For some reason, I finally started looking into the history of my family tree and family surnames. This is something others have been more interested in than myself, and those others have always tried to get me in on their whole National Treasure hunt for the truth. My father's side of the family is particularly vested in the history due to my grandfather coming from an orphanage. Unfortunately, there is a lot of myth and legend to my family history. This is why I was never into it, because fact was hard to come by. The orphanage and the myths unverifiable walls. Still, now that I look stuff up myself, it is interesting.
Here are the legends and rumors:
Father's Father side is Native American. It is also where my surname comes from, but is also where you run into the orphanage wall. The legend of the native american comes from my grandfather showing visual traits of it, my father at times as well, especially as they aged. It also comes from the surname. The surname in question has a legend tied to the lost colony of roanoke, White's second colony, and them intergrating with the nearby Croatan tribes.
So that is the second legend, that we're descendants of a Welsh member of the lost colony.
Third legend comes from the other side of the family tree. My grandmother in her last year muttered off about her ex-husband(my grandfather) "oh he was a Jew". This was quickly dismissed as my grandma being an old woman spouting shit, but she explained that it was why his family left posh England life for farming in the middle of America as the war was looming. The problem with this theory is that there was no Jewish tradition in anyone's upbringing, no mention of it outside this incident at all. My grandfather was a firm atheist and his mother a prim, proper lady of Britain. Still, there is a lineage of Jewish families with the same surname.
Fourth legend is from the same surname, same British line, but the craziest, most renown of that line being a part of the Crusades. Known as the Duke of Arabia, he was rumored to have had a son by the means of a Serecan during his stay in Jerasulem. A son in the line of lineage from Mohammed. This rumor has shit to do with me. It's just amusing.
Fifth legend comes from my dad who said after my grandfather's recent death that I have a filipino Uncle from the woman my grandpa married in the Philippines after his tour in the military there. This is brand new legend. Nobody's heard of this before, but it is the reason I always stayed away from family history. There is so much secrecy and bullshit amongst my family that you can't tell when you've dug up the truth or dug up another lapse in someone's psychosis.
