We only finally started digging into the story of my great-grandfather. He was a pioneer in aviation and motorboat racing. He was killed before my mother was born. The legend was that a guy had taken his airplane to him to be fixed and he wouldn't release it because the guy never paid him. The guy shot him and got off because he was the governor's brother. That's the story. We finally got off our asses and wrote to a library in that county to look at newspapers from that time. We've got the name of the guy and he *was* shot in roughly those circumstances. Don't know about whether he was the governor's brother and how the subsequent trial went, though.

A guy my mom went out with, when I was an early teen, asked her to marry him 3 times. Each time she said no. And each time he had a heart attack.

Dude, quick asking. Seriously.

I need to remember to take out my contact lenses before I cook with hot peppers. On the bright side, at least the soup was fantastic.

Cash, I'm getting sucked into ancestry.com and I blame you. I can find a ton of stuff about my Dad's side of the family (immigrated in the 1800s, lived in Pennsylvania and Ohio) but my Hawaii family? NSM. I wonder if it's because my Hawaii family was there before it became a state?

Ai, shrift!

Kat, there are often genealogy groups for specific regions and ethnicities. Those folks are great to ask for advice because they can show you where records are if they aren't in the usual places.

Kat, it's like CRACK, isn't it???

By the way, I'm somewhere in 11th Century Wales. Bless their hearts for being such great genealogists.

Cash, if you've found anyone in Kent, holy CRAP, those people are thorough. I got back to the 12th century with that branch.

Yeah, I never looked into genealogy stuff because I know my records go back only so far; they were destroyed in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. But with social media versions of genealogy, it may be possible to find information if people had individual records held elsewhere. But it's a long shot, so I haven't been willing to spend any money on it. My great aunt went to Japan and did some extensive research, but yeah, everything ended at the bomb.

I suspect my family would defy ancestry.com, what with my mother being adopted (and my not remembering her birth father's name) and my father's family having fled Russia.