You and your Ancestory!

Discussion in 'Community Discussion' started by Otus_NigRum, Jan 21, 2019.

  1. Hello, I just wanted to make a thread to discuss and discover the wonderful heritages and cultures we at EMC have all descended from.

    To cut to the chase, I was born within Canada, with two lovely parents whose ancestors came from Northern Europe. I was born in Canada, along with my Dad and my siblings, although my Dad's side is German.
    I'll just use different terms for grandparents now, my Opa (German for Grandpa) came from Germany, while my Oma (German for Grandma) came from Poland.
    Both left during WW2, and my Oma has a story on how she ACTUALLY saw Hitler in person and had to salute to him while his "escort" went down the street. She doesn't mention this though, I only got the story from my Dad.

    During the time when the Germans and Russians were both oppressing Poland, my Oma and her family had to quickly leave and fortunately left on the last train. She also mentioned how the train was a steam train, so when it ran out of the water they had to create a human chain and pass buckets of water from the river to the train.

    As for my mom's side, she was born in Denmark and still has a thick Danish accent :) I don't know much about my Mormor (Grandma in Danish, basically meaning Mom's Mom) and my Morfar. (Grandpa in Danish, basically Mom's Dad)
    My knowledge about my Danish ancestry is kind of limited but should grow once I visit Denmark in August :). Although, I know that there is some Gypsy relation within my Danish side, as well as a prominent link to the Protestant faith in my family, as my Danish ancestors were Pastors.
    I know I have some Swedish in me as well, but I honestly don't have the full story on it, all I know is that I have a relation to it.

    As for interesting stories, my Ancestors on my Dad's side were German Slave Shipbuilders, they didn't directly go to Africa as far as I know, but my Dad saw the slave house in Germany which had shackles all over the walls where the slaves would have been.

    My Great Uncle on the German side was also a Nazi, he was in Hitler's SS men, and disappeared after the war. He is more than likely dead now, he would have died of old age.
    My Great Opa was in WW1 as some sort of officer as I remember, and I believe when my Opa was young his dad went out of town (I don't know every detail) where he was stopped and shot by Frenchmen who were most likely agents.
    In WW1 one of my German Ancestors was also a footman on the German side (duh) and I was told that he wanted to be in the Calvary, but since he was too short he couldn't.

    I hope you found that interesting, I know I do :)

    Please, tell me of your Ancestry and the stories from it. :)



    ^That's the distinctive area of where my Ancestors originated from. I used mapchart.net btw.
  2. I am from mars last time I checked my ancestory.com report
  3. I learnt more about my family history recently, actually. Quite fun. I had a lot of stuff wrong.

    Mum's side:

    My great granddad was a devout Catholic Irish nationalist who, from what I can tell, had a father who fought in both the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War on the nationalist/republican side. He got stuck in a Catholic slum in Northern Ireland. At some point he married a woman and they had at least eight children together before she somehow died. We don't know her name, how she died, how she lived, if she was Irish or British - he refused to say. I don't know what he worked as before retirement, but he supported Irish reunification, fought British Protestants in the streets, had spats with British Army officers stationed in his town. He died after decades of alcoholism and failing health in 2014 - my mum met him once, I never did - and from the way his own son spoke of him I'm glad I didn't.

    My granddad is a Catholic Irishman who failed school at the age of sixteen, preferring to hang around in his segregated town with his friends, causing loads of trouble. After failing school he just... regretted it, I guess, realised Northern Ireland was a horrible place to live (ten years later the Troubles would truly begin and this was basically a full-on civil war), and got on a boat to England. He got into port at Liverpool, where a few relatives lived (Liverpool got a lot of Irish immigrants in the 1800s after the Great Famine) and allowed him to stay. A few years later he met a Welsh woman who worked at the Women's Hospital as a nurse, got her pregnant with my mum, and then married her. The outside-of-marriage baby, combined with the fact that the woman was a Welsh (read: 'British', ignore that the Welsh are almost as oppressed as the Irish), and... she was also a Protestant. My great granddad was furious, refused to attend the wedding, and they fell out of contact until my mum was a teenager and it took until just before he died for my granddad to properly forgive him.

    My mum was taught Welsh (never quite got it though), got dressed in traditional Welsh clothing, and spent about 60% of her time as a child in Wales. I consider her to be Welsh, like her mum. And whenever we go to Wales we've got family everywhere. I'm also probably moving to Wales for three years in August and speak a conversational-ish degree of Welsh, so she gets bonus points off me.

    My nan had a Spanish grandmother too. No idea how or why a Spanish woman got to the United Kingdom, especially an area as impoverished as Wales, by herself in the late 1800s, but... she got a nice little house on the beach, married a Welsh man, had a few kids, those kids had kids and lived on the same beach, until those kids moved away into England and across the rest of Wales looking for work. Given how much Welsh there is there I'm also going to assume I've got a few Italian ancestors from not very long ago (also in the 1800s).

    My dad:

    My great granddad was a Spanish man who moved from Spain at some point (I sense he didn't like that his country was a 50/50 split between communists and fascists). Ended up in a slum in Liverpool, married an English woman, I think they were expecting their first child when he enlisted in the British Army in 1939, got stuck in the British Expeditionary Force, and... disappeared in France just before the Germans reached Paris and the French fascists took over the government and France surrendered. He probably died defending France or was on his way to Dunkirk. But for all we know he could have made it to a village or something and settled down with a French woman and never came back to the UK. Might have got put in some PoW camp although that doesn't explain the lack of documentation. It probably is the first one - his body is probably in France in somewhere. His wife never remarried and died in a fire in the 1960s.

    My granddad married an English woman he met by dating her sister - my nan was, I think, 18 when they started dating and he was 29. They got married a year later, had two kids, she almost died of what was thought to be cancer, he started a hospice for my town's cancer patients, suffered two stress-related, smoking-related, diet-related heart attacks and died from the second one in 1999. He saw my uncle get married in 1996, met my now 20 year old cousin in 1998, saw his son get married in 1998 too, died in 1999 while my parents had a kid on the way. I was born five months later. It was his dream to have a lot of grandkids, and he definitely does have a lot of them, but he never met us. The hospice still stands though. Under crappy management and losing the personality that made it so great, but it lives on and I still get "wait... you're [blahblahblah's] grandson! I knew him!" when I go to doctors or when I met new teachers at school. I even got fawned over by a celebrity who knew him like I was the celebrity lol. Oh, and he was well on his way to a knighthood before he died - he was already inducted into the Order of the British Empire and had a few meetings with some Dukes and Duchesses/LITERALLY THE QUEEN'S SIBLINGS.

    Anyway, my nan, the English woman, has a sketchy family history. We don't have much records going back and I don't have anything for her mother besides her name. I do know her dad was a naval officer, serving on a submarine in the North Sea and English Channel in World War II. My dad said he hated Germans all of his life, thought we should split it back up into dozens of independent states and rip away their industry, preferably kill a load of them. My dad also said he'd despise and be shamed by the fact I'm learning to speak German, love a German (she's Serbian-Hungarian but lives in Germany... whatever), and want to move to Germany. I'm the one shamed though, because I'm still alive enough to care and know I'm descended from a nationalistic, almost genocidal, hateful psychopath who had the most unfortunate luck to be born with the same name as Batman's servant. Ironic, really, given how much of a slave he was to the state.

    NOT ANCESTRY:
    My mum has Greek relatives, although they're not blood-related. Still fun to know though.
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  4. All the stories I type I end up erasing because they just end up leaving me to vulnerable to the internet hackers of the world. whistle-blowers need data, cause without data they have nothing to release.
    liamwill, luckycordel and Otus_NigRum like this.
  5. Mines quite the mix but to say the least, on my moms side one of my great ... grandfathers purchased 1000's of acres of land from Thomas Jefferson. On my dads side, the one guy was one of the founding fathers of "new sweden"
  6. I was born in Mexico. My linage comes from Spanish crusaders (my European relatives even have a family coat of arms earned during the wars of that period), African slaves (captured by the British to work at the Caribbean Islands fought for their freedom and escaped to Guatemala) and Mayan people (From the Peten zone, where the most fantastic Mayan pyramids were raised). I'm the descendant of countless survivors, just like everybody else.


    I carry the genetic legacy of three different continents. Looking forward to complete the collection :D
  7. Funny enough, my dad experienced the Anti-German stigma that was still prominent in North America at the time that he was alive. He was born in 1961 and lived in western Canada. Since both my Oma and Opa are from Germany, my Dad of course was soaked in German culture, as he wore lederhosen to school, barely spoke English, and was clearly a German. They lived on a farm in a very secluded area by the river, super thick full of trees, the road was a narrow gravel path, and they were the only ones living in their area, although there were a few houses down the road, although I say few...

    Anyway, at school, he was obviously bullied and hated for being a German, as the Post-War attitude was still upon many people, even in the 60s-70s, even in Canada! Many American dads taught their kids about how bad germans were. My Dad's best friend was at the start, a German hater, as his dad was, and he was told about the little house at the end of the gravel road at the disclosed farm where the Germans lived.

    What didn't help either is that my father was expected to be a girl when my Oma was pregnant, thus since his parents were stubborn, he had to wear girls clothes and leotards to school. (No wonder he dropped out in grade 9).

    I know this isn't related to what I was talking about with the Anti-German mindset, but since my dad became a Christian at a young age, he also felt a lot of hate in school, as he recalls when a girl kicked him really hard and yelled "You stupid Christian!" along with other Anti-Religious statements from his peers. That best friend of his that I also mentioned which had Anti-German parents also said that Christians should be lined up and shot. Ironically, he was friends with my Dad. Sorry for the change of Anti-German to Anti-Christian, but both were very prominent in my dad's life.
  8. I am just unconftorble about my family on th we internet, so ima not post stuff about it, but I will post my royal Waffle family!
  9. Update:

    My Swedish side is from my Morfar's side, and it is from my Great Great Mormor.
    Not much is known about her, but my Mor mentioned something along the lines of her getting pregnant by a widowed man with children in Denmark, as she was a housekeeper there, and her returning to Sweden and being dislocated from her family as being unmarried and pregnant at the time was heavily frowned upon. Although I don't think I got the exact details, the only thing I can say was is that her situation was hushed down and she was disliked by her family. She also had to give up her child, which is my Great Grandma I suppose.

    My Morfar's dad's side I believe was full of Pastors, who also came from Germany. It's confusing, but the best that I can say is that my Morfar's side originated from Germany, although the descendants since then have stayed in Denmark for quite a long time. Apparently, my ancestor in Germany used to sell animal furs and that's when he moved to Denmark and changed the family line for quite some time. Interesting! I don't know so much about my Danish Viking heritage anymore, as my Morfar's side is dominantly German far down the line, although one of my ancestors was probably some Swedish farmer, who either went Viking or not! Who cares anyway, society ruined Vikings for me anyway, I thought Vikings were actually cool :(

    My Mormor's side isn't very known, although somewhere down there is something to do with Gypsy's, I don't know how, or why, don't ask :p. There is a family book written about her ancestors though, and it would be super interesting to read that book in Denmark. It isn't a novel or anything though, it's more like a photo album, but a book I guess???

    Although controversial, I do have Jewish blood on my dad's side, as somewhere in the line one of our relatives was killed in the Holocaust. Most likely a German Jew.
    liamwill likes this.
  10. I only know things about a few generations up, and it's all Dutch. But here you go. ;)

    My father's parents lived in Limburg, at the bottom of the Netherlands. My father's mother's father had a wholesale: I think that's what's made this part of the family rich. When my school went to Camp Westerbork I didn't want to go, and instead I read diaries by and letters to my father's mother's father, about his Resistance during the Second World War. It was interesting, but also horrifying, especially reading about his (natural) hate of the enemies, and his shooting a German officer. He never told stories himself, although I have known him. A few kids he rescued from a train did contact him later, and he got an official recognition.
    My father's parents met on the train, twice, and the second time they decided to keep contact and fell in love.

    My mother's mother has always lived in Frisia, my mother's father did not, I learnt recently, although I forgot which part of the Netherlands he did come from. Anyway, he moved to Frisia and learnt Frisian, mostly by reading Frisian literature. He married my mother's mother and became a great mathematician, teaching at the school I have later attended as well, writing questions for the national exam, and working on books on mathematics.
    My parents met in Frisia (my father moved there in his teens), moved to Utrecht in 1998, and back to Frisia in 2010. I moved back to Utrecht in 2017, most of my family still lives in Frisia.
  11. It's basically all Dutch...
    My Dad's side is all Dutch, and compleatly from the local area I currently live in for all the generations I know. My mother's side is more interesting:

    My gradfather from her side comes from a really poor family (they lived in a small wooded shack where the interior floor was just the soil, as they couldn't afford a proper floor) In what must have been the later 40's/early 50's their father died of alcohol abuse (alcohol also was why they lived like that.), and they had to care for themselves. They did: every sibling of my gradfather, including himself, worked their way drastically up the social ladder, one ending up in what is the senate of the Netherlands, and my grandfather ending up as the manager of a quite large international company.
    My grandmother is born in the Netherlands, but in an indonesean family. Her father was a progressive originally Dutch colonial, who married an indonesean, became buddhist like her, and took her back to the Netherlands after the first world war (that wasn't usual). It wasn't easy to be anything but christian in that time. I've heard enough stories from my grandmother to fully realise that.
    When those two met, my my grandfather, due to poverty and the second world war, didn't have any faith in christianity anymore, which ment that he became buddhist too.
    All thet combined is the reason my mother grew up in a Buddhist family, without really looking Asian.
  12. My Great Uncle on my Mormor's side was said to be naughty and a trouble maker, and so during WW2 he was apart of the resistance on the Danish side. I don't know much about him, but through reading books about Denmark in WW2, there's no doubt he damaged something German :)
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  13. Part Italian I am, big pasta lover. No real family stories but I'm related to a Pope that had a brother who married a Jew back in the time of the crusades.
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  14. I just started digging into my family tree. So far I've found a lot of French/French Canadian ancestors on my mother's, mother side. And I've traced them all the way back to a few different areas of France. On my father's side I've traced a few ancestors that came from Italy.
  15. I wonder if we have a family tree of either side of the family. But I don't feel like asking right now. :rolleyes:
  16. Yeah the animosity towards Germans in North America was mental. For Canada I can semi-understand, but for the United States it seems really overkill. Canada was sending troops over to France from the very beginning of both the Great War/World War I and the World War/World War II. But the US just... wiped out the language in North America and burned their books and beat the German-Americans up in the street - they weren't even in World War I until a few months before it ended. It's always struck me as a bit strange.

    It definitely helps rationalise my great granddad's attitude a bit though. If it was like that in a place that was pretty much safe from being attacked by Germany, imagine what it's like in the UK - this country got bombed to hell for a few years and had important cultural sites that are hundreds or even thousands of years old harmed or destroyed. I can see why he'd believe what he believed.

    On a sidenote, some of the stuff the stuff in this thread is so bittersweet. Western Europe has known peace for decades now, works together. We don't have Dutch people having to shoot and kill German officers. We don't have men from all over the world dying in France to save it from invasion. For that I'm grateful. It just puts the UK's attitude of threatening to invade Spain, using war terminology with Brexit (the Prime Minister refers to it as a battle, she wants 'victory', etc.), and the rise in violence in Northern Ireland between the republicans and nationalists (they're now both equal in support at 50/50 of the population) culminating in a bombing the weekend just passed into a sad context.
  17. my mother's side is mainly british and italian.

    my father's side is the most interesting. I am german, polish, probably cherokee, and probably other places too.

    so i'm mainly just european. and my father's side supported the fuhrer during that time. just a fun fact i guess.
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  18. What part of Great Britain? Or don't you know?

    I only ask because, as a Brit, there's not really such a thing as 'British'. The English have only been here for just over 1,000 years and aren't related to the Welsh or Scottish. It's pretty much just a thing that foreigners call us and what we put as our nationality. The Welsh (who were even called British before the English invaded their land) and Scottish view it as England trying to remove their culture too so that's fun.

    EDIT: Wait I didn't mean to sound that pretentious or nitpicky or condescending or whatever, I am just genuinely curious and thought I'd explain why :p *sorry if I came across that way*
  19. yeah idk what part, I know my grandma (I call her nanny because britain) i just know that i'm part british and i'm quite proud about that. I should ask and get back to you on that one.
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  20. I really have absolutely no idea. I know I have some Irish, some German, some Scottish but I'm not sure otherwise.
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