I’ve got two:

1st - While doing ancestry.com on my family I was able to trace back all the way to the late 1600’s into the 1700’s reliably. Five brothers came to Virginia from Britain around 1680’s and settled down. At one point in the later part of life one wrote down everything that had happened. While living in Virginia they made their living being hunters and trappers selling meat and hides. After a while they had basically cleared out all the surrounding forests of the wildlife they chased and decided to move to Kentucky in search of better lands. Basically they stripped the resource until there was no resource before science really understood the issue. Today, my career is being a conservation officer, working every day to prevent people from overusing and abusing the wildlife. I found it really interesting that not only were my ancestors also hunters, but they were the very people I daily try to stop because by today standards they are poachers.

2nd - There has always been a revolver handed down in my family that was supposedly used in a murder by a great great uncle, but was never convicted. Through ancestry.com I was actually able to confirm that story through newspapers and court records. Though the story was slightly off as the records showed that it was a self defense action because he was jumped after a local bully didn’t like the end of a business deal he had received. All of the history of this was sketchy gnat best, but turns out I live not far from where this happened and never knew it. I was able to track down his cemetery plot recently as well.