puszysty

I started watching "Who Do You Think You Are?" tonight, which is a show where celebrities dig into their family histories. I'm hooked. I mean, I'm a total history nerd anyway, but when it has a personal tie-in with it, it's so much more interesting than your classic textbook style. (This is what I like about Michener. He makes up a couple families and follows them over a few centuries in the area he's writing about.)

Anybody have some interesting family history stories they feel like sharing?

My family has a lake named after them in Michigan (after they stupidly sold the land that later became worth a lot of money). This family has an odd name (that is a morphing of a German name, thus only appears in America). Makes it easy to track down relatives...I just found a website that tells me I have a number of distant relatives in Denmark. Cool.