@CountingDown, It might be Germanic as Jews from Germany moved east into the Pale, and when they had to choose a surname many chose one reflecting where they came from originally. In our family history book there is a whole section on the origins of all our surnames.
I just put the name of the towns in JewGen and they give the various names, plus, who controlled what and when. And they all came up as present day Belarus and not Lithuania - so I have to go back and read again and figure out why I thought it was Lithuania (although I know some did live in Vilna.)
Latvia as an independent country in modern times existed from 1918-1939 and 1991-present. So records relating to Latvia in years when Latvia was not independent may have referred to countries which Latvia was part of (Russia before 1918, USSR from 1940-1991 except for the World War II years when it was conquered by Germany).
At some points in history, Lithuania (or the combined nation of Lithuania and Poland) was much larger than present-day Lithuania, including much of present-day Belarus and Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuania has a map of various historical extents of Lithuania.
@Hanna, Latvia was just so different than everything else I’ve found so far. The rest of his family seems to be from what is now western Ukraine, about 40 miles south of Lviv.
“I’m confident my ancestry would come back as 100% Cold Northern European Places. I’m looking for more detail than that, wondering which business would be give me more localized information.”
23&Me breaks your ancestry down into 31 subcategories. I don’t know whether that is more than Ancestry.com or not.
In my case I tested out as 98.7% Northwest European, 0.7 % Iberian, 0.5% Broadly European, and 0.1% Middle Eastern or North African.
The Northwest European was further broken down as 64% British, 18.8% Broadly Northern European, 9.8% French and German, and 6.1% Scandinavian.
The pretty much agrees with the family tree written records, which have been traced back to the 1600’s (Help from Prof. Gates was not needed) and indicate that 100% of my known ancestors came from England. Not even a Scotsman or Welsh in there anywhere, much less something more distant like a German or Irishman. So I figure that 0.1% that the DNA turned up must have come from an Arab or Jew who somehow ended up in England back in medieval times - before any family written records were kept.
I remember being disappointed as a teenager to find out that all my known ancestors came from boring old England instead of some place more exotic like Iceland or Romania. My earliest immigrant ancestor came over from England in colonial times. My last ancestor to come over (my maternal great grandfather) immigrated from the tiny village of Steeple Ashton in Wiltshire in 1849 when he was 18 years old. I’ve traveled back to that village and seen dozens of ancestors’ graves in the churchyard. There I met one of my very distant cousins who is descended from the branch of the family that stayed home and didn’t run off to America. I guess one thing that my total English ancestry allows me to claim is that we never lost the language of the Old Country. Except for employing a somewhat different accent, at home we still speak the language of our immigrant ancestors all these generations later.
Strictly by accident my ancestors in the US somehow continued to marry only their fellow ex-pat English and their descendants for every generation since they immigrated. But the pure English ancestry ends with me, since thanks to the genetic contribution of my wife our children are 1/2 English (from me) plus 1/4 Japanese, 1/8 German, and 1/8 French Canadian (from her).
Has anyone done research at any of the Mormon Family History centers? Reading earlier posts here and other sources, I’m under the impression that I can find documents from countries in Europe. Is that correct? My parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe, so all of the information about my ancestors would be from non-US sources.
Also, how would I go about hiring someone to do this kind of research? Has anyone done this.
I grew up “knowing” that I am 50% German because my father is 100% German. Right? Wrong. 23andMe showed that I’m only 15% French/German. My father was intrigued and took the test himself. He is only 23% French/German. We have a surprising amount of Scandinavian in the mix, along with some unexpected Italian and British Isles. Those Vikings really got around.
Does it change my life? No, but it’s pretty interesting and I have had to revise my family narrative.
That is what I am wondering about. We have traced ours back to the 1600s and I am a 50/50 kid but I wonder about those roaming Scandinavians! H and I are doing the test next week and sending them in.
I’m a bit confused by your post. A lot of what the Family History Centers have is also available on FamilySearch, Ancestry, FindMyPast, etc. In fact, one of the reasons to go to the centers is to use Ancestry and other databases for free. There are some records at the Centers that they have that the aggregators don’t have, but often those are films or books you have to order and wait for.
You might try going on to the www.familysearch.org. site. Use the search tab and check out the catalog and books. That way, you’ll know whether there’s anything worth making the trip to order.
My grandmother’s parents were from the Lviv area, too. Aka Lviu, I believe. One of these days, some of us will learn we’re related. I bet.
You don’t really need the Mormon family centers if you start with Ancestry.com. Documents can be viewed, as well as transcriptions.
Beware the transcription errors. Especially translated grom Cyrillic. You can get boat records, too. But there are all sorts of errors possible. I know the boat my gf came on, but the manifest misstated his hometown. Not uncommon.
Also, depending, some, like my gf, self identified as Russian because it was dominant, rather than Ukrainian. Until the Communists, that is.
I need to say also to quadruple check ehen you think you have a lead, even verbal lore.
Coincidentally, I just discovered this thread after dropping my Ancestry DNAsample into the mail (purchased from the Black Friday sale) earlier today. While I know a fair amount of our family history, my father’s father and his family are a complete mystery. He abandoned the family when my dad was young and never was spoken about again.
I’m trying to understand one thing. My dad’s side of the family is Jewish. People are mentioning getting results that show Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. Does that mean you don’t also get countries of origin for those relatives?
My D is adopted internationally, and she did Ancestry DNA about four years ago. It basically confirmed where she’s from, and so far only shows 5th to 8th cousins, which is not very helpful. But on a DNA adoption FB group I belong to, I do see stories of finding siblings and birth parents.
@Jonri
Thanks for the info. I got information about my parents from the Ancestry site. For example, I found info on my mother and her siblings entering the US. Also info for my father as well. Names were horribly misspelled but I figured it out.
Can’t find any databases on Ancestry for info on my grandparents—they were all born in what is now Croatia back when they were birn it was part of Austria… Would records from there be at the Mormon Family centers?
@Bromfield2 Again, go to www.familysearch.org. (That’s the Mormon website and thus linked to the Family History Centers.) Since your inquiry is so broad, I’d recommend you go under the search tab and look at the Wiki. I put in Croatia. https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Croatia_Genealogy I’m not sure the link will work, but if not, just do what I did. This will give you info about how to research Croatian records. You should also click the button on that page for Croatia Online Records to see what family search has.
You should also check catalog and book tabs under the search menu–especially if you know the name of the town.
Again, you should understand that most of the centers are small and don’t have a heck of a lot of records just sitting there. You usually have to order them and there’s a small fee. I haven’t done it in a while, but it took about a month for them to arrive when I was doing it. Again, I reommend figuring out what they might have before you go.
I’m late to the thread so, I may be repeating things. I did a 23AndMe DNA analysis last year… nothing to surprising aside from being ~0.2% Native American. I expected higher. A large percentage was non-specific, such as “broadly northern European.” It’s my impression that Ancestry.com DNA makes more guesses about specific countries than 23AndMe.
What was more interesting is uploading the raw results to 3rd party sites, particularly https://www.gedmatch.com and https://promethease.com/ . The latter provides a hundreds of pages analysis of how DNA impacts risk of disease, impact of drugs, and various interesting facts. The former has a variety of interesting tools, such as predicting eye color, what combinations of existing populations is your DNA most similar to, a list of persons withing their database that your DNA is most similar to, such as 3rd cousins. 23andme, Ancestry.com, and others also support contacting distance relatives.
I think it works well to combine the DNA analysis with maintaining a family tree, particularly through Ancestry.com. This makes it easier to figure out the common relatives among the DNA relatives you find through the analysis, and give a list of last names to compare when contacting people. In addition to the existing DNA relatives, you can often easily trace back quite far. I was able to go back all the way to Rollo the Viking and Charlemagne.
Would looking around in Hungary help? What is now Northern Croatia was part of the Kingdom of Hungary, including when the latter was a political subdivision of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary.
We just did the 23andme.com ancestry kits. I guess we’ll get the results in a few weeks. While filling out the online questionnaire, DW and D18 asked me whether my ancient relatives came over on the Mayflower, I replied, “no, they probably came over on a prison ship”. Anyway, according to the family history books, both sides of my family came here in the 1700/1800s from England. We’ll see how that matches up to the genetic analysis (I think plenty of guesswork is involved in that).
BTW, for kicks, we did a bunch of head measurements on an anthropology website and my results came back as “Zulu”!!!
You guys make me laugh because the ancestry test can’t tell what country your from in Europe. Maybe this video will explain why it would be too difficult. Don’t need the volume up as it is just music.
If you mean Ancestry.com DNA, they do guess specific countries in Europe or groups of countries. Some of options are below. 23andMe includes some specific countries or groups of countries as well, but the outputs usually have much larger percentages of “broadly … European.”. 23andMe’s “broadly … European” is likely the more accurate estimation, but it still can be interesting to see the more specific countries or groups of country estimates, even if they are not precise.
Great Britain
Ireland
Italy/Greece
Finland/Northwestern Russia
Scandinavia (circles Norway Sweden)
Europe West (circles France/Germany)
Iberian Peninsula (circles Spain)