Before the American Revolution.
@Momofadult, you might be interested in the recent Danish TV series 1864 (most expensive Danish series yet made). It’s about the German-Danish war over that region.
Yes, yes!!! Thanks so much. Do you know how I can see it? I googled, looks like it’s been shown in Britain? Are you aware of youtube or other access in the States? One of my friends speaks Danish, I’d even go that route if we could watch it together! I spent a long time before my April trip trying to understand this issue and history along with German unification. I think my Great- grandfather probably found it prudent to leave as his area became Prussian-ized and he was of military service age. This is, of course, not mentioned in the family correspondence that has survived. What fun this all is!
My mother’s grandparents came through Ellis Island. Her paternal grandmother came around 1908, with her 4 daughters, and one of the questions on the form was “Are you a Polygamist?” - she answered no. Another question was “Are you coming with more than $20?” - she answered no to that too. She was met by her husband and my Grandfather was conceived shortly afterwards and was born 9 months and a few days later. By then, 2 of her 4 daughters had died and she didn’t baptize my Grandfather because she had lost her religious faith. He grew up being rather pessimistic, which I don’t wonder at now.
My mother’s maternal grandparents both came from the same town in county Galway, Ireland, but met in NYC. They had 6 or 7 children and my Grandmother is the eldest. Far from being the usual eldest daughter - having to work hard being Mom #2 - she was quite happy and I have photos of her where she looks like a regular flapper! One of her younger brothers went to Cornell. They were not well off at all, but it was a different time.
On my Dad’s side we have an ancestor who came over the year New Orleans was founded, 1719, I believe. She and her sister were on boat #10 and were from the poorhouse of La Rochelle France. Was their getting on the boat voluntary? You have to wonder. Later ships included people sent over for illegal salt dealing, illegal tobacco dealing, vagrancy, women sent under “lettre de cachet” from the King, etc. It wasn’t just Australia that did this!
ETA - on the Ellis Island web site you can find the original documents for you ancestors who came over. In one case (with the polygamy question), the writing is quite elaborately spidery and difficult to read. In the other case, it is beyond ridiculous and completely illegible! Too bad.
@Pizzagirl Hahahaha. I’m a direct descendent of Lewis Morris, who signed the Declaration, and a half-great-niece of Lewis’s half-brother, Gouverneur Morris, who played a major role in drafting the Constitution. There are a whole bunch of others, a Baldwin or a Bliss was governor of Michigan, John Murray Carnochan was a notable surgeon, and so on. But in the end, one is what one does more than where one comes from, so I’m as proud of my brother and sisters doing psychotherapy, social policy research, and starting schools, as I am of good old Lew and Guvvy:).
BTW, I see there are other people on the thread with ancestors in the Colonial Congress, etc. The thing is, I have never looked up how the Morris dudes actually got here. The Carnochans were lowland Scots who came over and bought up a bunch of land. But I don’t know when the first guy arrived. I suppose I should go ask my dad for more details.
First generation on my Dad’s side. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I was told I could be DOAR on my Mom’s side. But I can’t prove it easily at this point because all those relatives have passed. It would take a lot of research.
So on one side I am rare and the other well done.
1986
I’m afraid I have no famous direct ancestors whatsoever, except (in an extremely localized sense) my 6x great-grandfather, who was parnas [president] of the Jewish community in the town of Emmendingen, Baden in the 1740s, but once had to spend a night in jail for cursing the mayor. And was fined for getting in a fight with his son-in-law (also my ancestor) and pulling his beard. (The town council records survive and are very informative.)
As for other relatives, there was my now rather obscure great-uncle who won all those Olympic medals more than 100 years ago. (He is, at least, a member of the Syracuse Hall of Fame, the Track and Field Hall of Fame, and the informal and relatively small Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.) And my great-grandfather was a cousin of Alfred Dreyfus. (I read Robert Harris’s recent novel about the Dreyfus case with great interest.)
Beard pulling, I love it!
Some thousands of years ago, Cherokee, some in the 1700s, Scotch Irish, some in the mid 1800s, German Jews. Married an immigrant who came over in the late 1980s.
My kids are a crazy quilt of ethnicities and I expect my grandkids will be even more so.
It seems whoever came here recently does not have much to say about their ancestors in US. This is natural. But it is somewhat strange that there seems to be relatively few such new immigrants here. In the area (a city in the heart of silicon valley) where I live now, I once read from some source that almost 80% of residents were born in other country and then came here. Maybe their children are still very young (a lot of babies, toddlers and young parents in my immediate neighborhood) so they have not found College Confidential yet.
It may be interesting to know how large is your family (includingvyour extended family) who are living in US now.
For us, it is very easy to count: only three.
Until recently, on my mom’s side there was only 8 of us. Then my cousins decided to have lots of babies in a short time span and now we’re up to 13.
On my mother’s side, there’s just me and my son, and a small handful of more distant relatives (one second cousin of mine and a couple of third cousins, and their respective descendants), since my mother was an only child and didn’t come over until 1943, and most of her cousins and other relatives were either Holocaust victims or ended up in South America, Israel, or France/Belgium. My sister doesn’t live in this country either, and I haven’t seen her in 20 years.
On my father’s side, since all four of my great-grandparents (and a number of their own siblings and first cousins) came over in the 1880s, and almost all of them had lots of descendants, I probably have hundreds of second, third, and fourth cousins (and their children and grandchildren) living in the USA, plus three first cousins and their descendants. I’ve corresponded with lots of them over the years in researching my family, but only know my first cousins and their children personally. My more immediate family was about as unprolific (if that’s a word) as possible; my son is an only child and has no first cousins, since he’s the only grandchild of his four grandparents: even though my parents and my ex’s parents had a total of five children, I’m the only one.of the five to have become a parent.
My dad’s side of the family came from County Tipperary in the 1840s. My GGGM was 19 and traveled with two of her younger sibs to the US. She met my GGGF, originally from the same town in Tipperary, in the US.
My mom’s mother’s side is Norwegian and German. The German branch was in East Prussia (now Poland) and left in 1871 as things started to get bad. My maternal grandfather’s side seems to be German, but they changed the spelling of their name a couple of times, which has made it a bit more complicated to track.
My paternal grandmother, who was born in a shanty house in rural Arkansas, proved to have the most interesting line. One of her ancestors was on the Lewis and Clark expedition, and a cousin of mine who has been doing geneology work for the past 30 years (pre-internet) has traced us back to Martha Custis Washington and Pocahontas. There was another thread on this previously, and CC poster Hayden and I are cousins about 10x removed!
DH’s side is Eastern European Jewish and has had many of the men disappear from the family, so I never expected to find much. His mom always said her family was from Austria-Hungary. Bless my dear BIL, he saved anything that looked interesting when my FIL moved out of the Bronx after my MIL passed away. He gave me a couple of bags of papers. First envelope: birth record and naturalization papers for DH’s maternal grandmother. Birth record is in Polish – used Google Translate and was able to identify the town where she was born, which was Austro-Hungarian at the time, but was previously Polish. All records were maintained in Polish, and Jewish records were maintained in a separate book from the other residents of the town. The area was later Russian and is now in western Ukraine. From there I could identify her parents grandparents, find their home towns and copies of their birth/marriange records, and cross reference to an old photograph we had that we couldn’t identify (except for the town where the photographer’s studio was located). So far I’ve identified relatives from Stryi, Boryslaw and Drohobycz.
SH’s paternal side has been harder to work. Early census records in the US indicate that side came from Russia, but the 1920 census said Latvia.
For those folks doing research on ancestors who were in Galicia and the Pale – here are a couple of sites I have found helpful. Yad Vashem and the Polish gov’t have been working on digitizing as many geneological records as they can find (and fund). Some funding comes from individuals, but it’s a treasure trove. There are also some links to Yahrzeit books, which memorialize and document those who were murdered in the Holocaust. Those seem to be assembled by survivors from a particular town.
http://jri-poland.org/agad/index.htm
http://www.geshergalicia.org/
http://jri-poland.org/
http://www.jri-poland.org/jriplweb.htm
My dad’s side of the family came from County Tipperary in the 1840s. My GGGM was 19 and traveled with two of her younger sibs to the US. She met my GGGF, originally from the same town in Tipperary, in the US.
My mom’s mother’s side is Norwegian and German. The German branch was in East Prussia (now Poland) and left in 1871 as things started to get bad. My maternal grandfather’s side seems to be German, but they changed the spelling of their name a couple of times, which has made it a bit more complicated to track.
My paternal grandmother, who was born in a shanty house in rural Arkansas, proved to have the most interesting line. One of her ancestors was on the Lewis and Clark expedition, and a cousin of mine who has been doing genealogy work for the past 30 years (pre-internet) has traced us back to Martha Custis Washington and Pocahontas. There was another thread on this previously, and CC poster Hayden and I are cousins about 10x removed!
DH’s side is Eastern European Jewish and has had many of the men disappear from the family, so I never expected to find much. His mom always said her family was from Austria-Hungary. Bless my dear BIL, he saved anything that looked interesting when my FIL moved out of the Bronx after my MIL passed away. He gave me a couple of bags of papers. First envelope: birth record and naturalization papers for DH’s maternal grandmother. Birth record is in Polish – used Google Translate and was able to identify the town where she was born, which was Austro-Hungarian at the time, but was previously Polish. All records were maintained in Polish, and Jewish records were maintained in a separate book from the other residents of the town. The area was later Russian and is now in western Ukraine. From there I could identify her parents grandparents, find their home towns and copies of their birth/marriage records, and cross reference to an old photograph we had that we couldn’t identify (except for the town where the photographer’s studio was located). So far I’ve identified relatives from Stryi, Boryslaw and Drohobycz.
SH’s paternal side has been harder to work. Early census records in the US indicate that side came from Russia, but the 1920 census said Latvia.
For those folks doing research on ancestors who were in Galicia and the Pale – here are a couple of sites I have found helpful. Yad Vashem and the Polish gov’t have been working on digitizing as many genealogical records as they can find (and fund). Some funding comes from individuals, but it’s a treasure trove. There are also some links to Yahrzeit books, which memorialize and document those who were murdered in the Holocaust. Those seem to be assembled by survivors from a particular town.
http://jri-poland.org/agad/index.htm
http://www.geshergalicia.org/
http://jri-poland.org/
http://www.jri-poland.org/jriplweb.htm
I am like Donna’s family insofar as everyone has small families. Lots of only children, people who didn’t have children, a “large” family is 3 kids. Neither my H nor I have any kind of extended family, just our immediate ones (parents and siblings).
" It was Tykocin, I believe, that lost vast majority of its inhabitants virtually overnight (rounded up and executed at nearby Treblinka). As for Jedwabne… wow… the very word sends chills down my spine."
Katliamom - my great grandmother (who died sometime around 1916) was from Jedwabne. I have seen her maiden name among the names of the lists of the dead, so presumably I have relatives who perished there, but all I know on that branch is her name and her parents’ names.
Re - DAR research. My mother joined as a young woman at the urging of relative who wanted the lineage (from the Mayflower) documented. She never attended meetings and I suspect paid dues only that first year to join. Mom felt great disgust at the Marian Anderson incident. I have her records, many of which are from the DAR Lineage Books, said to be available at “various libraries” and seem to really short cut a lot of research.
What I find hilarious is that my Hubby’s family has been in the US for about as long as my mom’s, but family from his lines would be probably by ineligible for DAR - they had to escape to the hills due to their support of the English Monarch.
@CountingDown, my ggp’s were from Galicia, but not Jewish. Interesting that a number of us trace back to the Ukraine or that general area near Poland tied in with the Austro-Hungarian empire. I was lucky to know my mother’s maternal grandparents, who lived til roughly 1970 and 1980. They came in the early 1900’s, my ggm was brought by her brothers who earned money, then went back. My ggf was in love with her in the old county and followed her. (And though that sounds romantic, it wasn’t a good marriage.) I recorded an oral history with her when I was in college, and with his brother. Their town in NJ was a mix of Eastern European immigrants, part of what started a lifelong fascination with cultures. My mother’s father also came to avoid the Russian army.
Over the past 20 years, as the web records multiplied (I do say, bless those Momons,) I uncovered so much about DH’s family, which goes back to Plimoth Colony on his father’s maternal side (3 families, turns out my best friend has a documented ancestor who was an indentured servant there, same time) and Jamestown, and probably the Mass Bay Colony and then early CT. DH wasn’t the least bit interested.
About confusing, alternate records, short version: sometimes births, marriages, deaths were recorded in the parish a family had left, as well as where the actual event occurred. I’m pretty obsessive about trying to get it right. And yes, some of the DAR records are wrong, just wrong. Even tales some old relative supposedly learned at grandfather’s knee can be wrong.
The tale I learned at my mother’s knee was that her GGrandfather was a “big, tall redhead from County Cork”. I searched lots of passenger lists and immigrant records and never found him. That’s because he was born in Arkansas. His father was born in Georgia as was his grandfather. And the family owned slaves, which was so dis-heartening that I quit researching this particular line.