Speaker Series: Bad Ancestors: Owning Your Family's History

Join us in person to unpack and own the messy truths of your family's past in this eye-opening talk! Speaker Series: Bad Ancestors - Owning Your Family's History ]Every family tree has a few questionable branches. The brawler. The bootlegger. The person with three families in three different towns. The relative who was absolutely on the wrong side of history. The person everyone called a troublemaker, but now we see was trying to make a point for equality. And then there are the ancestors who didn't do anything notorious enough to make the history books, but changed the course of a family, a community or a town anyway. The EDHS has invited genealogist, political observer and commentator Mugsy Margarit for an evening devoted to the people in our family trees who were complicated, contrary, badly behaved, misunderstood, forgotten, or just trying to make a life in a world very different from ours. Mugsy has found some characters in his own family research that were the brawlers, the troublemakers and the folks who prove that this province has a long and distinguished history of municipal disagreement. But finding out what someone did is only half the story. A hundred years can do strange things to a reputation. The family villain might have been challenging something everyone else accepted. The beloved patriarch might look considerably less charming once you find the newspaper archives. Something scandalous in 1926 might barely earn a raised eyebrow in 2026. And sometimes an ancestor really did do something awful, no historical whitewashing required. Bad Ancestors is a chance to dig around in all of it. Bring us the ancestor your family still talks about, the one they stopped talking about, or the ordinary person you've discovered who deserves to be talked about more. We'll trade stories, add some historical context and see what happens when we stop expecting the people who came before us to fit neatly into good and bad. We will also leave lots of room for Genealogy questions - maybe you’ll meet one of your ancestors that will be in a future speaker series at EDHS! Bio:
Brian “Mugsy” Margarit is a professional genealogist, writer, political observer and commentator, and the founder of Gonzo Genealogy. His philosophy is pretty simple: your ancestors deserve better than a dusty spreadsheet. What started as curiosity about his own grandfather’s family history became an obsession with the patterns, contradictions and questions hiding inside our family stories. Through Gonzo Genealogy, Mugsy has now connected more than 10,000 people across verified family trees, digging through documents, land records, migration trails and the occasional uncomfortable letter to get beyond names and dates and into the lives people actually lived. His approach to genealogy is grounded in truth over comfort, context over nostalgia, and the understanding that our ancestors were human, which means they were complicated. Mugsy believes genealogy gets a lot more interesting when we stop polishing the past and start getting curious about it. The people who came before us made strange decisions, difficult decisions, courageous decisions, selfish decisions and decisions that made perfect sense in a world that looked nothing like ours. Those are the stories he likes to find. https://gonzogenealogist.substack.com/
https://gonzogenealogy.ca/