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Originally Posted by Bigtoe32067
My parents died young and I don’t have hardly any lineage info.
It would be nice to know. Maybe ancestry dot com has something. I don’t want to pay if they don’t though.
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Tony,
The Mormon church also runs a free site - familysearch.org. Chances are, if you know your grandparent's names and dates of birth and death, you can link up to existing information. It's not as nice as ancestry.com, but it is free. One issue, since it is crowdsourced, people who really don't know what they're doing, but have a copy of a family tree some relative did 20, 30, 50 years ago, go on there and try to "fix" the info to match their family tree, which is often very wrong. I just had that happen with my 5xgreat grandfather.
I've done a lot of work on my family tree, and my wife's, and for her kids, her ex's tree. My best story comes from his tree.
His ancestor, don't want to look it up right now, died from an illness while in the Union army during the civil war. His widow then married a man from Vermont.
Well, a short time later his first wife shows up in Wisconsin, and accuses him of bigamy, adultery, and lewd and lascivious conduct.
That riled up the locals, and a group of them came to the house, forced their way in, smacked them both around, then stripped her naked, tarred and feathered her, then put her on a rail and tossed her in the field. They then did the same to him. Turns out, he got out of the bigamy and adultery changes on a technicality, he was married in Vermont, but the ceremony was performed by a minister who lived in a different state, and Vermont law said the minister had to be a resident of the state for the marriage to be legal. He was convicted of lewd and lascivious conduct and served six months in jail. All the men who tarred and feathered them came up with alibis, and none of them were charged with anything.
Some time later, one of the men who allegedly led the assault was driving his wagon on a road that crossed the property, and he was stopped by husband #2, holding a gun, saying he was trespassing and he was going to shoot him. The man in the wagon pulled out his own gun, and shot the guy dead. He was tried for murder, but claimed self defense, and was acquitted.
That's more interesting than anything in my family history.
My dad's second cousin did write an autobiography, it's unpublished, but a relative sent me the first few chapters, which talked about his grandfather, father and his life growing up in La Crosse. That was interesting, but only if you're from here.