Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire what nationality are you ? Are you sure?

Two things you will learn if you start looking into ancestry:

1: Western Europeans have been shuttling all over western Europe for a long, long time. Just because your ancestors can be traced to a country doesn't mean that they had been there since the beginning of time.

2: It only takes a couple hundred years of a bloodline for it to contain a *lot* of different ancestors.

In other words, if you're an American of western european descent, it's very likely that you're carrying DNA from all over Europe,..and maybe even traces from north africa and the middle east.

Agreed, and quite likely. Also, given where my family was in the New World and at what times, it's quite likely to have traces of Native American and African in there, too, because they weren't growing white girls on trees that far into the frontier.

Irish, English and a big dose of Cherokee. All fully documented.

Yep.. I can trace back to the revolution, with a whole load of FOBS from there, but IMO it's just a bunch of hot air from old biddies with nothing better to do.

I finally got it done and it hasn't helped me find any of my ancestors. Unless they connect you with somebody with almost identical DNA, and unless that person really knows a lot about his ancestors who may also be your ancestors, you'll never get past a vague generalization that you probably already knew. Frustrating for me. You'll get a notice that you and some other person have a 90 percent chance of having a common ancestor within 24 generations (!) That's 1,000 years ago! There weren't all that many people total in Scotland back that long ago. Of course you're all related.

we know that Mom's side of the family came from Bavaria/Austria, as we have records going back into the middle ages.
Dad's family is from England, and we can trace folks fairly accurately to the middle 1600's. Names, dates of birth, who married to, dates of marriage, that sort of thing.

So very true. Even a cursory study of any region's history (like, say, the British Isles) (or Italy) (or China) will show that there is nothing "pure" about the folks who live there. Just too much conquest, trade and migration.

That's even more true of the U.S. - like Bill Murray said in Stripes: "We're mutts!"

Well,...it just depends on who sends their DNA in to have it added to the data base, if you're talking about ancestry.com's records.

For whatever reason a lot of people who are fairly closely related to me have submitted their DNA to ancestry.com.

I found a very in depth family tree on ancestry.com that's been assembled by someone who I don't know,.. that is descended from my uncle,..who had children with a woman that I've never heard of. Hence, I have first cousins who I've never met,....never even knew existed,..and whoever has constructed the family tree has taken it back to my great-great grandparents. (the parents and grandparents of my father's mother)

I strongly suspect, from the emphasis on one branch of the tree, that it's been constructed by the child of a first cousin that I never knew of.

American! Mom's family came from Germany and landed in Connecticut in 1647 migrated to in Dallas PA in in 1701 most of er family remains there 300+ years later.

Dad's family German/Dutch is harder to trace but they seemed to be in N.E. PA in the early 1700.

Mostly black Irish....( descendants of the Vikings). Mom has some German. Tho I don't know how much..

Im 100% Red, White, and Blue! Whatever else is in there I don't care.

nationality? I don't put much stock in that just list me as American.

cause its interesting.....

Just mailed off my tube of spit a couple hours ago. It will be interesting to see where my parts and pieces came from.

Some of my ancestors came from Europe a few generations ago. Other ancestors were here to meet them. As for me, I'm an American. First, last, foremost and unhyphenated.

i have zero interest going back to Norway ect.....my great-grandfather et all came over here and left their homelands for a reason.....no interest in hyphenations either but ones family history is still interesting....

Sister did a little research and seems my family name, Crooks, came in thru Charleston in the 1820s. That's one leg of my English heritage. From there we spread over into the Dakotas and down into Alabama. Family lore has my 2Great or 3Great (I forget which) Granddaddy coming into Jefferson County, Alabama with his Cherokee wife and all their belongs on horseback from South Carolina. But for all I know she could have been Blackfoot. There was a lot of them came in by boat thru Charleston too. Then there was the Nail lineage of my father's side, Irish I believe, whose homestead southwest of Birmingham was pillaged and burned by Yankee terrorists on their way to destroy the iron and munitions facility at Tannehill. Add to that some additional AmerIndian blood from my paternal Grandmother's bloodline. She even looked Indian to me. My maternal Granddaddy was by name a Suit; supposedly French. Maternal Grandmother's maiden name was Cosper for some additional English but with a little Shoemaker that cold be English, Scandinavian or German depending on original spelling. There was also mutterings it was actually Shumacca, from a "dark" skinned Indian tribal lineage. Other Indian blood was also supposedly blended in on my maternal side as well. Figured up once I'm probably 1/16 or so Redskin with the rest made up of Scotch. Irish, English, French. And of course there's that dark skinned Indian rumor. Come to think of it, way back in my whisky drinkin' & hard partying days I got fairly nappy on Saturday nights........ That DNA test may be shocking.

I've really gotten into my family history lately. As a kid I didn't think anything of it, but it's been fascinating lately, especially my mom's side.

On my Dad's side, our family came from England through Jamestown, Virginia in the 1600s. His line then steadily migrated West through Texas, Oklahoma and finally California. His mom was a war bride from England that came over in 1947 I believe after his father met her while serving in the Army Air Force.

My mom's side is pretty interesting. She's a Finn-Swede that moved here in 1956 with her mom and dad. Her mom's side is very well documented through Finland, Sweden and the various German/Danish states (Schleswig-Holstein). I even have a huge printed copy of some of their family tree, but several branches have written books on their history too.

It wasn't until much more recently that my grandad's darker complexion was explained. He hid his real ancestry from us, and it wasn't until after he died that my grandmother started dropping clues and my mom found out who her real grandmother was.

Her grandfather and who she thought was her grandmother failed to produce a child before their 40s, so my great granddad on that side talked a 20 something year old naive noblewoman into fathering him a child. According to letters he even promised to marry her. This woman, though of Austrian nobility and born in Prague, had a mother whose family that was in Peru and Argentina for many generations(including some governors). She's very South American Spanish in appearance with jet black hair.

This stuff really pissed my mom off because she was in Vienna when her grandmother was still alive and could have met her in 1972. Instead, we've had to uncover a lot about that side through letters she wrote to my grandfather, who was emabarrased by being a bastard, his father's philandering and the fact that he essentially stole my grandfather from his mother and took advantage of his diplomatic immunity and connections to retain him. She wasn't permitted to speak to him (and his father hid all of her letters and gifts) from age 3 to about 21 when a priest acted as a go-between for her to.
However, since my grandfather was never legally adopted, the death of whom he considered his mother brought about legal challenges for his inheritance from his cousin involving US, German(born in K�ln for some reason), Austrian and Finnish courts.

Anyway, through those court documents and secret letters (telling the court she gave up her claim to him, but sending letters that told a very different story) we learned more about her and her later adoption of a countly family to allow them to take advantage of her sweet rent controlled apartment in Vienna. Anyway, we reached out to them last year and met them this past summer in Vienna, where we got more stories about great grandmother and the family she adopted. They dug up some documents for us on my great grandmother including her passport and a story about her bringing back a chest of sand from Egypt. They also gave us her grandfather's paperwork granting title from Franz Josef(they also had one of his chairs in the apartment).

Turns out he's also a hunter and while taking us out to her gravesite we passed some land where pointed out the location of his first red deer kill on land he rents from the Hapsburgs. One of the other memorable crazy stories we got was about his father having dinner with Hitler at their castle and making him parade around with a German helmet on as a young teenager. Oh and then another story about growing up in post war Germany, he said there's a Life Magazine article about his mother, he and his brothers acquiring black market leather to make boots and shoes in order to survive after being disowned by the family (his mother was literally a princess and a few of his cousins are kings).

Also on that trip we got better information on our Prague and other Czech links. Stuff that you can't just get off of the internet. Most notably, while visiting this same grandfather's great-great whatever grandfather's altar in Our Lady before Tyn, the church historians put us in touch with an author who was able to finally tell us why he had this altar in the church. Turns out he was an important player in the 1648 Battle of Prague (against my fellow Swedes) and was granted the title of Baron and became a major donor for the church. We also got his old address and saw his home which is now a small school in Prague.

And we got to see the great grandmother's apartment building when she was younger in Prague, but didn't try to sneak inside like we could in a few previously places we've visited.
Previously, I've visited other ancestral homes of family members and find that to be one of the more interesting aspects of tracing family history.

So, I love this family history stuff. We frequently hit dead ends, but when you keep scratching at something, it's amazing what you'll uncover. I'm extremely interested to see if the DNA stuff will help us figure out where to go with a few of these other dead end threads. My mom says he still have things at my grandmother's house with my grandfather's DNA on it which I think would be more interesting when trying to explore that side instead of using her DNA or mine.