'whut?' ancestral names in your lineage

Mehitable Buck
Micajah Organ
2 guys named Philander, which a fair number of people in 19th century America thought was a fine name to give their baby son, although dictionaries say the meaning of "to screw around" dates back a century earlier.

Means lover of men I think?

Yeah, derived "from Greek philandros ‘fond of men’, from philein ‘to love’ + anēr ‘man’" Beats me how it went from that to "man who has sex with lots of women".

Mine’s only interesting (and searchable) on my dad’s maternal side because Huguenots wrote EVERYTHING down (and this family were very active in the Revolutionary War). Less accessible are the Swedish, Polish, Canadian or Irish Methodist bits of my family tree.

The Swedes kept meticulous records, back to the early 1700s at least. Pretty much everything is available online, but it’s not all searchable and you have to pay for it, at least that was the case when I was doing my Swedish genealogy. I used ArkivDigital. The only thing is that you have to know what parish(es) to look in, and what year(s). Then you have to be very patient with scrolling through old handwritten church records.

Not sure if he was a Philander, but I have a Philo in my tree. Philo Tolbert, born ca. 1723. The tiny bit of African heritage I have comes from him.

when I was a kid I was struck by how rare my surname (O' Dowd or just Dowd with dropped O) was in England but then when I went back to the motherland every summer it was almost as common as Smith over there. I remember looking it up in the phone book and we were the only Dowd's in Hudds despite it having a big Irish presence and thinking it is probably more of an indictment on the family name than signalling that we are unique in some way! Anyway I find the idea of doing self genealogy absolutely abhorrent when you go past the parents of dead family, who gives a flying fuck what any of them did. it's quite safe to conclude that most of them were complete fucking arseholes whether they gained some peripheral historical respectability at some point or not is my blazing hot take on this!

Some good French-Canadian names on my mom's side:

Hermine Spenard
Rosalie Cayouette
Eustache Beaupre
Cyrille Thibeau
Domithilde Filion
Narcisse Boudreau

My mom's uncle traced one line all the way back to a 16th-century Frenchman named Nicolas Bonhomme.

no doubt a very cold and aloof character!