My background is like that of a heinz 57 mutt at the pound. My grandfather on my father’s side came over in 1920 from Italy, my grandmother and my 6 year old father came over in 1928 (my grandfather was a stone mason, and used to go back to Italy each winter when work usually halted). On my mom’s side, her mom’s family came from England just after the turn of the 20th century, on her dad’s side the grandfather came from Germany in the 1870’s, the grandmother was a New England yankee whose ancestor came over sometime in the 1650’s (yep, I could belong to the SAR, not that I am inclined to join them for many reasons), and had one ancestor that sometime in the 1730’s settled in what is now a park in NYC with a native american woman.
Yes, the family lore was that GGGF was an abolitionist. Nope. Not only are the slave censuses there, but also local and regional histories. And the last surviving, very old relatives learned what they did from an aunt of theirs who wrote her notes in roughly 1930. There’s also a personal diary of a governess from the far north, just before the Civil War, who detailed some of her utter dismay. I don’t know these elders, btw. There was a rift in that part of the family a couple of generations ago. MIL’s sister made contact (wanted to join the UDC, United Daughters of the Confederacy) and I followed it up with some updates, but I don’t feel the need to blow their minds. Maybe if some younger cousin is interested.
But on DH’s paternal side, they are documented as Quakers involved in the Underground railway.
@lookingforward :
“as the web records multiplied (I do say, bless those Mormons,)”
Have you ever been to the Family History Center in Salt Lake City? I could spend an entire month’s vacation there, only coming out to have meals.
“Even tales some old relative supposedly learned at grandfather’s knee can be wrong.”
My grandmother told me one story of her father’s experience emigrating through Liverpool as a small boy that she never mentioned to any of my cousins. I sort of dismissed it as a fanciful tale ment to entertain a small child, and didn’t give it any more thought. Imagine my surprise forty-mmphm years later, finding the ship’s records from their journey on Ancestry-- and while the story wasn’t recorded, everything I found supported it. It was sort of like having Gran back for awhile (and telling me “told ya so!”).
No, but I’ve been to SLC and it was pleasant. Are there more records there than online? (I guess that’s a dumb question, but would love to hear more.)
It’s funny about some lore, petrichor. Nearly every “maybe” or “I think” from DH’s aunts/uncles about the family in NYState or before has proven out. (And their nuclear family had moved to PA, when they were quite young.) I joked with them at one reunion that they should just brain dump any and all wild hare ideas.
Here’s a weird thing about my own grandfather. I have records of what he did when he arrived in NYC, some of where he worked or lived, his enlistment, have a record from my GM of the ship, etc. But signs point to another wife. Hmm.
" Interesting that a number of us trace back to the Ukraine or that general area near Poland tied in with the Austro-Hungarian empire."
Yes - I would bet the majority of Ashkenazi Jews in the US trace back to that area.
I belong (like a lot of those with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage) to the G2C haplogroup. They believe that G2c was one of the haplogroups around Rome in the time of Jesus, which then migrated to Sicily and lived there til around 1492, when the Jews were kicked out of present-day Italy and then migrated north, mostly to what became the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then became the Pale of Settlement. Some moved a bit west to Germany, but most hung around that area.
Saying whether someone is “Russian” or “Polish” or “Ukrainian” or whatever is really a matter of where you stop the clock. I mean, if you stop the clock at an earlier point, I’m really Sicilian!
“Here’s a weird thing about my own grandfather. I have records of what he did when he arrived in NYC, some of where he worked or lived, his enlistment, have a record from my GM of the ship, etc. But signs point to another wife. Hmm.”
That’s the thing with genealogy. It’s so easy to romanticize the past, that all of these people were saintly, hard-working salt-of-the-earth people. But they were all just people, like the rest of us, with foibles and faults and affairs on the side and lies and so forth.
I forgot to mention that dh’s mother who was a Christian Scientist was disowned by her parents for marrying a Jew. She was an only child and both parents died young. There might be second or third cousin out there, but no one has ever met them. Dh’s father’s family mostly settled in the midwest - they’ve spread around the US now.
One family story that turned out to be true: my paternal grandfather, whose name was Israel L., died when I was a year old (there’s a great photo of me sitting on his lap and playing with his glasses, but I don’t remember him). When I was about 14 – and already very interested in family history – I interviewed his older sister, then in her mid-80s, to find out what she remembered about the family. One of the things she said was that her brother Israel was given that name because a day or so after his birth on April 9, 1887, during Passover, when the family was living in Paris, France, their father (my great-grandfather) received a telegram from Lithuania saying that his own father, a dayan [Jewish judge, basically] in Yurburg [Jurbarkas] – whose first name was also Israel – had died the day my grandfather was born. So my grandfather was named Israel named after him. Nice story, but who knew?
As an adult, I was able to obtain my great-grandfather’s death certificate, confirming (the information came from his wife) that his own father’s name was indeed Israel. And some years after that, I contacted someone in Eastern Europe who actually went on my behalf to the Jewish cemetery in Jurbarkas, Lithuania (which survives relatively intact, although almost all of the Jews there were murdered) and was fortunately able to find and photograph for me the tombstone of the first Israel L., my great-great-grandfather. (His name was in the Roman alphabet, even though the rest of the inscription was in Hebrew, which made it possible to find the tombstone.) I had someone translate the Hebrew inscription for me and I converted the Jewish calendar dates to our own, and lo and behold, he died on April 9, 1887, during Passover. So my great-aunt’s story was precisely true after all.
“Saying whether someone is “Russian” or “Polish” or “Ukrainian” or whatever is really a matter of where you stop the clock. I mean, if you stop the clock at an earlier point, I’m really Sicilian!”
We have traced my mother’s paternal grandmother’s family back to the Spanish Inquisition and the family name was Castro. When my niece was in Spain she went to the village where they lived and found the records (they don’t throw anything out in Spain.) At some point after being kicked out of Spain, one letter was added on to the end of the name. .
Well, the National Geographic test thinks my maternal line is really mostly Finnish. So much for assuming. Or stopping the clock too soon. My grandfather always said my GM’s family was really Spanish, part of the Galician migration from Spain (and not Jewish, as far as anyone knew.) I’ll take whatever.
Part of the genealogy interest was the same tracing roots. But the real surprise (I’ve said this before) was that, growing up, US history was taught in a dry and utterly boring way. (And a lot, since I was in eastern PA.) Tracing DH’s family was utterly fascinating and made it come alive. One summer when we were in VA, we made a side trip to an old plantation now owned by UVa for digs. The house was rebuilt, a speculation, and suffered some assumptions of what a wealthy landowner’s home would look like. Years later, I found an old pic of one of the versions before this- and it was pretty much an ordinary farmhouse. No Tara.
Donna- my grandfather was an Izrael as well. He Americanized himself to Jack.
To answer a previous post–my brother and I and five first cousins are the only members of my mother’s family in the US. All of my father’s family is still in Croatia, mostly on the island where my father was born and the mainland cities nearby (Split and Dubrovnik). I have met and am in contact with my cousins (father’s side) in Croatia–they have no interest in family history, which surprises me. The don’t understand why it interests me.
Interesting, Pizzagirl. Israel becoming Jack wasn’t the usual pattern of Americanization for Jewish names. Most Israels (and Isaacs) became Isidore or Irving (as a result of which those very English names eventually came to be thought of as “Jewish” themselves); almost every Moses/Moishe became Morris or Maurice (or Moritz in Germany); most Jacobs/Yankels became Jack; most Wolfs became William; almost every Hersh became Harry; Ber became Bernie; Judah became Julius; Leyb became Leonard or Leon; Sarah became Sally; Rebecca became Betty; Vogele/Feigel became Fannie; Judith became Julia, and so on. Which is how one can usually reverse the process and be almost certain that a relative named Morris was originally Moses, etc. In addition to figuring out the Yiddish name, it’s often possible to figure out the Hebrew name simply by finding the Hebrew equivalent when it isn’t the same as the Yiddish, as in Wolf = Zeev; Hersh = Tsvi; Ber = Dov; Leyb = Aryeh; Feigel = Tzipporah, etc.
Which reminds me of the old joke that I first heard in childhood, about Moishe Pisch in Lithuania who moved to Germany and changed his name to Moritz Goldwasser, and then moved to France and became Maurice de la Fontaine.
Oh I agree Donna - I wasn’t suggesting that he had any rationale behind going from Izrael to Jack other than, presumably, he liked the name Jack, and I suspect he liked the “J” to honor his deceased father who was a Judel. I have a Bluma to Blanche, Chaja to Helen, Szmul to Samuel, Nosek to Nathan, Wigdor to Victor, Zysla to Susan, and so forth. The Frumas seemed to be on their own.
“Saying whether someone is “Russian” or “Polish” or “Ukrainian” or whatever is really a matter of where you stop the clock.”
Could be Mongolian! 
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/genghis-khan-s-genetic-legacy-has-competition1/
“The case for Genghis Khan’s genetic legacy is strong, if circumstantial. A 2003 paper led by Chris Tyler-Smith, an evolutionary geneticist now at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, discovered that 8% of men in 16 populations spanning Asia (and 0.5% of men worldwide) shared nearly identical Y-chromosome sequences. The variation that did exist in their DNA suggested that the lineage began around 1,000 years ago in Mongolia.”
@Bromfield2 - which island? My ancestors were from Lusin Piccolo or Mali Losinj although family lore says they had moved there from somewhere in Slavonia before that. They emigrated to the U.S. In the 1870’s. It was common for everyone to have an Italian first name, with a last name that ended in “ich”.
Interesting. I see the broad facial shape of my kids, whose dad was Ashkenazi from Ukraine/SerboCroatia, among other places, and it is reminiscent of my Korean step mom. Those Mongolians got around!
It also is interesting how some families have recognizable features / a “look” and others don’t. My kids don’t look like me at all!
Bunsen, that’s why it was so interesting to learn Finnish- we had always thought some Mongolian. But nothing from thereabouts showed up. (At least in the maternal line.) Most of us in my maternal line share a look.
@lookingforward I don’t know how much of the library is online and how much is not-- I know it’s an ongoing project. I loved sitting in the stacks though, and just going through hard copies of records. There’s an entire library shelf dedicated to one small county in the Ohio River Valley where my ancestors settled, fresh off the boat. It’s a small rural county, and I wasn’t expecting the wealth of information.