What is your most amazing (personal) family history discovery?

[wildtech]

I had been researching my 4th great granduncle on my paternal side.  He was a butcher in Richmond, Surrey and had built a Baptist Chapel in 1829.  During this research I found he and his wife had attended the Baptist Chapel in Brentford and had been baptised there by the minister John Andrews Jones.  One day I was looking through some papers my cousin had sent me with the ancestors of my paternal grandmother and John Andrews Jones was my 4th great grandfather.  This prompted me to look into the life of Rev Jones and I discovered that his first pastorate had been in Ringstead in Northamptonshire.  This rung a bell and I remembered that my maternal grandfather's family had come from there.  I contacted Ringstead Baptist and a VERY helpful member of the Chapel looked into the history of the names and dates I already had and indeed the family had attended the chapel during Rev Jones' pastorate.  But that was not all.  Just for interest she included and article which concerned a member of her own family but the key person in it was a Mr Weekly from the neighbouring village of Irthligbourgh.  The Wild family of Sipson (my father's side) married with the Weekly family who had originated from Irthlingbourgh in more than one generation.  As Ringstead and Irthlingbourgh were neighbouring villages it seems quite possible that my mother's side of the family may have Weekly blood too!

[Josephine]

Wow, I am so enjoying the wonderful stories in this thread!

Tracing my father's mother's family and building a tree from scratch was amazing because we knew almost nothing about her.

Suspecting, and then proving, that my 4th-great-grandfather (on my mother's side) was Jewish was pretty amazing, since that knowledge had not been passed down to us by my mother's grandmother (and she had to have known, since she had Jewish aunts, uncles and cousins).

Regards,
Josephine

[Enfield Medcalf]

Looking at my great uncle's wifes tree.  He moved to the USA in early 1900;s and married.  Just recently I had some spare time and started to look at her forebears,  Within a few minutes I was back into Glasgow in the 1200's via Norther Ireland and all outlined even with a book written on these families.

[Aulus]

Looking at my great uncle's wifes tree.  He moved to the USA in early 1900;s and married.  Just recently I had some spare time and started to look at her forebears,  Within a few minutes I was back into Glasgow in the 1200's via Norther Ireland and all outlined even with a book written on these families.

The 1200s!!!  Wow!

You lucky so and so.  It takes most of us years to get back to the 17th century!

[Enfield Medcalf]

Stubbsy,
Have you read 'Big Chief Elizabeth'  by Giles Milton?  It's about the 1st ships sailing to the US.

[Nick29]

That sounds interesting !  One of my distant cousins in the Griffin line was born in Isle of Wight, Virginia, USA in 1644.  I think the family originally came from Wales, but I haven't been able to trace them.

[soulsister]

I think I may have added this story somewhere before but here it is again!

When I started on the family search we traced my gt gt grandmother back to a little village in Huntingdonshire called Brington. As a little holiday we decided to visit the place whilst staying in Huntingdonshire. Brington is now almost empty and is made of a handful of houses, a church and a post office.

On visiting the churchyard we found that the few stones in the yard were ALL our familys's! We looked for residents to ask about the history of the church and were sent in the direction of the local historian who lived in the village, and lo and behold the house he lived in had been owned by our family over 150 yrs ago! The gentleman had also done the history of his house and in his possession he had wills belonging to our forebears and our family tree going back to 1746!!

Not bad for a days work!! 

Emma

[alftabor]

One of my great uncles died of dementia in Salem,Oregon after living for years in Portland.
he had a sizable estate valued at 40,000 american dollars in the 1890s
 there was a court case to appoint a trustee to dispose of the estate which comprised real estate in Portland.
Among the beneficiaries were several people livng in Japan and Beunos Aires,Argentina.
My family having been in South Australia for over a century we never knew that our ancestors had spread throughout the World.
One beneficiary had  an unusual second name (Alt)
I chased this name which I guessed to be a family maternal name and made contact with the family living in Argentina.
I had discovered third cousins and offsprings and have had regular contact since  that time.
This family had no idea who and where their great grandfather lived and died.
I found him in Kyogo,Japan where he had died,
The Argentinians had a photo of one of their ancestors talking to a Japanese man and had not known about his sojourn there.
This all came as a great suprise to me.
Alf

[Stubbsy]

My Milner ancestors were from remote Swaledale in Yorkshire. For some reason the parish was part of the diocese of the Bishop of Chester, on the other side of England.

But quite by chance I found the original will of Edmund Milner, written on calf skin vellum in Latin and dated 1500 in a dusty archive just a few miles from where I live in Leeds. I then found his son William's will too, dated 1530.

Once translated they made fascinating reading - but it was all a bit spooky, remembering that they had actually personally handled and signed those documents.

John