My family history only goes back to when the country was colonized and even then, before 1850 it gets fuzzy.

Still, in my family, there's been a prison warden of the largest prison island of my parent's home country, a leader of a cult whose immediate family hold significant political power, some local gangsters, one of the first women to attend Yale on a full scholarship, who also happened to be classmates with Chomsky, and also is the woman that conducted the research behind the many successful ad campaigns.

Part of what makes the genealogy so hard to trace is the sheer number of offspring. My dad for example is one of an untold number of siblings. He found out that the had yet another sister when we went to clean my grandfather's grave for his remembrance day one year. There are many times many "extra" children in the family. An aunt commissioned a family tree, of only my grandfather's descendants and then had to stop as it needed to be updated so often.

Still, I do wonder. There are some deeply rooted characteristics in my family and it would be interesting to know more.