Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Who is Your "Bad Behavior" Relative?

Genealogy isn't all sweetness and light.  This week Randy Seaver's challenge for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun is to think about the less pleasant members of our family (maybe not as much fun as usual?):

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible music):

(1)  Who is one of your relatives (ancestor or not) who behaved poorly during his or her life?   It can be any time period.

(2)  Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a comment on Facebook or Google+.

I guess I've been pretty fortunate.  So far I have not found many members of my family who behaved poorly, or if they did, I haven't found the evidence yet.  When Randy posted this theme a year and a half ago, I wrote about the really bad relative I know of, Joseph Mulliner, who was hung for treason after the Revolutionary War.  It's hard to behave more badly than treason.

I suppose my fugitive great-grandfather, the biological father of my paternal grandfather, might quality as a "bad behavior" relative.  Until I figure out who he is, however, and then try to determine whether he even knew that my great-grandmother was pregnant, I can't indict him for not being around.  That wouldn't be fair.

If I focus on "bad behavior" rather than criminal acts (such as treason), one person does come to mind.  I can't really name names, as descendants are still alive, but I can describe her behavior.

I never met my grandaunt, who died in 1980, but I heard stories about her when I was young.  Her daughter was unable to bear children of her own, so she and her husband adopted a son.  My grandaunt always made a pointed distinction between how she treated her adoptive grandson versus the biological grandchildren she had.  Decades later, when I met the grandson, he confirmed the stories I had heard.  It was obvious the pain still lingered.

The daughter mentioned above later had cancer.  Even though she was ill and nearing the end of her life, my grandaunt used to order her around and demand that the daughter cook for her.

I was fortunate to meet my grandaunt's son on a trip to New York.  He did not go into detail, but he did confirm that the woman was unpleasant to pretty much everyone and treated people poorly.  He apparently had nothing good to say about her so kept what he said to a minimum.

I don't know how she treated her father, but his will shows that he wasn't a big fan either.  Bequests to his other children were each several hundred dollars, while he left her only $25.  At the end of the will, after having designated several bequests to charitable organizations and the like, he stated that the residue of his estate was to be divided evenly among all of his children — except for this grandaunt.

Overall, there seems to have been a lifetime of "bad behavior."  If she had any positive traits, no one seems to have remembered them to pass on that information.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Who Is Your "Bad Behavior" Relative?

It's Saturday, and that means another episode of Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun!  Tonight's assignment was a very easy one for me:

1)  Who is one of your relatives (ancestor or not) who behaved poorly during his or her life?   It can be any time period.

2)  Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a comment on Facebook or Google+.

Anytime I'm asked about black sheep or misbehaving relatives in my family, the first person who comes to mind is Joseph Mulliner, commonly known as the Pine Barrens Bandit.  While Joe's brother, Moses (my ancestor!), was a Patriot who fought on the side of the Americans during the Revolutionary War, Joe was a Loyalist.  Instead of fleeing to Canada after the British lost, he stayed in New Jersey and became a thief and poacher to survive.  He eventually was caught and hung for treason.  "Bad behavior" doesn't get much worse than that!

Many legends have been repeated about Joe Mulliner over the years, including that he was a kind of Robin Hood and that he attacked both sides indiscriminately.  Gabe Coia, who has a Web site about the New Jersey Pine Barrens, wrote a well researched post that tears apart most of the things that have been written about Mulliner.  While some arguments were apparently made at the time of his capture in 1781 that he had been commissioned by the British government and therefore should be treated as a prisoner of war, he was charged with high treason and hung.

The ironic twist to this is that today Joe Mulliner is still well remembered.  He was portrayed in a New Jersey Public Television documentary about the Pine Barrens.  He has a tombstone that is replaced when it disappears (which has happened several times over the centuries, apparently).  He even has a page on FindAGrave!  Yet Moses barely received a pension for his service before he died, and he doesn't seem to have a tombstone at all.  What's that line, nice guys finish last?

Skeletons in the Closet: A Criminal in the Family

This is the third in an occasional series of posts about subjects often not discussed when you ask family members for information.  A page listing other posts in the series is here.

Treason.  Robbery.  Bigamy.  Even murder.  Sometimes when we research family history we may be surprised to learn that family members committed crimes of various types.  What do you do with this type of information when you discover it?  Here are some examples I've come across in my own work and that of others, and what happened when the information was shared.

When I was researching a friend's family, I found the death certificate of a cousin.  The cause of death was listed as "shock, traumatic" due to "hemorrhage and concussion of brain" and "multiple injuries of head", with a finding of homicide.  That definitely caught my attention!  I did some quick additional searching and found two newspaper articles about the case, from which I learned that the woman's nephew was the person who had killed her.  This appeared to be quite a bombshell to lay on family members, but then I had another surprise — almost everyone already knew about it and talked about it quite matter-of-factly.  I'm sure that the fact that it had happened decades ago contributed to the calm discussions on the subject, but I was still surprised at how little the discussions seemed to bother anyone.

Twice I've uncovered bigamy without any warning, by finding that a second marriage occurred before the divorce for the first marriage.  What made these particularly interesting is that the research in each case was for an inheritance, and in both cases the person who was thought to be the heir was the unknowing spouse in the second, bigamous marriage.  Under these circumstances, the disappointment over losing out on a large estate might have overshadowed the shock of learning that the marriage was invalid.  Either way, I'm glad I wasn't the person who had to break the bad news.  The actual bigamists had passed away in both cases and apparently never paid any price for their crimes.  Of course, if you discover bigamy when the person is still alive, you're going to have a very different situation on your hands.

Once someone asked me for help in trying to determine which of two men was her friend's ancestor in the 1870 census:  the one in Ohio, or the one in jail in Pennsylvania.  I found a newspaper article (hooray for newspapers again!) that made it very clear that the man in Pennsylvania was the right individual — the town, the wife's name, and other details were absolutely correct.  But even though this had happened almost 150 years previously, all the friend's living relatives were mortified at the possibility and flatly denied that the man in jail was their ancestor.

An interesting story developed when a friend was researching his own family.  He had always been told that the family had had a very successful business that had failed during the Great Depression.  He discovered, however, that one of the family partners had embezzled money, before the Depression, and that's why the business failed.  He learned this through extensive use of court records, not available online.  The embezzlement apparently had also (understandably) caused a rift in the family at the time.  When he contacted cousins on the embezzler's side of the family, they were happy to hear from him and to learn what had actually happened.  The embezzlement had been covered up in their branch of the family also, and they had had no knowledge of it.

In my own family, I learned that the brother of my Revolutionary War patriot ancestor was not only a Loyalist, he did not go to Canada but stayed in the new United States and became a thief and poacher, and was eventually hung for treason.  Everyone in the family I have shared this information with has thought it interesting and even cool, but of course those events happened more than 200 years ago.

Just look at the range of crimes and reactions in this short list!  The most serious crime, murder, which was also the most recent, had the least reaction, because everyone already knew about it.  Information about the embezzlement was actually welcomed by the cousins, because it explained a lot that had been covered up over the years.  The relatively minor jail time from 150 years ago actually caused the most distress and was hotly denied.  And the story about my treasonous relative has been enjoyed by my siblings, not least because it makes us eligible for the International Black Sheep Society.

As with all skeletons, though, tread carefully and be discrete!  Generally speaking, the more recent the event, even if it's relatively minor, the more likely that people will be sensitive about the subject, because the events will have often occurred within living memory.  The more serious the crime, the more sensitive you should be.  And make sure your documentation stands up to scrutiny — you certainly don't want to risk upsetting everyone and not be able to back it up.

DAR and Lithuanian Citizenship

from Ghosts of the Pines

Well, my new presentation was well received by the Mt. Diablo DAR chapter.  I spoke about my Revolutionary War ancestor, who was a drummer for his New Jersey unit, and his brother, a Loyalist who stayed in the colonies and was hung for treason.  I'm eligible for DAR through my ancestor, and eligible for the International Black Sheep Society of Genealogists because they accept a sibling of an ancestor.  What is particularly ironic is that my ancestor died destitute and has been almost forgotten, but his brother lives on in legends, comic books, and a documentary.  I don't even know if my ancestor has a surviving tombstone, but his brother's grave marker is replaced when it disappears.

After my talk, I went to the Oakland FamilySearch Library to do some research but ended up helping someone who came in looking for advice on how to prove his grandmother was Lithuanian, so he can claim Lithuanian citizenship.  I wrote recently about the right of return and my experience researching someone's Italian ancestry.  Apparently the Lithuanian requirements are similar to the Italian, including eligibility up through a great-grandparent (though the information on the Wikipedia page is singularly uninformative).  One aspect relating to eligibility is proving that the ancestor was a Lithuanian while Lithuania was an independent country, between 1918-1940.  His grandmother was living in Lithuania at that time, and there was a 1923 national census, so I recommended he try to find out if the census has survived and has information about individuals.  There's also the possibility of finding a civil birth registration (his grandmother was born when Lithuania was part of the Russian Empire), or maybe the visa issued by Lithuania when his grandmother left to immigrate to the United States.

An interesting quirk in this patron's situation is that his great-grandfather immigrated to the United States in 1913, while Lithuania was part of the Russian Empire, but did not apply for U.S. citizenship until 1922.  When the great-grandfather submitted his Declaration of Intention to become a citizen, he renounced citizenship and allegiance to Russia.  So I'm wondering what his citizenship status was from 1918-1922, when Lithuania was independent but he had not renounced any citizenship.  Was he Lithuanian?  Russian?  Stateless?