Ethelred the Unready

I've been messing around with genealogy again, now that the kids are in school and I can slouch here for a couple of hours at a time without being interrupted for milk or DVDs or world war three.

I followed the link back from my great-grandfather Victor E.'s line, through his mother, relying completely on other people's family trees (in case I haven't mentioned it, I love Ancestry.com), and have found that oh, about 30 generations back from him, I am descended from Ethelred the Unready of England, 968 - 1016.

I mean, unless there were mistakes made in all these charts and we didn't quite make it to the Stricklands and Curwens.

Oh, and via Victor's wife, a Clawson, I am related to Pres. James A. Garfield. Which is funny because one of my best college friends married a direct descendant. Not that WEIRD, really, because my family has lots of roots in Ohio and in the Hiram, Ohio area - James A. was president of Hiram College for a while. So now E. and I are 9th cousins or something by marriage.

I am still trying to find the link between Victor E. and the Wright brothers. Using Ancestry.com's One World Tree thing, you can click on a link looking for famous relatives. Your relatives have to be matched to people on One World Tree, so I had to go back several generations, then the site came up with 8th cousins or so. But the Wright boys came to visit the Michael farm and the farm boys played tricks on their town "cousins," and my grandfather remembers having them visit when they were older, so there has to be a link a whole lot closer than the 17th century.

They are definitely linked through the church. We have a Bishop of the United Church of Brethren, Andrew Zeller, stomping around founding churches in Ohio in about 1800 (and about 5 generations back, Zellers who allegedly hung out with Zwingli in Switzerland). Orville and Wilbur Wright's father was a Brethren bishop in the same general area of SW Ohio in about 1900. Oh, and the Brethren later became/merged with the Methodists.

I'm still not having a lot of luck with the Germans. Loads of 'em from all over what is now Germany and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. There's a German census that's apparently online now, so I have to dig through that, though from what little I looked at a couple of months ago it seems to be either too early or too late for the families that came to America.

Last edit, I swear: I have ancestors whose last name is Boger. *giggle*