Many of our readers have expressed interest in more community interaction on Family History Daily, so we thought we’d give you a chance to share some of your family stories!
Not long after we launched our Facebook page we asked our followers to tell us who the most well-known person was in their family tree and the responses were so much fun to read!
Here are a few:
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Now we’d love to know…Who is the most interesting and/or well-known person in your family tree? Post your responses in the comments!
Image: Ogalala Mother and Child, c1905
I have a few. Geoffrey Chaucer was my 16th uncle; Henry VIII is a disputed 12 GGF (supposedly had a fling with a woman and she gave birth to my 11th GGF, (this places some other English royalty in my line); Patrick Henry, 2cousin, 7x removed; and Jonathan Winters (American comedian) 6th cousin, 1xremoved.
He was my 18th Great Grandfather. I have a McNab border collie named Wallace and Wallace tartan carpeting in my family room. Both great reminders of nobel linage.
My most famous member of my family tree was my great-uncle,William Edward Jaimison, better known as “Bud Jamison”. He was a supporting actor beginning in the silent movies in 1916 (age 20) and making the transition into the “talkies” because of his great tenor voice. He was in over 360 films including all but one of the Three Stooges series. This was my paternal side.
On my maternal side, my great-great grandfather, Dr. John Starr Cummins, M.D., was the most interesting. He came to California for the Gold Rush in 1850, then went back to Ohio, moved his family to Indiana, and then to Texas. He brought them to California at the beginning of the Civil War. He left a paper trail that other genealogists would envy.
My husband’s 7x great-grandfather was Isaac Van Tuyl. He had two brothers, Otto and Aert van Tuyl, who were a ship’s doctor, and ship’s carpenter. They usually sailed on privateer ships that tried to capture pirates and recover their treasure. But in 1695…after people constantly accused them of being pirates themselves, they decided that the riches were with the pirates and they might as well join them since that’s what everyone thought anyway!
Otto actually became very famous (lots of books and internet sites tell about him) because he sailed with a rival of Captain Kidd and some of Kidd’s crew who had deserted Kidd. Otto was later accused of being one of Captain Kidd’s cohorts on Madagascar. When he returned to New York a very rich man, he was immediately jailed. However, he had so much “booty,” from his piracy days that he bought his way out of jail. He eventually was required, though, to give a deposition which was among the things used to convict Captain Kidd back in London. Afterwards, because he was such a likable scoundrel (even after everyone knew what he’d done as a pirate), they let him become the captain of a ship again! In December of 1705, however, while sailing the ship Castel del Rey, his ship ran aground during a raging storm on the shallow areas south of Long Island, between Staten Island and Sandy Hook. Even though they could be seen from the shore, no one could reach them because the storm had turned violent, with lots of ice. When rescue boats reached them two days later, it was discovered that most of the men froze to death on the ship–in sight of land.
A Side Note: Jan Otten Van Tuyl, (the father of Isaac, Otto, and Aert) had to escape from the Netherlands in 1663 after a bar fight he was in resulted in a man’s death. When he sailed for America, he only had a wife and one child (Otto). But he eventually had eight children, seven born in New York. And that’s how Otto and Aert just happened to be living there when piracy was in its heyday in the late 1600s, jumping on the bandwagon and becoming both rich and notorious! So, what happened to the “good” brother, Isaac, who was twenty years younger than his pirate brothers? He knew a good thing when he saw it…he settled down on Staten Island on his father’s estate and raised a family.
Maternal side: John Wallace is my 22x Great Grandfather his brother was William Wallace (Braveheart).
Paternal side: Catherine Baillon she was a part of the King’s Daughters program the French king promoted to send French women to marry French men of Canada.
Can’t wait to read the responses!