What question would you ask an ancestor?

[Phoenix]

This is running as a thread on Facebook at the moment, and my immediate reaction was to demand "Who were your parents?" of those irritating brickwalls.

But on reflection, I'd be more interested in what their homes looked like. Why they moved to an area. etc.

The trouble is, when I asked Dad about anything I got precious little. His grandmother lived till he was fifteen, but all I gleaned was that she made good faggots and pork pies (but not that she was up against the beak for stealing meat!) and when she was asked about her childhood "you don't want to know about the past"

Assuming your ancestors were forthcoming AND told the truth, what questions would you ask?

[kiterunner]

I would ask my 2xg-grandparents about their relationship, how they came to get married just a few weeks before the birth of their first child (and whether he believed he was her bio father) and the circumstances of how their second child (my g-grandmother) was conceived. Well, and I would ask the same 2xg-grandmother about her whole life really.

[Olde Crone]

I'd ask my maternal grandmother why she appears to have lied about her childhood, saying she was an orphan growing up in a terrible Children's Home. I have her on all relevant censuses at home with both her parents and her various siblings. Her mother did not die until my gran was 15 and her father did not die until she was well into her 40s.

I'd ask my very proper maternal grandfather whether he had, ahem, any love interests when he lived in Germany as a young man before WW1. My Catherine Cookson-inspired imagination makes me wonder if I have German contemporaries.

I'd like to know why my 2xggps left the beautiful Cheshire farm the family had held for 300 years in order to move to the slums of Manchester and promptly die.

And not least - who IS this lovely young woman in a studio portrait which lived in my grandmother's bedroom? She isn't Pamela Holden (as labelled by my father) but she is the spitting image of my youngest daughter so she must be a relative.I

(Oh and the standard "well, who was your mother, never mind who was your father?" )

OC

[Phoenix]

I suppose I ought to sit down with Dinah Porter of Kings Lynn and ask (assuring her that since everyone was dead, nobody could make life miserable for her) if ALL her children had a Massingham as a father.
The first five were baptised Porter and she married John Massingham after the last was born.
Dorothy was "by her husband's son"
The twins, both my ancestors, were baptised 3 days after she married Henry Hook. Was he the father, or had "her husband's son" paid him to avoid more scandal? Each marriage seems to have put the kibosh on having more children.
Meanwhile, what happened to the eldest children when Diana moved to her husband's village? And, indeed, what happened to John Massingham and his first family? I cannot find burials for him or his first wife. He may well have died at sea, but unless he had a very open marriage, his wife cannot have travelled with him.

[Margaret in Burton]

Well mine is probably obvious to any long standing member of this forum. Not my ancestor but my late husbands and of course my daughter’s great grandfather. Peter Henry Harrison.
I’d probably torture him . I’d want to know what his real name was as he certainly wasn’t born Peter Henry Harrison as there’s no birth record or anything on the 1891 and 1901 census. Why he denied having Italian parentage when my daughter and his granddaughter have Italian DNA. Also, why he refused when asked to divulge his past even as he was dying.

[Olde Crone]

Marg

The thing is, if he had said "oh, I was a foundling" you probably would have accepted that and looked no further. Until you became interested in family history of course!

OC

[Margaret in Burton]

Originally Posted by Olde Crone

Marg

The thing is, if he had said "oh, I was a foundling" you probably would have accepted that and looked no further. Until you became interested in family history of course!

OC

True

[Olde Crone]

Because I was born nosy, it was like a red rag to a bull when my father said "you don't need to know about that, you wouldn't like it" in answer to my question about why one set of relatives hadn't spoken to the other set since 1933.

When I discovered the reason, it was very much a disappointment - a divorce in 1933!

OC

[ElizabethHerts]

My mother-in-law and her mother warned me off researching their family history. I assumed it was because the mother was illegitimate. That might have been one of the reasons, but the main reason came to light after both their deaths and I can now understand their reticence to discuss family matters.

[ElizabethHerts]

I would ask my great-great-grandmother Sarah Thomason when her exact birth date was and who were her parents. She married a week before civil registration and died in 1843 so there is no record of her place of birth.

There are countless other questions I would ask. One is seemingly trivial but I'd love to know why my great-grandmother Ada Quintrell had no middle name when all her siblings did (Eddy, Daddow, Emery, Wood, Hubbard, Dickens and Bromley).