Hmmm. Mine, I guess, is reasonably respectable (whatever that means), although a great grandfather returned to Germany in 1915 to be on the same side as Kaiser Bill. (He actually never made it back -- he died on shipboard.)

I come from a long line of German fishermen and farmers -- most of whom ended up farming in Wisconsin. (Or, seasonally, cooking in lumber camps, moving houses all over the upper Midwest, working as a lumberjack or carpenter, etc.) One ancestor, though, was a dye chemist and made some major major discovery and invented a new dye or process but for some reason didn't get any financial advantage from it.

When I married my first husband I was given explicit orders not to trace the family tree. Evidently the Italian side of his family stole a dukedom in the 13th century and had to buy their way into the Church and the other side of the family got thrown out of England and kicked out of Scotland and ended up in Kentucky where they turned into a passel of horsethieves and moonshiners.

(Actually sounds a lot more interesting than MY family!)

Linn