Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Five "Fun" or "Different" Facts

And somehow I have fallen behind in my blog posts again!  Ah, well, I'm picking myself up and starting over (again).  That's all we can do, right?  So here I am for this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision. 

1.  We all find "fun" or "different" information about ourselves, our relatives, and our ancestors in our genealogy and family history pursuits.  What are five "fun" or "different" facts in your life or your ancestors' lives?

2.  Tell us about your five fun or different facts in a comment on this post or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

Thank you to Jacquie Schattner for suggesting this topic.

I had to thnk about this a little bit to come up with five stories.

• Starting with myself, something fun and different about me is that for a short while I was a professional drummer — as in was paid for a drumming gig.  This is prettty cool, since I'm not actually a drummer (as any real drummer can tell you), but a percussionist who can drum a little.  So I consider myself fortunate to have had the opportunity.

• After he passed away, I found out that my father had served in two different state National Guard units.  This was one of those accidental discoveries, as opposed to something I had been looking for.  My sister had consulted me about my father's obituary (as she should have, since I'm definitely the family genealogist).  She had included that Daddy had served seven years in the New Jersey National Guard.  I knew that couldn't be right, based on his age and when he had moved to Florida, so suggested she take it out.  She ended up revising it to served seven years in the National Guard.  The question prompted me to figure out how to request his National Guard personnel file.  The revision turned out to be accurate, because he served four years in New Jersey and three in Florida.  None of us had known previously that he served in Florida!  And I was happy the obit didn't have inaccurate information.

• Many years ago, I found a newspaper squib in an issue of the De Funiak Springs, Florida newspaper thanking my paternal grandfather for lending his collection of antique carpenter's tools to a display in the local library.  I saved it (of course!) and remember thinking at the time that I had had no idea my grandfather collected antique carpenter's tools and wondered what had sparked his interest.  Recently I was looking over documents my grandfather saved from when he was working at Fort Dix, New Jersey in the civil service and discovered that one of his early jobs there was as . . . a carpenter!  So one little genealogical tidbit fed into another.

• After being contacted by a cousin's husband (he's the genealogist in their family), I learned that my great-great-grandmother's older sister had an early marriage that was apparently annulled (so far the only annulment in my family that I know of).  I say apparently because I haven't found documentation yet (not sure what kind of documentation you can find for annulments), but it's definitely her in the marriage record, and there doesn't seem to be a divorce (and my cousin's husband thinks it was annulled).  Okay, so it's possible that she simply moved on without dissolving the first marriage and married two more times, which would make those bigamous.  Well, that would be a different kind of "fun" fact about a relative, wouldn't it?

• And for something different on my mother's side of the family, I was told that her father had played sandlot baseball with Jackie Robinson (yes, *that* Jackie Robinson) in Brooklyn.  I suspect I'll never be able to find any kind of documentation for that, but it's a cool story.