Any historical stories in your family?

Big Nasty wrote: »

One of my ancestors was a general in the American Civil War on the Yankee side.

Great stuff which one?

Spanish Eyes wrote: »

That conflict fascinates me for lots of reasons.

I spent a lot of time in the Imperial War Museum in London about it. The photographs... OMG.

Could spend days there really for everything else too if you had the time!

Unfortunately he never really received the recognition he deserved in our family or the wider community until recently when a plaque was erected in his home village.

I often heard my late grandfather lament that he would have been better off picking potatoes in Scotland...

Anyway his name was Thomas Patten, there's a little bit of info on Wikipedia about him if you want to have a look.

We have Afew historical stories in the family

My great grandad fought in ww1

My grandmother on my dads side met my grandad in a safe house for the IRA that her parents owned

Some of my grandmothers cousins were fighting in the gpo during the rising

My grandad on my mums side fought for the Canadian army in ww2 and fought in the dieppe raid which was apparently one of the worst battles during the war. He was a medic and met my granny after the war ended when he was working In a hospital in Toronto looking after the wounded and was renting a room in my grandmothers aunts b&b. They met the first day she arrived in Canada and were married within 6 months and were married for 65 years until grandad passed away 2 years ago aged 92.

Also my granny (the one that married the Canadian) her mum (my great grandmother) changed her mind at the last moment after she arrived in Southampton and decided not to go on the titanic but her best friend did and sadly died.

Think that's all

My many times back maternal great grandma and grandpa were Pilgrims, met onboard the Mayflower, fell in love and got married. Decades later one of their other descendants (and another distant relative of mine) named Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem about it called "The Courtship of Miles Standish."

During the American Revolution, one of my maternal great grandfathers ran messages for George Washington and later received a loan from good old George to purchase some land. Here's hoping he paid George back eventually!

My mother's family history basically reads like a highlight (or lowlight) reel of American history: in addition to the above, there are pioneers who went out West in the covered wagons, slave holders in the South, abolitionists in the North. We're related to 5 American presidents. And my 3x great grandparents settled in Dodge City, Kansas in the late 1870s, where they lived alongside some gunslingers like Wyatt Earp and were present during the Dodge City War of 1883.

Both my grandfathers fought in WWII in the Pacific. My maternal grandfather was lucky enough to be stationed in Hawaii after Pearl Harbor. My paternal grandfather was in the South Pacific and the Japanese torpedoed and sunk his ship. He was lost at sea for several days before being rescued.

My father's side of the family is the ethnically Irish side. All of his great great grandparents came over in the late 1840s due to the famine and settled in New York City. They lived in Irish-American neighborhoods for generations, a lot like the Kennedys but without the wealth or rise to political power. However, my dad was adopted and as it turns out, he's not a shred Irish, biologically. His birth family was Portuguese and settled in Hawaii in the late 1800s to work in the sugarcane plantations. They still live there and we haven't figured out how a Portuguese baby whose parents were from Hawaii got into an Irish Catholic orphanage on the East coast. But in the meantime, Portuguese Hawaiians invented the ukulele.

My great-uncle was the 8th person to walk on the moon.

When we were kids we were always told he was disgraced from NASA for selling moon dust to the Russians when he got back, which is a lot more interesting than the truth (he and the other crew members sold off some special edition stamps)

PLL wrote: »

Details of this are hazy as it is my oh's grandmother. She is Dutch and lived through the war, took Jews in and there is some stories that she walked a long way to get food (I think) for her family. Lovely lovely woman. Many times she has been asked to write about it all, she is 88 now. She doesn't like talking about it, but apprently there are lots of stories. Not something I would dig for more info about but would be fascinating to hear all the same. My daughter's are an 1/8 Dutch, which will be a lovely heritage for them to research.

Maybe you could record her talking about it/telling the stories?

Jawgap wrote: »

For previous work I've interviewed 'old soldiers' - it is very difficult to get them to talk. I remember one guy who I was writing a profile on (he'd won a community award) and I knew from his family he'd seen service in WW2 - anyway using the bit of info they gave me I started doing some digging to have some background to discuss with him. It turned out he had been evacuated from Dunkirk, fought with the LRDG in the desert, then in Italy - seeing some pretty serious action. His family never knew the exact details of his service (or the background to his DSO) and he became pretty upset when I produced my research (much to my puzzlement) - not being in the habit of upsetting pensioners, I agreed to leave out the detail in the final article and left his astounded family to digest the details!!

Another guy's family thought their grandfather had something to do with getting the post to soldiers because he'd mentioned being involved (again WW2) with something called the 'Special Air Service' before going on to work as a rural postie after the war - it was only after the Iranian Embassy siege that they realised that the quiet man in the corner who liked nothing better than an afternoon pint while watching the horse racing had been a bit more than a postman before he became an actual postman!!

Most, as you say, don't talk about their experiences.
My first employer was a plumber who'd been at Arnhem. I was young and naive and thought it was wonderful. He gave me what they used to call an Old Look[!] and said, "Lad, when we got over the drop zone we stood up to jump," [you know the scene from A Bridge Too Far with the paratroopers jumping from the Dakotas], and the line snagged. The aircraft were forbidden to turn back into the stream of planes over the drop zone, so we flew back to England on the return route. I wasn't upset - if I'd jumped I'd probably not be here today!
On a lighter note, when I was about 7years old a friend of my fathers gave me a spent 303 bullet and told me he'd shot 14 Germans with it - I think he was fibbing!