Old news

What happened? read the text from younger daughter, who had just holed up in her bedroom for the late afternoon. You said 'Oh My God!'

Younger daughter was a few yards away, but also on the autism spectrum, so in some aspects, miles away. So I texted back:
I've just found out something interesting and exciting that happened in our family 170 years ago!!!

What?

Ah. Not so easy to put in a few words.

Some fella, who shares something like 22 centiMorgans of DNA, was asking me for information some weeks ago. I make it a point to not respond until my ducks are in a row, as it were. Each inquiry is an excellent excuse to update a given timeline. This one is a timeline I haven't worked on in a while.

As usual, it was while I was double-checking a great-great-great-uncle's 1853 death date (which may actually be late 1852), that I stumbled upon a 1851 news article, involving a court-case involving not one, but two of my great-great-great-grandfathers, and my great-great-grandfather. It gives dates and clues to their changes of occupations, and hints at the connections my ggg-grandfathers had, even before their respective children got married.

The case pits them against the Whitbread Brewery, a powerful adversary. I'm probably going to have to search out more newspaper articles to try to determine the true end of the matter (which, I suspect, wasn't good).

Too much for a text. I simply called to younger daughter that it was a story about her great-great-great-great-grandfathers. She wasn't nearly as excited as I was, for some reason.

'Twas ever thus.