Honorable mention goes to a third cousin three times removed. Shortly after the turn of 20th century he inherited the land on which the Grave Creek Burial Mound (Adena Culture) sits in Moundsville, West Virginia. A few years later he convinced the state of West Virginia to purchase the mound from him at a good price because if they did not he was going to level the Mound, use the dirt for fill and sell the land as building lots.
One of my great grandfathers comes in as first runner-up. He was born in west central Pennsylvania a number of years prior to the Civil War. Not much documentation, but family tales suggest he became enamored with the wife of the local inn keeper. The story goes that he was climbing out the window and sliding down the downspout as the husband was climbing the stairs. A quick road trip brought him to the same WV family that would eventually own the mound. In Moundsville he met the woman who would become my great grandmother. The fact that she was a teenager at the time did not deter him in the least. Ignoring her father’s dislike of him and knocking five years off his age so he didn’t seem so old, the couple was married in the early 1890s. Fifteen or so years later he decided family life was not for him and abandoned his wife and three children.
The grand prize winner goes my 3g-grandfather, the maternal grandfather of the lady mentioned above. Things started out well enough, when the Civil War broke out he was a 41-year old cooper living in Moundsville. He enlisted in the 3rd Virginia Infantry (Union) which in turns became the 3rd West Virginia Infantry, Mounted and then the 6th West Virginia Cavalry. After serving 2 years he was discharged for medical reason, but re-enlisted in the 2nd Maryland Cavalry serving as a scout along the upper branches of the Potomac. This is when the trouble started; he was accused of unwanted advances on a young woman in the area. Events are uncertain from here on, but it appears my 3g-grandfather forged a letter that attempted to implicate one of the woman’s male relatives, who had filed a formal complaint about the incident with the military, in the Lincoln assassination conspiracy. Testimony before military commission trying the conspirators followed. It couldn’t have gone well as we next here of him in close confinement because of perjury charges. He was discharged from that confinement on May 16, 1865.
These episodes all occurred on my father’s side of the family. My mother’s ancestry, Danish Vikings who relocated to Normandy and a good number of generations later to Quebec, seems tame in comparison.