Any famous/unusual ancestors?

Irishlad11 wrote: »

My Great Great Grandmother was an illegitimate child of the Eustace family of Ballymore Eustace (the town gets its name from the family). The Eustace's were meant to be very wealthy and held powerful positions in the Irish Parliament in the 15th and 16th Centuries

Illegitimate schmillegitimate. We're talking bloodlines here; whether there was a piece of paper is beside the point.

The Eustaces were always the stewards and sidekicks of the O'Byrnes in Wicklow - for instance, it was a Eustace who conducted Red Hugh O'Donnell and the ill-fated Art O'Neill from Rathfarnham to the King's River on 6 January 1592; leaving them there and telling them to follow the stream, he hurried across to Glenmalure, Fiach MacHugh O'Byrne's home, to bring horses and men to get them to safety - but the lads following the stream came to a fork and took the side no local would, and then when the men came searching the weather changed, first melting the snow and bringing the King's River down in spate so they couldn't cross, then freezing hard; when they finally found the lads under a cliff, their cheeks and their clothes were frozen to the ground and Art was dying; they poured hot wine into its mouth but it just flowed out and he died there. They buried him and carried Red Hugh across to the MacHughs' place, where they warmed him and treated him. His feet were frostbitten, and he had to have several toes amputated, and could never again mount a horse without help. (You can follow their journey in the Art O'Neill Challenge next month http://www.artoneillchallenge.ie/route.html)

Three families were intertwined there - the O'Byrnes, the O'Mores (Fiach MacHugh O'Byrne's wife Maighréad O'More was a sister of Rory Óg O'More, said in my family to be an ancestor of ours), and the Eustaces.

With the passing out of power of the O'Byrnes, the Eustaces became the stewards of Lord Waterford, and as far as I know still are stewards of that land for the current one. There's loads of Eustaces spread along the strip from west Wicklow in to Tallaght. Good people.

P. Breathnach wrote: »

One of my cousins has managed to include (with solid evidence) Gregory Peck on the family tree. I am 15 steps away from the Hollywood legend, two of the steps being marital rather than genetic.

Beat that.

Here's a page with a newspaper picture of Gregory Peck visiting his Ashe cousins. Thomas Ashe was a wonderful patriot. A huge big guy, famous as an uileann piper, he was killed during forced feeding while on hunger strike during the War of Independence.

Thomas from Presence wrote: »

What is amazing to me is how little crossover I've gotten with smart matching on Ancestry, MyHeritage et al. For most of my families it seems my generation are the last gasp, centuries of dying young, not having enough sprogs etc.

So, so, so true. For instance, if the Irish birth, death and marriage records were put online free like the census, it would be easy to crowdsource links for people in the census, with their birth and death, and to add links for spouses and children and siblings; these could be checked for accuracy and locked online. It would be a wonderful resource.

And if Ireland could do that, perhaps America would come in; we could link things like the Ellis Island records, the draft cards and the US censuses to them, and then the US could link their censuses in the same way.

We're all mostly related if you go back a few generations, 'mere English' or 'mere Irish', as they said in the 16th century, when 'mere' meant 'exact' or 'pure'. Cut almost any Irish person and out will flow a mixture of Norman, Norse, pre-invasion Irish, Spanish, English and other blood, often with the odd dash of Rhineland Palatine, Huguenot French and whatever you're having yourself.