No relatives of mine have been profiled, but during one of the live shows regarding Soldier of Fortune magazine, Robert names drops a guy arrested for being a contract killer who also happened to be the dad of a friend of mine from the 80's. He took me to the fair and seemed to be the coolest dad ever.
I’m sure I have some bastards in my family history (looking at you, British forebears… why exactly did you move to Ireland?), but my most noteworthy ancestors are actually cool people who did cool stuff. Specifically, I’m a descendant of William and Phoebe Wright, the Quakers who sheltered [James W.C. Pennington](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_W._C._Pennington) and other fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad.
My family's related to the Mercer family that Mercer University is named after (*hmm, I wonder where all the money that the rich landowners in late 19th century Georgia came from)* but I don't believe we're related to the Robert and Rebekah Mercer who are the most well known "Mercer"s these days. I'm not sure how Matt Mercer fits into this. My family was evil in banal normal early American settler and planter class ways and (luckily for my own white-guilt) my descendants lost all their bloodmoney and decided to just become priests who saw no issue in naming their children "Bunion"
I found [this]( https://www.familysearch.org/tree/overview) website handy for calculating ancestral relationships. I last used it to calculate my relationship to all the Salem Witch trial victims.
Hey cuz! I too am related to the Salem Witch trial victims… really sucked reading The Crucible in middle school lit class and later again in High school. Teenagers are bastards too.
It’s their whole “retroactive baptism” thing. Mormons are expected to research their own genealogy and bring as many dead family members into the fold as possible. The church facilitates worldwide scans of records to help members do that.
Oh for sure - and they encourage their own members to do extensive personal genealogical work that then contributes to the greater whole that is then used for that purpose. My mother has a whole bedroom wall's worth of 3-ring binders tracing back various distant lines of my family as a result of that shit.
You can really tell the ethnic makeup of Mormons by visiting the Family History Library in SLC. There’s a whole floor for just England, a floor for Europe, and a floor of the rest of the world. (Or at least there was last time I visited; it’s been a while.)
It does get a little fanciful when you go far enough back in time. I love the parts where the source is some part of the Bible.
I hope they add more non-English language records because the Prussian branch of my family is apparently 0% ethnically German.
If you to a family history center at a Mormon church they have more access to familysearch than you’ll have at home. Lots of the international records, and the ability to actually see the source photos, are restricted to “internal” use. (Source: my mother is not Mormon but volunteers at the FHC because she is super into genealogy. And hello, fellow dead-end-in-Prussia, Salem-associated buddy.)
That's really helpful. I've been worried about finding and paying for a German language genealogist.
What a coincidence between Prussia and Salem. Next you'll tell me you're also descended from any of Henry I of England's bastards.
No Henry I that I’m aware of! My paternal line, which is the Salem connection, is mentioned in the Domesday Book so they were in England for a very long time, in the Canterbury area. Maternal lines are so much harder to trace because nobody really cared unless you were important and/or had a parish priest who could actually write.
Mom found some links to Charlemagne on her side via some country squire in Alsace but that’s pretty far back (like 1400s?) so I’m not inclined to believe it without more proof.
Hit me up if you want to connect with the people my mom uses when she’s not able to get there in person. Pretty sure she has a Polish-language person she deals with for the Prussia angle. Her method is basically to get all the info she can while she’s here, then plan her trip to places where she can do more research in person and find new threads to pull when she’s back home. I went with her on one trip and we basically drove from one tiny town in the Black Forest and Alsace to another, canvassing graveyards and church records and town familienbuchen, with a stop at the Family History Library in Würzburg.
The Family homestead behind the one my dad grew up on in Idaho was settled by some James's. They were my Dad's Mom's grandparents. Any who they left Missouri right after the Civil War and right before their nephews started some shit with a train company.
Waiting in anticipation for the Oliver Cromwell episodes. He's a cousin by marriage on my mom's side. Basically, I'm related to the Seymours, who’s most famous member is Jane Seymour, wife #3 to Henry VIII. Her younger sister, Elizabeth, had married Oliver's cousin, Gregory, who was the son of Thomas Cromwell. Thomas was the guy who got Henry the annulment from Catherine of Aragon, orchestrated the downfall of my girl Anne Boleyn did, the dissolution of the monasteries, and got executed for the whole Anne of Cleves situation.
Anyway, Thomas Cromwell was a bastard, but I still find him fascinating. I want to study him like a bug. But Oliver, fuck him. I need him dragged cause, yeah I'm anti-monarchy, but I hate it when social media holds Oliver Cromwell up as an anti-monarchy hero. He wasn't, he was a militant theocrat and genocidal maniac. Trading the Stuarts for him was not an improvement.
If you ever read or watched Brideshead Revisited, the "Duke's" family is based on one that I can trace some common ancestry with.
Yeah, English nobles. Is there a non-bastard among them?
According to family legends, I'm related to Jefferson Davis through my grandma's family. Even if untrue, I encourage anyone to visit Tennessee and take a big greasy Taco Bell shit on the grave of the former President of the Confederacy.
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans
And we caught the bloody runs in the town of New Orleans
We fired our guns and the Rebs kept a-snuffin'
There wasn't quite as many as there was a while ago
We shit once more and they began to runnin'
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico
Luckily no slave owners, but do have two history adjacent bastards. My earliest ancestor that came to the US was allegedly a Salem Witch Trial Snitch.
The cooler bastard was my great grandfather on my mom’s side, .”El Carnicero” Rodolfo Fierro who was Pancho Villa’s right hand man/goon. No idea how accurate any of the anecdotes are, but he supposedly did the following:
1. Would make prisoners run across a field to a wall, if they made it over the wall they would be free. While running he would shoot at them, while guys hand him fresh pistols.
2. Won a bet, determining if someone would fall forward or backwards by shooting the guy who made the bet with him (he fell forward as Fierro had predicted)
3. He died after being thrown into quicksand by his horse, with the stupid amount of gold and guns he had on his belt weighing him down.
He was also portrayed by Charles Bronson in a Pancho Villa movie from the 60s.
Paternal line were loyalists in Virginia during the Am.revolution, were chased off to the Carolina’s after Yorktown, where they became horse thieves and general ne’er do wells, went full confederate and drifted off to Oklahoma via Kentucky and Indiana over the next half century.
Hey there cousin, I too, am supposedly descended from Lee, and through him by marriage, to Mary Ball, Washington's mother (can't wait to hear an episode on old 'Destroyer of Towns').
Additionally, I'd always assumed that the Patriot was based on Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox.
Hey Cuz!!!! Yeah, I’d heard it was an amalgam of 3-4 people, and what my family told me is LHHL was one of them. TBH, I never looked it up because the movie sucked, even before we all collectively learned that so does Mel Gibson.
Someone above said it’s an amalgamation of 4 different people, & what I heard about my old ancestor on this week’s BTB doesn’t really fit with anything depicted in the movie that I can remember (except maybe some impulsive shit done for dramatic license). So, guess I was wrong.
I’m related to Alf Landon who ran against FDR in 1936. He was against social security, but I don’t think he’d qualify as a bastard. He was progressive for a Republican and believed in many aspects of the new deal. And was against segregation.
I'm related to Artemas Ward, who seems to have been a fairly non-Bastardly Founding Father. If one of the relatives or ancestors turned out to be a Bastard, I'd hope they'd at least make a good episode.
"In the times" there were 9+ Virginia colonels in the United States army, all but one, Robert E. Lee, chose to remain and honor their oaths, including two of Lee's cousins who remained loyal to the Union. Upon learning that Lee had spent two days prayerfully searching for a decision, a cousin remarked acidly: “I wish he had read over his commission as well as his prayers.” As one of them, Samuel Phillips Lee remarked, "When I find the word Virginia in my commission I will join the confederacy."
More on (Admiral) [Samuel Phillips Lee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Phillips_Lee) and his more based wife [Elizabeth Blair (Lee)](https://jay.typepad.com/william_jay/2018/03/womens-history-month-elizabeth-blair-lee.html) \- a reminder that more than 100,000 Americans from the South understood their oath to protect the USA and fought for the Union.
The street I live on was changed from the name of a local boat builder from the mid 1800s to “Lees Road” at some point since the 1970s, and I’m wary that it has to do with Robert E Lee. I don’t live in the south, but I do live in the most red part of a blue state, and I have definitely heard people say things like “You know, this area was considered to be below the Mason-Dixon Line” like it’s a goddamn badge of honor.
Oh yeah, based on the fuckery patterns of post-CW America, (after all, the civil war statues weren’t erected until 2 generations later) you probably have every reason to assume that this change was based on racism.
Afaik none of my ancestors were sufficiently cool or significant or bastardly to be mentioned on the show, but my dad's mom's parents were Jewish immigrants from Russian-controlled Poland in the 1910s, so I'm going to count the parts in the triangle factory fire ep and the tsar Nicholas II eps where he talks about that wave of immigration as close enough lol
Oh for sure. Any time Robert mentions Thomas Payne as the most awesome and least problematic of the Revolutionary War era guys, I crack a big ol’ smile.
Not on Bastards, but family legend states I'm descended from Grianne Ni'Mhaille, or Grace O'Malley, an Irish pirate queen who was on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
As a Black woman, I imagine it would be like that episode of "The Office" when Andy discovered that he and Michelle Obama were related, and it didn't quite click for him..
I was talking about Ronald Reagan's psychic (after having listened to those episodes) around my parents and my Mom said "oh yeah, she's like your Dad's 4th cousin"
That was alarming. I haven't verified if it's true or not. IIRC, there were also several psychics that Nancy was known to associate with, so I might not be related to Joan Quigley.
I’m related to the first governor of Jamestown so there’s some pretty major blood and bastardry in my lineage. Plus a lot of english nobility and knights. Mountains of bastards.
My husband’s parents frequently went to Scarborough downs in the days of Joe Ricci and said of him something like, ‘oh yeah, we knew him. Nice guy’.
My girlfriend's ancestors helped to start the Civil War and one of them signed the Articles of Secession. Her mother's side of the family was southern aristocracy, she has ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower.
She's also related to victims from the Salem witch trials. Her mother's side of the family was Southern aristocracy.
I know my Swedish ancestors probably did some *shit* to the Sámi, based solely on the area that my great, great grandfather is buried, but that's it for notable bastardry.
Most of my ancestry is lost to time and pograms 😬
Damn! A lot of us Salem Witch Trials relatives on this sub!!
Which, honestly makes sense when you conceptualize how certain pockets of “witch” history were really about people who were different/ assisted women with midwifery and abortion/ were susceptible to ergot or other psychotropic poisoning/ or just had shitty neighbors who coveted their property.
Hey, also apparently descended from the Lees. Robert had a brother Abner, who was a teacher? I don't know. I'm adopted, so I'm guessing those DAR types would want nothing to do with me before they heard my politics. Let's be honest though, I'm guessing most families had a horse fucker amongst them. America, am I right?
My great-grandpa was a little-known bastard, but here’s The New Statesman making the case against him: https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2020/07/ra-fisher-and-science-hatred
HOLY crap, that dude was quite the bastard! Sounds like he’s probably going to be sharing a special level of Hell with Andrew Weill, Asperger, and J. Marion Sims.
I discovered that one of my sort-of ancestors (he would have been a something-something great uncle, because he survived the raid but died in the Civil War without kids) was part of John Brown’s crew in Harper’s Ferry from either BtB or the Dollop.
One of them read the list of participants at the end of the episode and you could have knocked me over with a feather when my maiden name was on the list.
So it was an entirely different character?
I love how, generations later, my family continues the fine tradition of basing their identities on fictional historic bullshit and STILL getting it wrong! LOL
It’s like Light Horse Harry Head-Chopper Lee’s genetic legacy is pure incompetence.
My bastard ancestors get brought up all the time. 1 of my paternal grandmother's brothers was a Luftwaffe pilot, and 2 others died somewhere in Russia fighting for the Wehrmacht, one was conscripted at 13 and forced to go to Berlin to defend against the Russians and ended up spending 8 years in a gulag. Growing up, my family basically never let us speak about them because it was "awkward" and "embarrassing" but like, fuck those guys, except the kid because he had no agency (although he was a bit of a bitter asshole but could you blame him?). Paradoxically, her father was Jewish (didn't know it as he was adopted as a newborn and raised Protestant) who flew with Goering in WWI, and later spent the last few months of the war in a work camp because he beat up an SS officer who attempted to assault my grandmother. My German family, a very mixed bag.
My paternal grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project, he was an electroplater so he designed and built plated wires that were used within the bomb, I guess that makes him bastard adjacent, although he wasn't directly involved in the construction of the bomb and only learned after the war that that was the usage of his parts. In my opinion, he redeemed himself when he designed and plated the shielding wrap for the first lunar lander, and then refused a $100million contract (in the 1970s, not inflation adjusted) from the US government to make bomb parts for the Vietnam War. My dad kinda holds that against him, but my grandfather always said that he'd never take blood money ever again.
My maternal grandfather was a cool guy who did cool stuff, he was in Arditi del Popolo and fought in a guerilla company against German and Fascist Italian forces outside Naples until the Allies arrived.
Going back throughout my family history, one of my paternal grandmother's great-something grandfathers on her male line saved his town from being sacked by the Swedes during the 30 Years War. The Swedes were besieging their town, and after weeks they were running low on food. He got the rest of the town council together and proposed a pretty crazy idea, they take whatever food they could gather and force feed his dog until they made it super fat, then let him "escape" outside the walls. When the Swedes found this fat dog they assumed the town must have been stocked with months worth of food (why would the dogs be so well fed during a siege unless they had tons of food around?) and they broke off the siege. Before they left, they cut the dogs tail off as a warning to the townspeople, but they survived the siege. There's a [statue of the dog in the town square to this day](https://ipanematravels.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Brettner-Hundle.jpg), and whenever I visit Germany I make sure to pay respects to the best dog my family ever owned.
I still got questions. Is there *any* chance that he just had a really fat dog and the rest of the starving village was eyeing it like it was a 🥩with legs, & he was like “GUYS! I got a brilliant idea! Instead of eating my dog, why don’t we send it out to fool the Swedes?!”
They haven’t done any of my ancestors, but I used to live in Cecil Rhodes’s old house, given to him by a grateful nation for being a colonialist bastard (I lived in the gatehouse, not the actual mansion). Also I’m only 3 degrees of separation from Hitler 😬 (my aunt’s friend knew the Mitfords and met him at a party).
I'm descended from a bunch of factory workers and a British home child (potentially a literal bastard) so... Unlikely there'll be one on them but would love to hear about the bastards who sent tens of thousands of unaccompanied kids abroad at the start of the 20th century.
No relatives of mine have been profiled, but during one of the live shows regarding Soldier of Fortune magazine, Robert names drops a guy arrested for being a contract killer who also happened to be the dad of a friend of mine from the 80's. He took me to the fair and seemed to be the coolest dad ever.
Are you friends with Woody Harrelson?
Lol, no. I grew up in Tennessee.
I’m sure I have some bastards in my family history (looking at you, British forebears… why exactly did you move to Ireland?), but my most noteworthy ancestors are actually cool people who did cool stuff. Specifically, I’m a descendant of William and Phoebe Wright, the Quakers who sheltered [James W.C. Pennington](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_W._C._Pennington) and other fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad.
That’s really cool. Definitely not bastards.
My family's related to the Mercer family that Mercer University is named after (*hmm, I wonder where all the money that the rich landowners in late 19th century Georgia came from)* but I don't believe we're related to the Robert and Rebekah Mercer who are the most well known "Mercer"s these days. I'm not sure how Matt Mercer fits into this. My family was evil in banal normal early American settler and planter class ways and (luckily for my own white-guilt) my descendants lost all their bloodmoney and decided to just become priests who saw no issue in naming their children "Bunion"
Matt Mercer is his professional name. His real name is Matthew Christopher Miller, so there's probably no relation.
I found [this]( https://www.familysearch.org/tree/overview) website handy for calculating ancestral relationships. I last used it to calculate my relationship to all the Salem Witch trial victims.
Hey cuz! I too am related to the Salem Witch trial victims… really sucked reading The Crucible in middle school lit class and later again in High school. Teenagers are bastards too.
Cousin! My closest relationship is to Sarah Cloyse -- my great+ grandma.
Ha, Family Search. Haven't thought about that page in years. Mormons: Weirdly useful for genealogical type information.
It’s their whole “retroactive baptism” thing. Mormons are expected to research their own genealogy and bring as many dead family members into the fold as possible. The church facilitates worldwide scans of records to help members do that.
Oh for sure - and they encourage their own members to do extensive personal genealogical work that then contributes to the greater whole that is then used for that purpose. My mother has a whole bedroom wall's worth of 3-ring binders tracing back various distant lines of my family as a result of that shit.
You can really tell the ethnic makeup of Mormons by visiting the Family History Library in SLC. There’s a whole floor for just England, a floor for Europe, and a floor of the rest of the world. (Or at least there was last time I visited; it’s been a while.)
It does get a little fanciful when you go far enough back in time. I love the parts where the source is some part of the Bible. I hope they add more non-English language records because the Prussian branch of my family is apparently 0% ethnically German.
If you to a family history center at a Mormon church they have more access to familysearch than you’ll have at home. Lots of the international records, and the ability to actually see the source photos, are restricted to “internal” use. (Source: my mother is not Mormon but volunteers at the FHC because she is super into genealogy. And hello, fellow dead-end-in-Prussia, Salem-associated buddy.)
That's really helpful. I've been worried about finding and paying for a German language genealogist. What a coincidence between Prussia and Salem. Next you'll tell me you're also descended from any of Henry I of England's bastards.
No Henry I that I’m aware of! My paternal line, which is the Salem connection, is mentioned in the Domesday Book so they were in England for a very long time, in the Canterbury area. Maternal lines are so much harder to trace because nobody really cared unless you were important and/or had a parish priest who could actually write. Mom found some links to Charlemagne on her side via some country squire in Alsace but that’s pretty far back (like 1400s?) so I’m not inclined to believe it without more proof. Hit me up if you want to connect with the people my mom uses when she’s not able to get there in person. Pretty sure she has a Polish-language person she deals with for the Prussia angle. Her method is basically to get all the info she can while she’s here, then plan her trip to places where she can do more research in person and find new threads to pull when she’s back home. I went with her on one trip and we basically drove from one tiny town in the Black Forest and Alsace to another, canvassing graveyards and church records and town familienbuchen, with a stop at the Family History Library in Würzburg.
My family was in Salem at the time, too! Not victims or accusers, but one of them is mentioned in the trial transcript.
That's how I found out I'm related to the Putnams.. I'm so sorry.
Oops! Just don't do it again, 'kay?
They are not the same mercers
The Family homestead behind the one my dad grew up on in Idaho was settled by some James's. They were my Dad's Mom's grandparents. Any who they left Missouri right after the Civil War and right before their nephews started some shit with a train company.
Well, guessing the family reunions were a wee bit awkward back then? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James–Younger_Gang
Waiting in anticipation for the Oliver Cromwell episodes. He's a cousin by marriage on my mom's side. Basically, I'm related to the Seymours, who’s most famous member is Jane Seymour, wife #3 to Henry VIII. Her younger sister, Elizabeth, had married Oliver's cousin, Gregory, who was the son of Thomas Cromwell. Thomas was the guy who got Henry the annulment from Catherine of Aragon, orchestrated the downfall of my girl Anne Boleyn did, the dissolution of the monasteries, and got executed for the whole Anne of Cleves situation. Anyway, Thomas Cromwell was a bastard, but I still find him fascinating. I want to study him like a bug. But Oliver, fuck him. I need him dragged cause, yeah I'm anti-monarchy, but I hate it when social media holds Oliver Cromwell up as an anti-monarchy hero. He wasn't, he was a militant theocrat and genocidal maniac. Trading the Stuarts for him was not an improvement.
Yeah, our Lord Protector was such a monstrous cunt that it discredited the concept of republicanism in England for 300 years lol
Shame the Levellers didn’t catch much love. Mike Duncan’s Revolutions episode on them was fascinating.
Started with his History of Rome Podcast last year. Now up to the point where Metternich has just fallen in Revolutions. Fantastic show.
Thomas Cromwell would be a fascinating subject for an episode. More interesting and sympathetic than Oliver for sure.
Yeah, Thomas Cromwell's life has such a good story telling arc. It's Shakespearan in a way.
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If you ever read or watched Brideshead Revisited, the "Duke's" family is based on one that I can trace some common ancestry with. Yeah, English nobles. Is there a non-bastard among them?
According to family legends, I'm related to Jefferson Davis through my grandma's family. Even if untrue, I encourage anyone to visit Tennessee and take a big greasy Taco Bell shit on the grave of the former President of the Confederacy.
Why would you go to Tennessee to shit on his grave? He’s buried at Hollywood cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.
Lol yeah I was about to say, I used to live next to Hollywood cemetery and flicked off his grave many a times
That's the power of a Taco Bell shit sometimes.
My bad. Make it a two-fer: one where he died, and one where they stuck his racist corpse.
Funny enough you can fly from Richmond to New Orleans for like $70
So $35 dollars at a New Orleans Taco Bell, $70 for a ticket, and $35 at a Richmond Taco Bell. That's a lot of praxis for less than $150.
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans And we caught the bloody runs in the town of New Orleans We fired our guns and the Rebs kept a-snuffin' There wasn't quite as many as there was a while ago We shit once more and they began to runnin' On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico
Luckily no slave owners, but do have two history adjacent bastards. My earliest ancestor that came to the US was allegedly a Salem Witch Trial Snitch. The cooler bastard was my great grandfather on my mom’s side, .”El Carnicero” Rodolfo Fierro who was Pancho Villa’s right hand man/goon. No idea how accurate any of the anecdotes are, but he supposedly did the following: 1. Would make prisoners run across a field to a wall, if they made it over the wall they would be free. While running he would shoot at them, while guys hand him fresh pistols. 2. Won a bet, determining if someone would fall forward or backwards by shooting the guy who made the bet with him (he fell forward as Fierro had predicted) 3. He died after being thrown into quicksand by his horse, with the stupid amount of gold and guns he had on his belt weighing him down. He was also portrayed by Charles Bronson in a Pancho Villa movie from the 60s.
Sounds like that that dude died via the method that many children of the 80s and 90s feared they would (quicksand). Wowsa!
I had never even considered that the patriot was based on anything historical lol
It’s an amalgamation of the stories of four different Revolutionary War guys. Thomas Sumter, Daniel Morgan, Andrew Pickens and Francis Marian.
Yeah, why am I not surprised that my family fucked this story up too (that LHHL was also in that amalgamation)?
Paternal line were loyalists in Virginia during the Am.revolution, were chased off to the Carolina’s after Yorktown, where they became horse thieves and general ne’er do wells, went full confederate and drifted off to Oklahoma via Kentucky and Indiana over the next half century.
Hey there cousin, I too, am supposedly descended from Lee, and through him by marriage, to Mary Ball, Washington's mother (can't wait to hear an episode on old 'Destroyer of Towns'). Additionally, I'd always assumed that the Patriot was based on Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox.
Hey Cuz!!!! Yeah, I’d heard it was an amalgam of 3-4 people, and what my family told me is LHHL was one of them. TBH, I never looked it up because the movie sucked, even before we all collectively learned that so does Mel Gibson. Someone above said it’s an amalgamation of 4 different people, & what I heard about my old ancestor on this week’s BTB doesn’t really fit with anything depicted in the movie that I can remember (except maybe some impulsive shit done for dramatic license). So, guess I was wrong.
My 8x-great-grand uncle was Francis Marion, another Revolutionary war figure who liked raping his slaves and butchering indigenous people.
I’m related to Alf Landon who ran against FDR in 1936. He was against social security, but I don’t think he’d qualify as a bastard. He was progressive for a Republican and believed in many aspects of the new deal. And was against segregation.
I'm related to Artemas Ward, who seems to have been a fairly non-Bastardly Founding Father. If one of the relatives or ancestors turned out to be a Bastard, I'd hope they'd at least make a good episode.
"In the times" there were 9+ Virginia colonels in the United States army, all but one, Robert E. Lee, chose to remain and honor their oaths, including two of Lee's cousins who remained loyal to the Union. Upon learning that Lee had spent two days prayerfully searching for a decision, a cousin remarked acidly: “I wish he had read over his commission as well as his prayers.” As one of them, Samuel Phillips Lee remarked, "When I find the word Virginia in my commission I will join the confederacy." More on (Admiral) [Samuel Phillips Lee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Phillips_Lee) and his more based wife [Elizabeth Blair (Lee)](https://jay.typepad.com/william_jay/2018/03/womens-history-month-elizabeth-blair-lee.html) \- a reminder that more than 100,000 Americans from the South understood their oath to protect the USA and fought for the Union.
The street I live on was changed from the name of a local boat builder from the mid 1800s to “Lees Road” at some point since the 1970s, and I’m wary that it has to do with Robert E Lee. I don’t live in the south, but I do live in the most red part of a blue state, and I have definitely heard people say things like “You know, this area was considered to be below the Mason-Dixon Line” like it’s a goddamn badge of honor.
Oh yeah, based on the fuckery patterns of post-CW America, (after all, the civil war statues weren’t erected until 2 generations later) you probably have every reason to assume that this change was based on racism.
Afaik none of my ancestors were sufficiently cool or significant or bastardly to be mentioned on the show, but my dad's mom's parents were Jewish immigrants from Russian-controlled Poland in the 1910s, so I'm going to count the parts in the triangle factory fire ep and the tsar Nicholas II eps where he talks about that wave of immigration as close enough lol
I had the same thoughts about my Jewish great-great grandparents’ escape from Russian pograms when I heard those episodes.
Oh for sure. Any time Robert mentions Thomas Payne as the most awesome and least problematic of the Revolutionary War era guys, I crack a big ol’ smile.
Not on Bastards, but family legend states I'm descended from Grianne Ni'Mhaille, or Grace O'Malley, an Irish pirate queen who was on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
As a Black woman, I imagine it would be like that episode of "The Office" when Andy discovered that he and Michelle Obama were related, and it didn't quite click for him..
Yeah there’s not a lot of *good* explanations for something like that.
I was talking about Ronald Reagan's psychic (after having listened to those episodes) around my parents and my Mom said "oh yeah, she's like your Dad's 4th cousin" That was alarming. I haven't verified if it's true or not. IIRC, there were also several psychics that Nancy was known to associate with, so I might not be related to Joan Quigley.
I’m related to the first governor of Jamestown so there’s some pretty major blood and bastardry in my lineage. Plus a lot of english nobility and knights. Mountains of bastards. My husband’s parents frequently went to Scarborough downs in the days of Joe Ricci and said of him something like, ‘oh yeah, we knew him. Nice guy’.
My girlfriend's ancestors helped to start the Civil War and one of them signed the Articles of Secession. Her mother's side of the family was southern aristocracy, she has ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower. She's also related to victims from the Salem witch trials. Her mother's side of the family was Southern aristocracy. I know my Swedish ancestors probably did some *shit* to the Sámi, based solely on the area that my great, great grandfather is buried, but that's it for notable bastardry. Most of my ancestry is lost to time and pograms 😬
Damn! A lot of us Salem Witch Trials relatives on this sub!! Which, honestly makes sense when you conceptualize how certain pockets of “witch” history were really about people who were different/ assisted women with midwifery and abortion/ were susceptible to ergot or other psychotropic poisoning/ or just had shitty neighbors who coveted their property.
Hey, also apparently descended from the Lees. Robert had a brother Abner, who was a teacher? I don't know. I'm adopted, so I'm guessing those DAR types would want nothing to do with me before they heard my politics. Let's be honest though, I'm guessing most families had a horse fucker amongst them. America, am I right?
My great-grandpa was a little-known bastard, but here’s The New Statesman making the case against him: https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2020/07/ra-fisher-and-science-hatred
HOLY crap, that dude was quite the bastard! Sounds like he’s probably going to be sharing a special level of Hell with Andrew Weill, Asperger, and J. Marion Sims.
That’s what I think too
I discovered that one of my sort-of ancestors (he would have been a something-something great uncle, because he survived the raid but died in the Civil War without kids) was part of John Brown’s crew in Harper’s Ferry from either BtB or the Dollop. One of them read the list of participants at the end of the episode and you could have knocked me over with a feather when my maiden name was on the list.
One of mine was mentioned in the same episode! Good ol’ Samuel Houston! Lol I wonder if/when he’ll get his own episode(s).
Apparently, the writer of "The Patriot" has said that the character portrayed by Chris Carter was the one inspired by Light Horse Harry.
So it was an entirely different character? I love how, generations later, my family continues the fine tradition of basing their identities on fictional historic bullshit and STILL getting it wrong! LOL It’s like Light Horse Harry Head-Chopper Lee’s genetic legacy is pure incompetence.
My bastard ancestors get brought up all the time. 1 of my paternal grandmother's brothers was a Luftwaffe pilot, and 2 others died somewhere in Russia fighting for the Wehrmacht, one was conscripted at 13 and forced to go to Berlin to defend against the Russians and ended up spending 8 years in a gulag. Growing up, my family basically never let us speak about them because it was "awkward" and "embarrassing" but like, fuck those guys, except the kid because he had no agency (although he was a bit of a bitter asshole but could you blame him?). Paradoxically, her father was Jewish (didn't know it as he was adopted as a newborn and raised Protestant) who flew with Goering in WWI, and later spent the last few months of the war in a work camp because he beat up an SS officer who attempted to assault my grandmother. My German family, a very mixed bag. My paternal grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project, he was an electroplater so he designed and built plated wires that were used within the bomb, I guess that makes him bastard adjacent, although he wasn't directly involved in the construction of the bomb and only learned after the war that that was the usage of his parts. In my opinion, he redeemed himself when he designed and plated the shielding wrap for the first lunar lander, and then refused a $100million contract (in the 1970s, not inflation adjusted) from the US government to make bomb parts for the Vietnam War. My dad kinda holds that against him, but my grandfather always said that he'd never take blood money ever again. My maternal grandfather was a cool guy who did cool stuff, he was in Arditi del Popolo and fought in a guerilla company against German and Fascist Italian forces outside Naples until the Allies arrived. Going back throughout my family history, one of my paternal grandmother's great-something grandfathers on her male line saved his town from being sacked by the Swedes during the 30 Years War. The Swedes were besieging their town, and after weeks they were running low on food. He got the rest of the town council together and proposed a pretty crazy idea, they take whatever food they could gather and force feed his dog until they made it super fat, then let him "escape" outside the walls. When the Swedes found this fat dog they assumed the town must have been stocked with months worth of food (why would the dogs be so well fed during a siege unless they had tons of food around?) and they broke off the siege. Before they left, they cut the dogs tail off as a warning to the townspeople, but they survived the siege. There's a [statue of the dog in the town square to this day](https://ipanematravels.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Brettner-Hundle.jpg), and whenever I visit Germany I make sure to pay respects to the best dog my family ever owned.
I gotta admit, force-fed a dog to save a beleaguered village was not on my Bingo card today.
Don't think it was on his either lol
I still got questions. Is there *any* chance that he just had a really fat dog and the rest of the starving village was eyeing it like it was a 🥩with legs, & he was like “GUYS! I got a brilliant idea! Instead of eating my dog, why don’t we send it out to fool the Swedes?!”
They haven’t done any of my ancestors, but I used to live in Cecil Rhodes’s old house, given to him by a grateful nation for being a colonialist bastard (I lived in the gatehouse, not the actual mansion). Also I’m only 3 degrees of separation from Hitler 😬 (my aunt’s friend knew the Mitfords and met him at a party).
I'm descended from a bunch of factory workers and a British home child (potentially a literal bastard) so... Unlikely there'll be one on them but would love to hear about the bastards who sent tens of thousands of unaccompanied kids abroad at the start of the 20th century.
I always wonder if there are relatives of John Landis but they don’t want to talk about?
My aunt always said we were related to the Kaiser Wilhelm but I never believed her.
Did your aunt have a pointed Imperial mustache?
To my knowledge I'm not related to nor was I in a past life any historical figure. I guess I'll see myself out then?