This weekend my daughter and her husband unveiled the name of their coming daughter. They chose a name they both liked. I laughed out loud when they told me because it was an old family name going back to the 1840’s; perhaps one of the more famous relatives.
Because I did not care a lot about the whole “rich ancestor” stuff I never really talked to her about it.
Funny how it creeps up every once in a while.
The ancestors I tend to admire are the ones who got by and did a fair bit on not much. My first name is the maiden name of a great-grandmother who first had the joy of indoor running water in the 30’s at a time when my grandfather was about 12—he was the sixth of her twelve children. They didn’t bestow a great deal of material benefits on their kids, but gave them a whole lot of other things.
I believe at the time they were living in a converted chicken coop (in fairness, it seems that it had been a fairly high-end chicken coop), though that may have been the house before.
If one goes far enough back, one does find some rich people in various places (though probably not through this line), but it seems better to be able to accumulate 12 (or even 8) good kids than to be able to accumulate 8 figures on a bank account.