Interesting Family History!

[Piggymon]

This weekend I spent a long time with my Gran and Auntie looking through old ( and I mean OLD ! ) pictures and learning some family history .. I found it really interesting.

My Great Grandad was a spiritualist and held seances for many people including Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle and the Cadbury's family ( my Gran used to get mahooosve chocolate castles ! )

My Gran showed me pics of my family that were over a hundred years old.

I then visited my Auntie and asked her about things and she brought out some pictures from the seances that were held !

I'm going to see if I can borrow them when I visit next and scan them in but they were very much like this one :





There were about 20/30 of them and they were bloody amazing ! There was a picture of my Great Grandad with what appeared to be an American Indian coming out of him - My Auntie said this was his spirit guide.

Bloody fascinating

Anyone else have interesting family history ?

[Kell_ee001]

Originally Posted by Piggymon

Anyone else have interesting family history ?

eerr... not that I know of!

[Chuckles]

My Dad's father worked down t'pit. His father worked down t'pit. His fathers father worked down t'pit. Reapeat Ad Nauseam.

[Mark]

My stepdad's a genealogy nut. He has a few big folders full of stuff he's researched since I got him on the internet a few years ago.

My Mum's side of the family has people in Yorkshire, somewhere in Scotland (who had lost contact with the rest of the family over 50 years ago but we found them) and probably a few other places. My Stepdad's side of the family has connections back to the Irish potato famine (well it would do with a surname like Menah a generation or two ago).

Unfortunately I can't find out much about my Dad's side as it seems my Dad doesn't have interest in such things (no surprise there), and the best source of information would be my Nan who seems to have decided it's too upsetting for her to recount and there's no way I was going to even think about pushing that.

I've even seen my Mum's diary from the year I was born - complete with my birth weight.

[Nutcase]

A distan relative grounded the SS Great Britain

[Will]

I've managed to trace part of my family and our family name appears in the Doomsday book. However I haven't really focused much between that time and the relatively immediate past. Our surname is quite prevalent in the USA so we must have emigrated there at some point, or at least part of our family went to Ireland and moved on from there to the States.

[lostkat]

That's fascinating Piggy. Would be really interested to see those pics when you get them

My Mum's absolutely obsessed with tracing our family tree and she has loads of folders full of info as well as a database on her computer. She tries to get as much info as possible on everyone to get an insight into their life, because she's really interested in the social history aspect. She's always off to various records officies to get marriage/birth/death certificates for some distant family member or other. She's not interested in the family name as such, more the link of people who got together to form our family and the people in it... if that makes sense? She's even been to churches to see where our relatives are buried and visited the villages they used to live in.

So far, she's found that we come from all over the UK. We've been in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and some of the family moved over to the USA too. I think the funniest story she's found out so far was that my Nana's great great great etc. Grandfather died in the asylum. My Nana was mortified because my Grandad kept taking the mick out of her for it, lol.

[Garp]

Some interesting family stuff, little major stuff from a historical background. My Mum and Dad have been researching their respective trees. My Dad has kinda hit a dead end at the moment and needs to travel to Ireland a few more times before he'll be able to trace back his side any further. For one reason or another the british army bombed the central records office in Ireland to stop terrorists *shrug* I'm sure it made sense at the time; but unfortunately it took out the main centralised records of Births, Deaths and Marriages, so my Dad is stuck having to pin point exactly which parish in a county my relative would have moved to England from, so he can go look at the parish records
I do know one of my relatives on that side of the family was a slave ship captain, family lore has it that a victorian relative first started investigating our history, got back a couple of generations, realised what her relative had done and then stopped, destroyed all her work and tried to forget the past

The only major interesting thing I can think of was my Father's involvement with two German POW Officers who were disguised as british pilots, and how he let them take off in a trainer plane from a Carlisle airforce base, despite having sussed out they were Germans. Its been a while since I read the book, and my Grandfather never spoke about it to me whilst he was alive; even my Dad had forgotten about it. I only found out by chance because I happened to pick up James Follett's book "A Cage of Eagles", in which as part of the fiction he recounts the real life story. I thought it was a very strange co-incidence. Same name, in an area I knew he was serving in, until I got to the end and read the authors comments..
http://www.dswilliams.co.uk/follett/...s%20novel.html
There was something about the German Officer's buttons on their uniform that twigged my Grandfather to them not being proper british officers. Remembering there was a POW camp near by, and also realising that he was on his own on the airstrip with two large men and a plane, he let them take off in the training plane, rushed to the Command Officer and told them exactly what he'd done. The coup de grâce was that he knew that the plane only had less than half a tank of fuel in it, and would have to land at an airstrip within a certain radius of the air base to refuel. All relevant air strips were informed, and then when an hour or so later the plane lands at a strip, the maintenance crew invited the officers to go to the officers mess whilst they refueled and gave the plane an obligatory once over. The officers sit down with food in the mess hall, at which point the MPs turned up

[Stan_Lite]

One of my uncles on my Father's side of the family traced ours back to the middle of the 17th century, apparently our ancestors were the lairds of one of the small islands in the North of Shetland.
He went to the island and took pictures of the ancestral home - a small mansion by Shetland standards. Although there have been various bits tacked on throughout the years, it's still an impressive house and is still used - the present owner is a Lady something or other (no relation).

He couldn't get any further back than that because the parish records before that were in a poor state of repair and mostly illegible, which is a shame.

One thing that was quite interesting is that, up until the middle of the 18th century, they still using the Fathers first name with son or daughter tacked on to make the surname of the offspring (i.e. the surname of the son of Peter Robertson would be Peterson and the daughter would be Petersdaughter). This practice died out in most of the rest of the UK in the middle ages.
This format is still in use in places like Iceland and would account for why Shetland stopped using it so late on, since much of the culture in Shetland until recently was based on old Norse culture.

[Feek]

We're French