Thank you all for your input! I love history and people. I have a question: I heard years ago that there some sort of “test kit” that had some sort of swab that told you who you are. Is this the 23and me? Or another one?
My husband is a direct descendant of Dicey Langston of the American Revolution. At the age of 15 she spied on the Loyalists for the Patriots in South Carolina. Once she had to cross a flooded river to warn the Patriots of a pending attack and once she stepped in front of a gun to keep her father from being shot by Loyalists. She later married Thomas Springfield and had 22 children so there are a lot of descendants.
Re: learning a new language. Human brain is a fascinating thing:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130829124351.htm
Interesting, BB.
I haven’t learned another language, I tried in my 30’s, but so far, not much progress.
I think that introducing language earlier, has made a difference with both the kids.
Garland, It looks like my ancestors are from Hartford, Conn.
Mostly Windsor, also Enfield.
And from Essex, England, to Essex, Mass.
Theres another branch in Maryland, arrived in early 1600’s, from, Vanaissin,Vaucluse, France.
They were pretty established in Gentry County, Mo, by early 1800’s, after migrating from Kentucky.
( both sides of moms family)
My maternal grandmothers parents, had 10 girls over a 16 yr period.
Its really interesting how long lived some of them were, even in the 1600’s.
The Dutch ancestors especially, had lots of kids.
I wonder how accurate this information is. For example supposedly William de Ros was an ancestor, but some records say he died in North Carolina in 1414. That didnt sound right to me, as it looked like he had a pretty nice life in England, so I did casual checking, & he probably died in Leicestershire, not N.C.
@bevhills There are only 3 DNA tests worth doing- 23andme, Ancestry or FTDNA. All of the tests run about $100 for the autosomal DNA results. These results will tell you where (Europe, Africa, Asia, etc) your DNA comes from and show you matches with distant cousins that have also tested with that company. We have found several unknown 3rd-4th cousins through DNA and my mother recently found a long lost 1st cousin through DNA.
23andme gives you the autosomal results, a mtDNA haplogroup for everyone, and at Y DNA haplogroup for males. The other companies either don’t provide haplogroup info or run a different test and charge more for it. 23andme also used to provide health information with your DNA results before the FDA stopped them. They are working to be able to provide it again.
This is a fascinating thread – yet I wonder whether it is offensive, too, to some of the people on CC.
The ancestors of African Americans didn’t “immigrate.” They were kidnaped and brought here as property.
And the ancestors of Native Americans were already here when immigrants started showing up and getting in the way.
The white and Asian and Hispanic people on CC can happily share their family’s immigration stories, but what about these other Americans?
My father’s family came from a town in what is now Belarus in 1913. They were Polish Catholics. In 1908, my grandparents were on a train in Turkestan when my grandmother had her first child. Since their dtr was born on a train she couldn’t get a birth certificate and go with them to America. So their dtr (my aunt) remained in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution and World War I.
One day the Cossacks or the Red Guard came to get her family so my aunt hid behind the couch. A sword went through the couch but just missed her. The Poles were all murdered outside of town and one relative went over and saw it and began crying. A Cossack saw her and returned and murdered her too. In 1921, my grandfather went to Paris alone to arrange his dtr’s passage out of Russia. He hired a man who finally returned with his dtr, but told my grandfather he must have $100 to cover added bribes etc. When my GF told the man he didn’t have it, he offered to take no money if the dtr recognized her father after all those years. The dtr walked around the train station and saw my GF and recognized his eyes and ran to him.
My mother’s family came from Bohemia in 1872. Some became tailors in Boston and lived nearby in South Boston. They are listed as being from Bohemia, Prussia, Austria, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia depending on which year you look at.
My wife’s ancestry on her father’s side links her all the way back to Gov. William Bradford in Plymouth. There are a few knights from England going back earlier. Her mother’s side hails from Scotland.
Good point, Marian.
Hard to imagine what records had an Englishman dying in North Carolina in 1414, over 80 years before the first English-flag explorations of North America, and almost two centuries before any serious attempts by British themselves at exploration and colonization in North America.
@Pizzagirl I didn’t mean to suggest that immigration authorities changed it. He changed it after he got here because no one could spell or pronounce it and he found it a liability in his business.
This is such an interesting thread!! We truly are a nation of immigrants and everyone’s story is so interesting.
For me, my paternal grandfather came from the Pale of Settlement and was a political prisoner following the 1907 first Russian Revolution. He was en route to a prison in Siberia when he escaped and made his way across Europe to London where he met my paternal grandmother who was from Lithuania (then part of Russia). Her family was en route to South Africa where many Jews from Lithuania settled. Instead she married my paternal grandfather and they emigrated to the U.S. landing in Galveston. As he was a carpenter by trade they travelled across the U.S. where he found work in SF helping with the rebuilding following the SF earthquake. They settled in Chicago where he ran a socialist gathering place, pool hall/candy store. They lost a child in the flu pandemic and relocated to NYC where my father was born as an extra child. Fairly unusual for the time was that my paternal grandmother was educated beyond the minimal most young girls experienced growing up in a shtetl. My maternal grandparents emigrated from Hungary and Yassi, Romania, settling in Queens, NY but I am not sure of when they arrived and whether together or separately. He worked as a tailor but died young from tuberculosis. My grandmother had minimal English and was left with four children to support although she did have a prosperous relative to help out somewhat. Essentially my mother and siblings grew up on what was called home relief during the Depression, essentially a form of what we would have considered welfare.
My parents met on summer vacation in some kind of a camp through a political/social organization. My father who worked and attended college classes at night was drafted out of college one week following Pearl Harbor.
For DH, his father grew up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in a village then later went back and forth between Hungary and what became Czecheslovakia. In order to avoid being “drafted” into the army- a 10 year sentence, he made his way through Europe to the U.S. as the son of his eldest brother. He was the youngest of 13 children in an Orthodox Jewish family, and his three eldest brothers had emigrated to the U.S, one remaining in Brooklyn and the other two in Southern California. He lived for a few years in Antwerp to save money for the trip and ultimately arrived in the late 20’s. I do have his embarkation papers. His parents likely died pre-WWII. The rest of the siblings and cousins all perished in the Holocaust. He did have some family survive who ultimately settled in Toronto after being sent to Cuba and a niece who settled in Israel who died just a few years ago in her late 90’s. HIs mother also came from similar area, town I believe called Pulkovitz. She was one of seven siblings and they arrived by ship from Hamburg, Germany arriving in 1931 although oldest sister remained in Europe for some time as pregnant and unable to travel. When the relative from Israel came to visit about 30 years ago, DH took her and her family touring and when they stopped for lunch at a glatt kosher restaurant in the garment center, her husband met a man, possibly the owner, who had been his boyhood friend in their village and was also a survivor.
It strikes me that we should all defer to @Alumother in terms of family ancestry, as her family members basically started the United States.
@NJSue: my father did the same thing–shortened his last name when after he immigrated because no one could pronounce it or spell it. He did the same with his first name; changed it from Visko to Vic.
Katliamom, I believe the Jewish residents of Tykocin were rounded up and murdered in or near the nearby forest of Lopuchowo. Treblinka was a death camp elsewhere in Poland.
@Bromfield2 @NJSue : my husband’s family changed their own last name upon exiting their home country. They were the ones avoiding forced conscription, and it seemed prudent at the time. Fortunately, we already knew what it had been when we started ancestor-hunting.
@Pizzagirl, actually even now the State Department workers in the consulates abroad can get quite creative with the foreign names. If they come across the letters that do not exist in English alphabet - watch out. The result may depend on what they had for breakfast.
My paternal grandfather was a Dutch sailor who jumped ship illegally in San Francisco around 1930. His name is in Ellis Island registers a few times as a visitor. There he met my grandmother, a Scottish/Kwakiutl woman who was also undocumented having come from Canada under an assumed name. Her father owned three ships that sailed the trade routes out of Vancouver, mother was born near Fort Rupert on Vancouver Island. My grandparents married near the end of Prohibition and bought an old SF house that had been used as a speakeasy, located on a dirt road near the dump.
My maternal grandfather was born in CA not long after his parents immigrated from Liguria, Italy in 1895. They bought a farm in the Central Valley, still operating today. My maternal grandmother is much more of a mixed bag, born in CA to a Norwegian immigrant mother and an American father of English/Irish/Norwegian descent with roots in MA and CA. AFAIK no one has done much genealogy on his side.
Oddly, my sister with a First Nations X chromosome looks strikingly native, with straight, dark hair, a roundish face and somewhat Asian eyes. My brother and I couldn’t be more Caucasian.
I obtained both my mother’s and my military records this year. I would encourage anyone interested in family history to request them free of charge. I learned that my mother competed for a scholarship to go to college to become a teacher. She didn’t win it so she trained other women at a clothing company. She then worked in a weapons arsenal before joining the service. She was one of the first women to work there. She was later stationed at Pearl Harbor where she was Master-Of-Arms in charge of a WAVES barracks.
In mine I saw my ASVAB battery of scores, and the names of several people I had forgotten about. It’s interesting how we forget some things but remember others.
*The ancestors of African Americans didn’t “immigrate.” They were kidnaped *
Correct, and this was aided & abetted by their countrymen in too many instances.
I’m sure that researching ancestors can be frustrating for many families.
Life certainly was not designed to be fair.
My son wrote a paper about Libya when he was in college, it turned out there were at least seven perfectly acceptable ways to spell Muammar Gaddafi in English, and Gaddafi himself had used several of them.