Dale Earnhardt Jr. has been spending time over the last six months trying to find out. And they may not be secrets, but perhaps just things he and his closest relatives may not have been aware of.
Earnhardt was one of 12 drivers to make a visit last week to the White House, honoring drivers who made last season's Chase. He said he had a new appreciation for some of the old artwork in the White House in light of time he's spent researching his family tree.
"I didn’t really appreciate how old some of the artwork and stuff is in that house until I did some work on my family tree this last six months and I’ve started to understand what 200 years really means or what 150 years truly means in the grand scope of things," he said.
Asked if he has discovered anything new or interesting about his family tree so far, Earnhardt said:
"We don’t have time today to talk about how much fun I’ve had with working on my family tree. I was fortunate enough to find someone in the field of genealogy that helped me out and I’m trying to put together some kind of a well-organized document to sort of be able to show to family members and what have you and just keep so Kelley’s (Earnhardt, his sister) kids and if I have any one day, they won’t have to do the work.
"I had one interesting experience. Ralph’s (Earnhardt) father, I didn’t know who he was and never really cared who he was, never thought about who he was or what his family would be like. Never thought past Ralph all these years and I started getting into his father and Ralph’s grandfather and I found their burial plots and so me and my grandmother Martha and my sister and my mom Brenda and my girlfriend rode up there one day, just in Kannapolis or Concord and visited their burial plots and a lot of relatives that were born in like 1809 and 1822 and stuff like that.
"It’s really cool to stand there over somebody that is responsible for you being there and that was pretty neat. I had done that before and I had people tell me to work on my family tree before, but I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. Once I got into it and started realizing the importance of it so it’s been a lot of fun.”
