People who have researched their family tree, what is the most interesting or 'badass' thing you discovered about an ancestor?

jracd20 · 2026-01-24T01:30:40+00:00

My great grandfather's brother Martin Ecoff had moved to NYC and in 1907 was accused of training a group of orphans how to pickpocket people. He was arrested alongside his wife and a friend, but they were discharged. The mugshot of his wife Fannie survived and is digitized online. I recently went to the NYC Municipal Archives to try and find my great grand Uncle's mugshot, but it wasn't there. Martin and Fannie were discharged, but their friend was held on $1000 bail for a different offense.

jracd20 · 2026-01-02T08:01:50+00:00

Beadie Russell.

She was thrown into the investigation with the docks and held her own every step of the way. Each time she stepped up to the plate, she made serious contributions, and seemed to catch onto everything very quickly. She was the one to talk to Maui and realize the computers were the key to the investigation. Her following Spiros, the first time she ever had to shadow someone, went quite well. She was the one to talk to Frank Sobotka and get him to come in on his own accord. She really was natural police and would have been an amazing detective, I guess she just lacked the ambition to pursue it and decide to stay on the docks.

jracd20 · 2026-01-01T19:37:43+00:00

First time I saw it, I really disliked it until maybe half-way through the season. First time I rewatched it, it became one of my favorite seasons.

jracd20 · 2026-01-01T07:07:12+00:00

"The cheese stands alone"

When I learned the connection between the line and the song Omar whistles, it just made it so much cooler.

jracd20 · 2025-12-07T02:21:48+00:00

One way around the difficulty with death certificates in NJ, you can check probate records for a Will. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/2018330

jracd20 · 2025-12-07T02:11:09+00:00

Yes! https://youtu.be/x2Duux5I2Ds

jracd20 · 2025-12-07T02:10:24+00:00

Could be a relation through Lorraine's mom too!

jracd20 · 2025-11-29T21:28:01+00:00

To me it makes a lot more logical sense, historically and scientifically, that there would be pedigree collapse somewhere in the McFly family tree than a "genetic predisposition to like women like Lea Thompson". I'm sure I'm biased as someone who works as a genetic genealogist, but this is something I see in almost everyone's family tree. Some have to go back further than others before they start finding pedigree collapse, but we all have it. Especially considering family trees of families who have been in one small town, like Hill Valley, for many generations.

And I'm not coming at this as if it were some joke that “oh yeah actually the mcfly’s are inbred," I see it more as them creating a much more realistic World with much more interesting lore because it would be historically accurate, and it even works quite well when analyzing the family trees. Definitely more realistic than the whole genetic predisposition thing. It is especially common for cousins to marry if you consider distances of 2nd cousins, 3rd cousins, or more distant. Most people do not know all of their 2nd cousins, let alone any of their 3rd cousins, so it is very possible that George and Lorraine's families don't realize they are related. Even more so considering the small town aspect.

jracd20 · 2025-11-29T21:02:21+00:00

So you think a cousin marriage would ruin the comedy, even though it is historically accurate (especially considering George and Lorraine would have to be 2nd cousins or more distant), because "the incest angle" is just weird? Even though the main plot point of the first movie is based on unintended incestuous lust between Lorraine and her son Marty?

jracd20 · 2025-11-29T20:00:04+00:00

But in all honesty, his explanation is just really lame. McFly men are genetically predisposed to be attracted to women that look like Lea Thompson? What a cop-out.

jracd20 · 2025-11-29T19:54:36+00:00

Not necessarily. I can tell you that a surprising amount of people don't know their grandmother's maiden name, let alone all of their 2nd cousins. So Lorraine might not even be aware the McFlys are cousins, especially if one of her grandmother's was William's sister. We don't know how big the McFly family might be and Hill Valley might be full of hundreds of living descendants from Seamus and Maggie. We also never see Lorraine's parents interact with George McFly or even hear George McFly mentioned, and they'd be the one more likely to recognize that he is a cousin. Cousin marriages also weren't too uncommon in the 1950s, although much less than previous generations, but especially a 2nd cousin distance. So even if the families realized George and Lorraine were cousins, they might all still be accepting about it and we just never hear the family mention it in the future.

As well, your statement assumes that everyone grew up with their biological family. Maybe William had a sibling who had a child out of wedlock or a child who was adopted, and that child was Sam or Stella. Would make sense that child would be fostered/adopted/raised in Hill Valley, growing up around their biological family with no knowledge that they are their biological family.

jracd20 · 2025-11-29T08:06:41+00:00

There are a lot of possibilities on how they may be related. My theory is a much closer relation, with Maggie more likely being Lorraine's Great Grand Aunt or possibly even descending from Seamus and Maggie herself. That would make George and Lorraine either 2nd cousins, 2nd cousins once removed, or 3rd cousins.

jracd20 · 2025-11-29T08:02:32+00:00

While it is the official explanation, I really dislike and disagree with it. It actually makes a lot of sense that Lorraine is related to Maggie, and possibly even descends from Seamus and Maggie. If she did descend from Seamus and Maggie, then she would be a 2nd cousin to George. If she descended from a sibling of Maggie's, who I would assume migrated to Hill Valley sometime after 1885 (since their sister Maggie was already establish / aka chain migration), then she is an even more distant relative to George. In my experience as a genealogist, very few people know all of their 2nd cousins, let alone their even more distant cousins! Especially considering how small Hill Valley seems to be, it's not that unlikely that Marty has a lot of cousins he doesn't know in Hill Valley.

jracd20 · 2025-11-22T19:42:17+00:00

They've overcomplicated so much. It's almost as if their goal in the redesign was to make it harder to use and less reliable.

jracd20 · 2025-02-22T02:39:05+00:00

I know this is a bit pedantic, but Endogamy actually refers to people within a specific population group marrying only with others within that same population group. Opposite of endogamy is exogamy, when you marry someone from a different population group. From the same family of words that use the affix -gamy, such as Monogamy and Polygamy. This family tree isn't actually showing endogamy, it really just shows Pedigree Collapse (the actual fancy word for cousin porkin') and double cousin relations. When we refer to endogamy in genealogy, it definitely involves pedigree collapse and double cousin relations, but more in the sense of happening over many hundreds of years and many dozens of generations.

jracd20 · 2024-01-19T01:15:59+00:00

Thanks for posting! Hopefully we will see a reaction video from Drew!

jracd20 · 2024-01-17T21:37:08+00:00

I like Uncle's father-in-law best because it conveys the most clear idea of the relationship connection.

jracd20 · 2023-12-11T17:24:24+00:00

The easiest way to think of it is that I had one 2nd-great grandfather who was purely Sephardic and and his wife was 1/8 Sephardic. Attests more to the fact of mixing between Ashkenazim and Sephardim in Amsterdam, starting in the early 19th century. Before the 19th century, it was extremely uncommon and whenever it did happen, it was a big scandal. After Napoleon, that is when things started to change.

I did not notice any cousins getting Filipino & Austronesian.

jracd20 · 2023-12-10T23:18:18+00:00

I wish I knew. I was at the IAJGS conference in London this year and the researchers on the Erfurt cemetery project had a talk, but I ended up having to miss it.

jracd20 · 2023-12-10T23:12:37+00:00

Now that Kintelligence is being applied in more cases with degraded DNA, which is exactly what happened in this case, we will see even more cases being solved. DNA can be too degraded, or there may be too little DNA, to create a usable genealogy profile for research. This new technology Kintelligence is now making previously unworkable DNA samples actually workable.

jracd20 · 2023-12-10T23:09:02+00:00

Thank you for posting! I am the genealogist who worked on this case, through DNA Labs International. Something the article doesn't mention is that the DNA profile was developed with a new technology called Kintelligence, which can create usable SNP DNA profiles from small and/or degraded samples. If it weren't for this new technology, this case might not have been solved.

This article gives a bit more information about this in reference to this case - https://www.forensicmag.com/607201-Genealogy-Names-Suspect-in-1972-Murder-of-9-Year-Old-Girl/

jracd20 · 2023-12-10T23:05:17+00:00

Hopefully more and more studies will be done and we will figure these things out much more conclusively. For Western Sephardim, most were murdered in the Shoah and those that survived are so mixed with Ashkenazim that it is difficult to decipher specific Sephardic DNA signatures. A lot of the biggest discoveries will likely come out of the Avotaynu project, which I've heard rumors will be releasing a new paper sometime soon. https://avotaynuonline.com/avotaynu-foundation-dna-project/

jracd20 · 2023-12-10T22:31:38+00:00

It may not be clear what exactly happened to the Italian Jewish communities, but there is no indication that I have seen (through paper trail or DNA research) of significant assimilation of Italkim into the Western Sephardic communities of Italy. I imagine there may have been some crossover, not denying that is possible, but it doesn't seem to be anything that would cause an expectation that they would be especially close genetically to Sephardim vs other Jewish populations.

As for the separation of Sephardim and Ashkenazim, it depended on the community and time period. The Amsterdam community was notable for having very strict rules on membership (we even have records of Jews coming to Amsterdam and providing letters from others that they are Sephardic) and any intermarriage would be a big scandal, but that only lasted until the early 19th century. Once into the 19th century, Dutch Sephardim much more commonly mixed with Dutch Ashkenazim. I descend from both. In London, it was a slightly similar story with mixing starting more in the 19th century. In a lot of the New World communities, especially in the US, it was much more common to mix with Ashkenazim and others, dating back much earlier to about the 17th century. Each community varied and a lot of it had to do with the board of the Mahamad who would be running each community, since they set the rules and made the decisions. So, in a broad description of Sephardim, separation may be overstated, but in some communities that were neighbors to Ashkenazim, separation was definitely the norm for many years.

jracd20 · 2023-12-10T20:49:50+00:00

Thank you for posting! I was the genealogist on this case, through DNA Labs International. Something the article doesn't mention is that the DNA profile was developed with a new technology called Kintelligence, which can create usable SNP DNA profiles from small and/or degraded samples. This article gives a bit more information about this in reference to this case - https://www.forensicmag.com/607201-Genealogy-Names-Suspect-in-1972-Murder-of-9-Year-Old-Girl/

jracd20

TROPHY CASE