that my grandfather (my mother's father) had been marries before he married my grandmother. I had no idea where this family was and I was never able to track them down.

My dad thought she had died. We found her on a ship manifest. She was deported from Ellis Island.

We think she went to France, because my grandmother went there when she was deported.

For his entire life, my dad thought his dad's family had all perished.

My great grandfather, or grandmother, or both were quite randy.

I have 15, that's right, 15 second and third cousins from the Ancestry DNA test. 429 fourth cousin and closer. This is two years after getting my test results. My tree, which I have been working on for 20 years, went from around 3000 to now over 11,100 in the last two years. When you start adding fifth, sixth, seventh cousins to your tree, it gets bigger fast.

I just counted mine. I have 20 (twenty) in that range. My results have been up for a two or three years. However, when you go to the next level up (people in the 4th-6th cousin range) I have over a thousand.

if you're Ashkenazi Jewish, French Canadian or Acadian, then all those predicted second and third cousins are likely more distantly related (because those are endogamous populations).

1458 cousins and of course I matched my sister and daughter.

Around 1930, my uncle impregnated a woman.... sex once, and never saw him again.

She described him to her family as "..looks like James Cagney."


Yup. That was him. He could have done stand in for Cagney.