in to the family and grandad was actually the result of a brother and sister having a bit with each other,they were not satisfied with just one so they had a second go.

 

[Reynard]

My paternal grandfather was sent to a Siberian gulag for leading an anti-czarist student protest in Warsaw. It happened to be the same gulag that Lenin had been sent to. The two men met and became good friends, and then, on release, went on holiday together in Zakopane. Grandad Arthur was an army man through and through, started out as a rifleman, awarded the Krzyz Waleczny three times for valour on the battlefield, and eventually rose to the rank of colonel. He was also awarded the Legion d'Honneur. Afterwards, he became a senior politician in the Polish government during the 1930s.

My paternal great uncle Edward was shot in the Katyn massacre.

My maternal great great grandfather owned a paint factory and died in an industrial accident - he was inspecting a new vat of paint being cooked up, slipped on the gantry and fell in.

My maternal grandfather was a Belgian army sergeant in charge of a machine gun crew who took out a German machine gun post holed out in a windmill on the QT during WW1. A French officer had access to some intelligence, so borrowed grandad and his gun, and they quite literally caught the Germans with their pants down. Because he wasn't supposed to do it, he never got commended, but it saved a hell of a lot of lives. In WW2, grandad was a member of the Belgian resistance, though exactly what he did, I'm not sure. On civvy street, he was an accountant in a cloth mill and a local politician.