Legends

[Running4Borders]

Just remembered a cool one that's a true story. A pair of my great grandparents and their parents/siblings moved to America from Hungary in the late 1890s or early 1900s and decided they wanted to move back home after a while. They were on the RMS Carpathia (ship) heading back to Austria-Hungary with all their stuff when their captain took them off course to go help rescue people off the sunk/sinking Titanic. They boated back to America after that and stayed put and eventually had my grandpa. Imagine they weren't big on sea travel after that but might have just been a financial thing. There's a newspaper story out there featuring my great or great great grandma talking about all the crazy stuff she saw.

[szin]

The family legend on my mother's side concerns North African ancestry, and she does score small amounts of North African on G25 and has matches with fully North African people.

[Rufus191]

Our family myth was that my mom descended from Spaniards somewhere down the line. Surprise, surprise: we do have some Southern European ancestry, but most definitely not Spanish.

Ngl, I was kinda disappointed. Don't get me wrong: no matter "what" I am, I'm still me and proud of who I am. But when you've been told your whole life that you come from a certain place and people and it ends up to be anything but true, it takes some time to adapt to that idea.

If you are Dutch, could that not be Sephardic Jewish ancestry? Many Sephardic Jews, many originally Conversos, settled in the Netherlands (and also to England and the Caribbean, Americas). Sephardic Jewish ancestry, if you actually inherited any of the DNA (which for a distant ancestor is less and less likely as you go back into the 18th C) may show up as Spanish, Maltese, Sardinian, or for those that settled in the Middle East, as West Asian, Middle Eastern. This is because with Sephardic Jews settled under Ottoman rule, (as was also the case with Muslims) any child by a slave 'wife' would be brought up in their own faith and having children by slaves was common.

[alanarchae]

The only ‘exotic’ legend in my, otherwise all Scottish and Irish ancestry (traced every line back at least 250 years and some much further), was a family story that my dad’s mothers, mother’s family (Wilson) had some French ancestry (a woman according to the legend) back around 1800. i looked into this. My GGGGG? grandfather on that Wilson line did have a link to France of sorts.

He was a farmer in Angus Scotland but for a while he became a artillery man in the British army in the Napoleonic wars. He was at one stage based at the Woolwich Arsenal in London and appears likely to have fought at the battle of Waterloo in France. He returned to his old life in Scotland after. So I wondered if he had brought a French lass home from the war. But when I looked at the records of his wife she was a Scot from his home locality. So the trail ran cold.

So the legend was right in that the guy on this line had been in France at the right kind of time but the story of a french girl seems to have no basis. Well not on records anyway. Though it does make me wonder if he could have brought back a lovechild or a french girl to Scotland as a milkmaid or similar servant role and something untoward has been kept ‘off record’. Though it’s so long ago that i’d only on average carry under 1% of any ancestor from that era. I’ve never done an ancestry test (ydna aside) but my sister did 23andme and it didn’t pick up French specifically (though i’m not sure it could anyway).

[Mitchell-Atkins]

Had a family legend that started in the 1930s or possibly earlier, that was told to my father in the 1940s or 1950s and to me in the 1970s.

The legend was proven false by dna testing in 2012 thanks to the boldness of a man with a similar family legend...same y-dna line as my legend.

https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/ki...ost-396899

When he posted the STR results, Jul 2012, I immediately ordered a FTDNA STR test for my father, and a month later the results disproved our family legend.

This resulted in my 9 year journey to find my father's actual patrilineal great grandfather.

On 10/08/2021 a 110 out of 111 STR marker match to my father finally solved the mystery. Our shared patrilineal line TMRCA was 1838, and one of MRCAs son was my father's great grandfather. BigY testing followed the STR test.

Many of you are already familiar with the story so I won't elaborate further.

[szin]

My eighth great-grandfather George Tingle (b. 1710, Rawmarsh, nr. Rotherham) was apparently the illegitimate son of John FitzWilliam, an earl, landowner and Member of Parliament. It is known through DNA testing that his brother John DEFINITELY was FitzWilliam's illegitimate son. It does appear George Tingle married a woman from a fairly well-off London family so there might be some truth to the legend.

John FitzWilliam's father William was a plantation owner in Jamaica, and fathered several children with his slaves. While I do have some New World black matches, these are mostly of American extraction and thus unlikely to be connected to me through Jamaica.

[Kellebel]

Our family myth was that my mom descended from Spaniards somewhere down the line. Surprise, surprise: we do have some Southern European ancestry, but most definitely not Spanish.

Ngl, I was kinda disappointed. Don't get me wrong: no matter "what" I am, I'm still me and proud of who I am. But when you've been told your whole life that you come from a certain place and people and it ends up to be anything but true, it takes some time to adapt to that idea.

If you are Dutch, could that not be Sephardic Jewish ancestry? Many Sephardic Jews, many originally Conversos, settled in the Netherlands (and also to England and the Caribbean, Americas). Sephardic Jewish ancestry, if you actually inherited any of the DNA (which for a distant ancestor is less and less likely as you go back into the 18th C) may show up as Spanish, Maltese, Sardinian, or for those that settled in the Middle East, as West Asian, Middle Eastern. This is because with Sephardic Jews settled under Ottoman rule, (as was also the case with Muslims) any child by a slave 'wife' would be brought up in their own faith and having children by slaves was common.

The Southern European ancestry I mentioned was in reference to my mother and has actually been confirmed to be South Italian through both DNA and genealogy - so atleast on my mother's side it's most probably not mislabeled Sephardic ancestry. 

For my dad however, Sephardic Jewish is one of those ancestries that's been a very realistic possibility in both his familytree and DNA. Lots of signs, but no concrete proof as of yet. Almost as tough to track as my mother's Romani heritage.

[Beowulf]

There is a legend in my paternal grandpa side that there was an immigrant ancestor from somewhere of Northern Europe, but i could have never found anything about it although i must say that the maternal side of my paternal grandpa is very unknown unline our paternal line i must say.

[Albruic]

There is a legend that one of my ancestors of a very old Brazilian lineage was the first husband of Anita Garibaldi. The marriage was arranged and didn't work out. Everyone from that side of the family fled in shame to the city I was born and currently am living in.

From Wikipedia: After her father's death and her older sister's marriage, Anita soon had to help support the family and, at her mother's insistence, she married, on August 30, 1835, the day she turned 14, the shoemaker Manoel Duarte de Aguiar, at the Church Matriz Santo Antônio dos Anjos da Laguna.[2] The marriage, described by Anita as a "sham" in a letter sent to her uncle, was marked by a lack of interest in the relationship on both sides, and produced no children. After a few years of marriage, in 1837 or 1838 Manuel Duarte de Aguiar, as a monarchist, enlisted in the Imperial Army, abandoning a young wife.

Anita Garibaldi met the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi at the Farroupilha Revolution when he took Laguna by the sea with seven canons and many troops, proclaiming the Catarinense Republic in 1839. Anita helped Giuseppe in many battles.

Manoel, if it was the same person that married Anita, was my 5th generation uncle. I do not have any picture of him sadly.

Then, after the conflit, Anita Gabribaldi left Brazil to help Giuseppe with the unification of Italy.





Manoel was the great-great-uncle of the old man sitting in this picture.

[Albruic]

There is yet another legend, this time with the old man's grandfather. 

Back then, funerals were made at home then they woud carry the dead with a net, like if it was a big fish, and the grave was just a hole on the ground. 

Theobaldo de Aguiar died in 1870. Son of Antonio de Aguiar and Gertrudes. His brothers, Joaquim Aguiar and Salvador de Aguiar were carrying him. Then the net suddenly broke and Theobaldo's body fell into the hole. His younger brother, Salvador de Aguiar, swiftly jumped inside the grave, removed the red scarf that all cowboys used to wear back then and covered his brother's face with it. 
Later, Joaquim had a son and named him Salvador de Aguiar after his youngest brother deed. Salvador married his first cousin, Zulmira, Theobaldo's oldest dauther and had 7 children on which 3 of them were named: Antonio (the one you see in the picture), Joaquim and Theobaldo