researching last names

[GingerVicki]

Has anyone else on here researched their parents last names? I did and apparently I have and it is quite interesting.

One of my parents last name is Ludwig and definitely German. The mad king is know for building a castle and being unfit to rule. Cinderella's castle is modeled after his creation. How neat is that. Ludwig's have other castles but history states that he was probably homosexual so I used his.


The other parent's last name is Campbell and apparently they had castles too. Although not as glorious, I am sure their people did not disapprove and kill them.


The Campbell curse

At Glencoe (and in other nearby Highland villages) to this day, there are signs in restaurants, inns, pubs and shops that state: "We Don't Serve Campbells."

Ain't that something.

[Lynne]

That's cool Vicki!
I won't mention names but my mother came from a once noble family. They had quite big estates hundreds of years ago but of course their wealth and power is long gone now and whatever land they had was appropriated by the Soviets after they came in to "liberate" us.

[Lacy]

My dad is heavily into genealogy. He has traced his side of the family back hundreds of years. He has worked with other people in Scotland, Ireland and England. The amount of documentation (marriages, births, deaths, census') and gravestone rubbings he has collected is insane!

Some of the cool things he found out:

We are related to Queen Bloody Mary. Not such a great person...but it is royalty!

My Grandma's family's last name is Torrance. The coat of arms is two oars with a saying "I saved the King". This is how that came about.
If you have watched Braveheart, you may remember two main characters.
Longshanks (King Edward the first) was a relative on my Grandpa's side. He tried to kill Robert the Bruce who became King of Scotland. Once when being chased by assassins sent by Longshanks, Robert game across a body of water. Two gentlemen were out fishing. They ended up helping him to the other side and helped him escape the assassins. Those men, were Torrances, and that is where they got their family quote!

During the civil war a set of brothers ended up on opposite sides of the battle. Thankfully they never engaged each other in battle, and both made it through alive.

Lastly, Sir Isaac Newton is my 2nd Cousin 11 times removed!

I love to hear my dad talk about everything, but the hours he spent is just flabbergasting!

Lacy

[GingerVicki]

Everyone has bad people in their family. We do not get to pick our family.

[Lacy]

Everyone has bad people in their family. We do not get to pick our family.

That is very true.

Hugs,
Lacy

[Kylo]

I know that I'm related in some capacity to the Kerr clan which were a major Scottish border reiver clan, sometimes running raids south of the border and involved in the politics of the region a few hundred years back. How directly my paternal grandmother descends from them I'm not 100% sure myself but she knows all the family tree and such. It's an important enough clan to have its own tartan, I know that much. 

Although she married someone English and took his name, and I still use his out of respect for him and my father, her side of the family has a more interesting history.

[Denice]

I can't find out what my last name means. It's Italian, so who knows?

It's a funny story about how my family came to America. We lived on the island of Ischia, which is off the coast of Naples, where they had been fishermen for generations. One day they decided to get the hell out of Dodge, so they banded together with other fishing families. They sold all their little fishing boats and bought one big boat. They loaded everything they owned onto it, sailed it out of the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic and pulled right up to Ellis Island.

[KathyLauren]

My dad is heavily into genealogy. He has traced his side of the family back hundreds of years.

Genealogy was my father's hobby, too.  He traced the full family tree back a couple of hundred years, and several of the lineages go back many centuries.  He found one line going back to English royalty, including William the Conqueror.  Before anyone gets excited about that, the theoretical number of one's ancestors that many generations back is many times the population of the British Isles at the time, so it is actually unlikely that someone's ancestors would not include William the Conqueror!

With more immediate ancestors, my father's family were Scottish and my mother's were German.  My mother, too, has a complete genealogical tree going back a few centuries.

[Michelledeanna1989]

For me my dads last name was adopted and
My dads step dad was incredibly harsh towards my dad, myself and
My brothers. But when my brother and I where born about 1 year apart
Are Nan choose are 3rd names so we would one day by choose have
A surname in which are family has ties too. So my last name is now my
Great Nans maidan name. With ties to family we still have in the UK.
My brother middle name traces back to the royal family centuries ago.
As well as a castle named after us in Scotland..
That's really all I know for my dads side and that his
Real dads family are Ukrainian and my mom's side is  mainly
Mennonite Mostly Prussian. So german and Dutch and Eastern European..