I thought it might be interesting to share where we came from.

Cbf typing so I vocaroo'd it

I think I'd have to go back by more than 170 years to find any ancestors who were not already in the country (USA).

I'd have to go back, I think, at least 500 years, or maybe only 400, to find any who weren't strictly Western European or Anglo-Saxon. Maybe Spanish 400-500 years ago.

I'd also have to go back at least that far to find any that were Slavic or Finno-Ugric.

To find Russian, maybe 1000 years ago.

The vast majority of my parentage over the last few hundred years is English/Scottish/Irish. Then some German. Then a little Dutch and Scandinavian.

Although supposedly some Native American ca 300 years ago.

A little Jewish. More than a little Quaker.

I'm about as White American as they come.

Didn’t know you were born in Cali brah. No wonder you love those west coast synthsMind = blown. Glad your family found paradise in the Pacific. Very cool.

As the name suggests, Italian-American family here. My grandfather was born in Sicily during World War II. Our people all come from the same small village near Messina going as far back as records go (early 1800s). My grandpa was raised in deep poverty, especially in those days as their country had been devastated. His dad was a tailor who was drafted in his 40s to fight for Mussolini’s army. He was captured by the Americans as their forces were apparently ill prepared. The story goes they treated him so well as a POW that he became dedicated to emigrating and that’s exactly what happened.

Unlike most Italians who came over in waves around the turn of the century, they arrived in New York in the middle 1950s via ship. Eventually they settled upstate where my grandpa did odd jobs, learning the language, culture, etc. That Sicilian bull joined the U.S. Army in the Vietnam era and after getting out met my grandmother, a saint of a woman. They got married, started a number of businesses (bars, restaurants, vending and trade companies), had my dad in the 70s and the rest is history. I focus on my grandparents because they were easily the people who instilled most of the values I hold.

Mom’s side is a whole other story lol.

Cold weather’s got my nose stopped up, so I sound like I have a busted nose.

Also, I said 1989 in the vocaroo, but I meant to say 1985.

My surname line goes back to a man hung after we lost the battle of Camden. He was ~30 years old. Good thing he had a few kids.

So Horatio Gates got my ancestor killed and now Bill Gates will finish off the rest!

Rip gramps. He fought in the South Carolina militia.

Ancestry dot com. All I have to say is holy fark, traced family back to Germany, England, and Ireland. What started out as just something interesting and trying to find a couple answers to some things has turned into a deep rabbit hole. It's made me think about a lot of things differently.

Neat, thanks for sharingCrazy to think what our grandfathers would have done to each other if they ever met on the battle field, and now we are friends.Very cool! You never wanted to go into the music business? I never wanted to follow in my fathers footsteps either.Fuark, stay safe dinobrah

The details of my life are quite inconsequential... very well, where do I begin?

My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen-year-old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet.

My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament.

My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent, I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds- pretty standard, really. At the age of twelve, I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen, a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum... it's breathtaking- I suggest you try it.

It’s not that I didn’t want to, it’s just that my talents are a little different than theirs.

Both my dad and my brother are essentially musical geniuses. There’s no instrument that they can’t play. There’s pretty much nothing they can’t do, music-wise.

I did inherit the writing gene, but it’s really more academic than musical lol. I’ve written a couple of books.

Mom's side is from Sweden. Great grandparents came from Varmland and vastmanland and were cowboys who rode horses with a giant group of Scandinavian men through the Minnesota and Wisconsin borders into Canada to cut down and steal timber from them. Then they brought it back and built houses for people. All my ancestors were carpenters. I have my great grandfather's Swedish bible which he got when he was 15. Pretty cool. Don't know too much more about the family though going back farther.

Dad's side is pretty badass. All from West Virginia. Related to both sides of the Hatfields and McCoy's. My dad goes to the family reunion every year. I am also related to Kevin Bacon's family. Thought that was pretty funny. All the men on my dad's side were giants. Literally giant men. My dad is 6'7 all my dads uncles were between 6'2 and 6'8, they all had hands the size of catchers mitts. My great grandfather fought in WW1 in one of the battalions that saw the most action in the war. He was left for dead at a random farm in France from an illness, but the owner's found him and nursed him back to health. He came back home 3 months after his unit did and everyone though he was dead. Just showed up out of nowhere. Said he wrote that family all the time. However he became a drunk because of what he experience in WW1 and eventually died, which my grandmother detested, but said he had a genius IQ and a near photographic memory. Dude was an absolute Chad too. I have pictures of him.

There's more but that's just off the top of my head.

Pic of Chad great grandfather

Interesting, I haven't used any of those websites. There is a family rumor that one of my uncles did, and found out he had a daughter he didn't know about. I heard it once and haven't heard anything since lolAware, lolStrong lineage, very cool brah.

I know my dads family was from
Poland but his mothers mother was from Ukraine. My moms mothers dad was from Slovenia and her father was the original Prussian

Nice try New Zealand Security Intelligence Service brah.

Whole family is from the Sip. M-I-crooked letter, crooked letter I, hump back, hump back-I.


Related to this guy, he is a great uncle I believe. One of the oldest photos of a family member I have.

Ancestry.com is the main onlinePAYrepository for research.

ForFREE, you can go tohttp://www.familysearch.orgFamily Search is not first-hand information like ancestry.com is, but I'd still say it's pretty accurate. A good bit of the information on there may link directly to first-hand information.

Find A Grave ( http://www.findagrave.com )is also a good place to look.

Both Family Search and Find A Grave are Mormon-owned/administrated, IIRC. The LDS church is huge into genealogy as I am a number of you know.

Trying to trace your ancestry can take real research skills and know-how, and knowing about the world in general, and, yes, re$ource$. Geneaological societies, historical societies, etc, can help with pointers for this. Your local library may be a good place to start as genealogical societies often meet there.

Mom's side came to Wyoming from out east on the Oregon trail and homesteaded a horse/cattle/bison ranch, still in the family today. Dads side immigrated from Norway to Minnesota 4 generations ago.

Dad's side of the family was Idahoan to the core.... I am 4th generation. His parents died about ten miles from where they were born. Grandpa was an alcoholic and a TOTAL redneck, salt of the earth construction worker. I might share some stories about him when more time to write/not on mobile. Grandma was kind of needy and made the family her whole identity.

My maternal grandmother is from a group of nasty Irish settlers in Kansas (went out there to settle an estate a few years ago, and some people out there STILL don't like the family). They're kind of like the people version of mules... they work all day, and they're all stubborn and mean as chit. Grandma was out on a ladder painting her own house at 78, half out of self-reliance, half so she could bitch that "this family never helps me with a god damn thing."

She married an Air Force guy from Texas, who was a bit of a drifter. Don't have any background on him and IIRC his birth certificate was pre-Social Security. I heard he stayed in touch with some relatives, so maybe Ancestry could turn up something. Anyway, they settled in Idaho in the 60s. My grandpa died in the 80s of a heart attack on an Idaho golf course. My grandmother never remarried and lived in the same house for the next 30 years.

Dad is like the living embodiment of gen X, death of the American dream. He went from football Chad banging the homecoming queen, to assembly line manager making $90k/yr in the late 90s, to night janitor at a middle school today.

Mom is steadily turning into a carbon copy of her mother as a grouchy, workaholic Irish person. Even picked up the fondness for golf. It's been weird to see.

I love this thread.

Moar.

Came in to post this

My great grandfather took his family and went west in a covered wagon.

If you'd seen their faces, you'd know why it was covered.

Direct descendant of Afonso I Mvemba a Nzinga, king of the Kongo empire.

Direct descendant of Leopold II, king of the Kongo empire.

Awesome to hear!

Did any of your daughter's paternal ancestors look like this?



This is one of my 4x great grandmothers, born 1793, from one of my Quaker ancestral lines. This photo just appeared out of nowhere a year or two ago. I really don't think she played games.

My dads side(grandma) fought in the revolutionary war. We have the family tree, wedding spoons and pictures from 1879 when my family lived in Vermont. We came over on the may flower and ship Ann, our chest we have in our living room came over with my family on ship Anne. It was a few years after the mayflower I believe.


I have civil war dollars, letters from the revolutionary war, signed documents from the civil war(all my relatives), a really cool Tin photo album of all my relatives from the 1800s, a gold nugget when we owned a gold mine in Colorado

My great grandpa fought in WW1, my grandfather fought in Korea.

My moms from Miami which I never knew originally. His dad worked with Capone in Chicago and they followed him down to when he moved to Miami. My great aunt is still alive and is remembered by Al capones niece, who she used to go swimming with in capones pool. She also used to get babysat by capones mother up here in the southside l. She speaks very fondly of Al and said a lot of the stuff is exaggerated lol

A lot of cool stuff.

-- I also nearly came to blows multiple times in college when some pos hipster liberal would mouth off about how the colonists were scumbags or some chit because he was talking about my blood. Shut him down real quick. Pussy

my family were potato farmers in central/eastern europe (srs)
came here to america to avoid the soviet communist era. now we're just rotting in the US

My great grandpa was in ww1 too, fought in France. Became a big drunk as well and died in a veterans home

Dad's Family

-Fathers Side
Great Great Grandfather immigrated from Rhineland Germany in the 1860's.
Great Great Grandmother immigrated from Lorraine Alsace Germany around the same time.
Great Grandfather was the first American born son.
Grandfather was second gen American. Fought in WWII
They all were farmers and miners in PA

-Mothers Side
Great Grandfather immigrated from Poland around 1900 (southwestern part near Ukraine - Galacia region)
Great Grandmother immigrated the same time and was from the same region
Grandmother was the first American Born.
Great Grandmother had has family in the states since the early 1700's. Had to great great...grandfathers fight in the American Revolution (have my application in for the sons of the revolution)
All the men were miners and the women either stayed home or worked in a garment factory in PA

Mothers Family

Moms side
Great Great Grandfather immigrated from Ayrshire Scotland in the 1830's
Great Great Grandmother either immigrated from Scotland or Wales around the same time
Great Grandfather and Great Grandmother were first borns
Grandmother was second born
The women all stayed home. The men were miners except great grandfather who worked in Law Enforcement

Fathers Side
Great Great Grandfather imigrated from the Galacia region in Eastern Europe int he 1890's
Great Great Grandmother immigrated at the same time and from the same region, her father was killed by law enforcement in a labor protest
Great Grandfather was first American born, died of black lung when grandfather was baby.
Great Grandmother was first American born, died from diabetes complications when my grandfather was child.
Grandfather was raised by his sisters, turned down a football scholarship to fight in WWII and storm Omaha beach.

Dad's moms family in the late 40's or early 50's. Grand mother is next to the bride.



Great Grandfathers family on my dads German side, Great Great Grandmother is the mean looking lady sitting in the front. My great grandfather is behind her ot the right. Assuming late 1800's or early 1900's on this one. They all look italian because there was a lot of Roma blood on her moms side.



Great Grandparents on my moms dads side. They are seated in the front, great aunt is the woman in the back. I'm assuming this is early 1900's. Again the women look dark due to Roma genetics.

He looks cool. Would drink moonshine and smoke a tobacco pipe with him.