Any famous/unusual ancestors?

seanaway · 01-12-2015 3:38pm

P. Breathnach wrote: »

. I am 15 steps away from the Hollywood legend,
Beat that.

Why are you lurking in a graveyard?

pinkypinky · 01-12-2015 3:55pm

Gregory Peck is related to the rebel Thomas Ashe. Friend of mine's maternal line links to Ashe.

pedroeibar1 · 01-12-2015 4:32pm

pinkypinky wrote: »

Can you plot that on a chart, Pedro?

It’s quite easy to plot Pinky:p

Up the tree back to my 10th great-grandfather (died 1620’s) who is the common ancestor. WSC is linked via the first marriage of our common ancestor and I’m descended from his second marriage, hence the half relationship. WSC is 5th great-grandson down from the common ancestor (so my 10 generations minus his 5 = 5 or five times removed and sixth cousins).
To be honest I let FTM calculate it for me originally!;)

P. Breathnach · 01-12-2015 5:20pm

seanaway wrote: »

Why are you lurking in a graveyard?

It's the methodology of genealogy.

P. Breathnach · 01-12-2015 5:21pm

pinkypinky wrote: »

Gregory Peck is related to the rebel Thomas Ashe. Friend of mine's maternal line links to Ashe.

Yep. I'm also connected to Thomas Ashe.

["Connected" is a great word in genealogy.]

Hermy · 01-12-2015 8:34pm

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.

I'll see your Gregory Peck and raise you a Jackie O! Well not quite - she almost married a chap called John Grinnel Wetmore Husted before Mr. Kennedy came along. John Grinnel's second marriage was to the first wife of my great great grandfathers older sisters great grandchild.:)

chughes wrote: »

That would be a difficult one to beat Hermy but when I traced back as far as I could I discovered that, using church records, my many times great grandfather and many times great grandmother may have been Adam and Eve.

I can go back a lot further than Adam and Eve.

A great grandchild of one set of g-g-g grandparents of mine married the great grandchild of another set of g-g-g grandparents of mine and their youngest daughter married David Hume Pinsent whose fathers cousins included the grandfather of Olympic rower Matthew Pinsent and his [David Hume's] namesake who was a friend and collaborator of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
This other David Hume Pinsent's niece married Richard Darwin Keynes and his great grandfather on his mothers side is Charles Darwin and he can go all the way back to the dinosaurs!!!:D

Of course I don't mean to claim any of these people or some of those mentioned in the previous post as close relatives or anything like it - we are merely connected as P. B. says.
But it does highlight one of the things I love about genealogy and that is the journey it takes you on as you travel forward and backwards in time.
And the Pinsent tree is a case in point with other connections including the economist John Maynard Keynes, the composer Ralph Vaughan-Williams and the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood.

Youngblood.III · 01-12-2015 8:43pm

A Hi-King of this fair land.

Jellybaby1 · 01-12-2015 10:41pm

chughes wrote: »

That would be a difficult one to beat Hermy but when I traced back as far as I could I discovered that, using church records, my many times great grandfather and many times great grandmother may have been Adam and Eve.

Oooh! We must be cousins then.

Thomas from Presence · 03-12-2015 11:25am

My brother has been challenging me to bring it back to Charlemagne on some side which bizarrely is just about in grasp. I am maternally descended from the Butlers of Ballintemple which gives me aforementioned Charlemagne, Edward Longshanks (the baddy in Braveheart) and lots of other ennobled miscreants.

On the Brunkard side of things it's looking increasingly likely that I share blood with Amanda Brunker within the last 240 years. Feck.

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.

L1011 · 03-12-2015 11:27am

Thomas from Presence wrote: »

On the Brunkard side of things it's looking increasingly likely that I share blood with Amanda Brunker within the last 240 years. Feck.

I'll trade you my SuBo for Amanda, I think she's marginally better!

Qualitymark · 03-12-2015 11:48am

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.

Emme · 03-12-2015 3:27pm

If the existing descendants of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy get wind of this thread it will go on forever as they are related to anyone who was of any importance.

As for me I am a peasant descended from peasants who did nothing noteworthy except work their fingers to the bone to keep bread on the table. Unfortunately one family ended up being evicted but apart from that they worked hard and kept their heads down.

Qualitymark · 03-12-2015 6:13pm

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.

Waitsian · 03-12-2015 9:15pm

Qualitymark wrote:

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.

I just purchased a book (having already borrowed and read it from Newry library) called 'A Twisted Root - Ancestral Entanglements' which is all about that very point. I'd thoroughly recommend it.

Any famous/unusual ancestors?

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