The first of my lot to make it over from England came in 1629 and ended up in Virginia selling slaves and horses. My spinster great aunt was on the OSS/CIA payroll in the at the tail end of WWII and through the rest of the 1940s. She posed as a USDA agricultural expert across several Middle Eastern countries.
My paternal line arrived in the US before the American Revolution and got to Texas before Texas Independence. The brother of the one that came to Texas fought in the war and has his name is on the San Jacinto monument. He was given 300 acres in Bell county for his service, but he sold it. I had also researched for awhile a guy with my last name who was indicted for murder in Arkansas when that was the frontier. He killed his friend over a girl. But it turned out I wasn't related to him in any discernable way. On the French side, I have a relative who was killed 3 days into WWI. Otherwise they were all farmers living within 20 miles of one another, so that what passes for excitement. In general, I've had a much harder time researching ancestors in France, Germany, China, and blacks from antebellum US (never mind where in Africa they may have come from!), so I don't know as much about those sides yet. Even if I can find the person, getting color about their lives is harder. Doing the genealogy has been interesting. One thing I liked looking at is the educational progress from generation to generation. On the black side of the family, we went from illiterate to Harvard lawyer in 3 generations. On my patrilinear side, you can see the march from literate 5 generations back, to elementary and some high school 3-4 gens back, to high school degrees 2 gens back, to college and masters degrees 0-1 gens back. You can also see the urbanization as farmers from 5 generations back give way to urban labor and then to knowledge worker occupations.
@AroundTheWorld my dad's family were Huguenots as well, and I have traced my direct patrilineal line back to La Rochelle around the turn of the 16th-17th centuries. The family moved to Bavaria, and then settled in a Huguenot colony in Jutland. If you've seen the movie Babette's Feast, you've seen a picture of what that colony was like. The old man was a kid in Denmark during the war, and used to tell a story about seeing British Mosquito bombers flying sideways down the streets of Copenhagen. I was dubious, until I read about Operation Carthage. @rimrocker my mom's family arrived around the same time as your people, also to tidewater Virginia. As best as we can tell the ur-immigrant was an indentured servant. One of his descendants (recently deceased) became president of these here United States. on the same side of the family, at least according to Geni.com, Charles Martel, is my 36th great-grandfather. His grandson was Carolus Magus, aka Charlemagne. according to family legend, Charlemagne is related to Jesus, so I've got that going for me, which is nice. Spoiler Spoiler
