Ancestry and Ancestors

G-Force Junkie

Old Vulcan Guy
Joined
Jun 2, 2003
Messages
405
What nationality is your ancestry and what did they do?

Mine is English, Scotish, Irish, French, Prussian, Lithuanian, and Russian. My grandfather was in the 101st Airborne in WWII, I had ancestors on both sides of my family that were double agents for both the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War, and my father's mother's mother's family is descended from Scotish nobility.
 
My ancestry is Northern European (Irish, Scottish, Swedish, German, etc.) with one Native American on both my mother's and father's side. I know both my granparents on my mother's side were in WWII, and my great grandma on my dad's side was a "manizer" up until her death (she was always pinching the orderlies' butts in the nursing home :lol: ), but beyond that don't know much about my ancestors' lives.

EDIT: I do know that all my ancestors arrived in America after the Civil War, so no activity there.
 
My surname is Dutch. It refers to a town near Amsterdam, so I think my Dad's direct ancestors came from there. They emigrated to the US around 1650 and eventually ended up in Tennessee, then migrated to Spokane, Washington. Along the way my Dad's Dutch ancestors hooked-up with French (Henot,) German (Ehmer) and Danish (Nelson) folks.

My Mom's is Belgian, but my family emigrated from Antwerp, Belgium to Cork, Ireland around 1670, so they are essentially Irish. Mom's family moved to Ohio in 1850, escaping the Irish potato famine, then they moved to tiny little Nokomis, Illinois.

My Great-Great-Great Grandma had an affair with a Cherokee laborer around 1880 and I am the direct descendent of the product of that union.

My Mom's Dad served as an airman in WW2, which led to his lifelong fear and loathing of flying. He was lucky to score service in Brazil, so he never saw combat.

After WW2, both Mom and Dad's families moved to Peoria, Illinois, but my parents didn't meet until they went away to college in Champagne-Urbana Illinois.

My Mom's brother served in Vietnam and re-enlisted a few years back to earn better retirement benefits. He was a sergeant during the war, now he's an officer and works in a medical organization.
 
My father's ancestors were Polish.
My mother's ancestors were from all over the world.
 
From my mother's side:

Most of the tree is from old Polish nobility that dates back hundreds of years. The coat of arms, swords, and other relics of the Matysiak's family holdings are still in Poland at this time.

My grandfather was from the old noble family while my grandmother was a simple peasant with ties to both Poland and Ukraine/Russia/Soviet Union. She was in Bialystok when she was a child, though I'm not sure where she was when World War II started. Her home, at the time however, fell to the Soviet landgrab while the Nazis blitzkrieged western Poland. I know that at least one member of her family (a sister) was prey to one of the famous Soviet roundups. She wound up in Siberia, and she was shot dead after some time in a gulag.

My grandfather started as a simple coal miner, but joined the military when tension between Poland and Germany started to heat up. He was a member of the Polish Cavalry that fought against the Nazi panzers when they stormed into Poland in 1939. He fought until they were defeated and had to surrender. From there, he was taken by the Nazis to be a policeman in Warsaw. However, while he did that, he was operating an underground station that would transport those (mainly Jews) chased by the Nazis to get them out of the country and also planning some kind of resistence. He was captured by the Nazis in 1941 when a Jew he was helping turned him in. He spent three years in a slave labor camp until Americans beat up the Nazis there and freed them.

My grandmother had to flee her home when Nazi dive bombers blew it up when they invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. However, she was quickly picked up by Nazi forces and transported to a slave labor camp...the same one my grandfather was in. That's how they met.

They spent time in a British relocation camp in West Germany. The town doesn't even exist anymore (I don't think) called Watenstaat. My mother was born there. They moved to a suburb of Brussels for several years before moving to New York.

I guess I'm the heir to the Matysiak family even though my last name is not Matysiak (my grandparents had two daughters).

As for my father's side...I don't know all that much. I do know that there is some relation to William Barret Travis, commander of the Alamo. Unfortunately, after contact broke between my father and his mother...any more information couldn't be gathered. Maybe I'll try to go through the family tree through records and try to trace the tree to see what the exact relation is. However, I do bear the name William Travis...but not the same middle name. There are quite a few Will Travises in the family.

My great-grandmother (or the generation before) fled Russia when there was a strong anti-Jewish feeling at the turn of the 20th century. I'm not sure if my great-grandfather served in World War I or not, but the time would seem to fit.
 
Mostly Irish, but with a little English and Hungarian mixed in.

I discovered that the central square in Galway is called Eyre Square, which is my last name...
 
Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Croatia (though when my grandfather lived there it was part of Yoguslavia and he only lived there until he was 11 or so as his father then sent him to London).

No war stories I'm afraid... My grandparents were too young to be in WW2 and none of them participated in the independence war... Then my father was in the army only after the major wars - he served in Sinai during it's evacuation and then was moved to a unit monitoring Lebanon (he was in intelligence). I'm going to intelligence as well, in the hopw that I'll expericnce only peace processes as well ;)
Only my Croatian grandfather was in europe during WW2 so the holocaust didn't hurt out family too much. He and one of his brothers were in London with their mother. The youngest brother was a baby and he stayed with in Croatia with their family's christian maid. They actually lived in a German base where she worked. The only one who was killed by the nazis was my great grandfather, appearantly in Yasenovac. He was among the first to be picked by the nazis, as he was pretty much everything they hated - a rich jewish industrialist who supported the communists and was a member of the free masons... My grandfather tried to find out but he was arrested by Tito's regime and came to Israel once released. That great grandfather is actually the only one I know of who actually fought, in WW1, as a soldier in the austro hungarian army. He was captured by the Russians and this is where he started believing in communism.
Also, the family of my grandmother from Romania was among the first families to establish Tel Aviv, although later they moved to haifa.
 
I am predominantly Irish, and my mother's side has a little bit of Dutch in them. My Irish family immigrated here during the Potato Famine.

I actually visited the grave of one of them when I visited Ireland in 2000. It was in a "town" that was a church, a gas station, a diner, and a couple of houses. :lol:
 
My Father's
mother- Irish origin (Parents from Ireland, and the story of how they got together is interesting)
father- French origin, German origin (his father was from France and his mother was from Germany)

My Mother's
mother- Ukrainian origin, German origin (not sure who was what as of her parents, they were both born in the U.S., though)
father- Cuban origin (parents were from Cuba)
 
My father's
father- Spanish.
mother-Italian. There is a street in Rome called Balbi(her family name), and a Balbi married the daughter of Julius Caeser! There were numerous Balbis among Genoese noblility in the Renassence.

My Mother's
father-German, with a Belgian father. They stabllished in the Espírito Santo state and were quite succesufull. The first car of that state belonged to my great-grandfather(the belgian one), who was murdered due to political fights.
mother-Portuguese father and Spanish mother.
 
my ancestery that i can trace is short

my father only knew one of his grandparents because a couple were dead an I believe his father(my grandfather) disowned his parents.

my mother can trace back to her grandparents and some great grandparents.

from what i'm told our ancestery comes from irish dutch italian and cherokee(not necissarily in that order)
 
Mother's side - Scottish and German
Father's side - German, English, Cherokee
 
On my father's side: Dutch all the way back to the early 18th century, though the latest suspicion is that they migrated there from Germany. There's a little English in me through my paternal great-grandmother.
On my mother's side: My maternal grandfather's family came from the island of Schiermonnikoog and was traced back there all the way to 1666, when the evil English invaded the island and burnt down the town and church. The records were lost in the fire.
On my maternal grandmother's side, my grandma insists I am a descendant of Grote Pier, a 16th-century Frisian freebooter/pirate who fought the Habsburgs on the side of the Duke of Gelre. By all accounts though, he was not just a freedom fighter, but also a plunderer, rapist and extortionist. It's possible I am a descendant (he was from the same village my grandma's family hails from) but really rather unlikely ;).

There's not much military history in my family that I know of, though I do know that my late maternal grandfather was drafted in the Dutch army in 1940 and fought at the Grebbeberg. My grandma used to tell us that he came walking all the way home to The Hague (approximately 120kms away) to surprise her in the kitchen late at night after the defeat.
 
My mother's family is mostly of Hungarian descent, and my father's is of Great Britian and Ireland, mostly Scotland, I think.

There's also probably some other countries mixed in there somewhere... The truth is, I don't know much about my heritage. Maybe I should look into it.
 
Well, let's see.

Both of my parents immigrated to the United States from Poland in the early 1980's. I suppose this makes them Polish. For the most part, they are, and I have been able to get some history out of them.

My maternal grandfather was, as far as I can tell, from petty Polish nobility that had land in what is now Lithuania. My maternal grandmother was likely descended at least partially from Jews that had converted to Christianity sometime in the 19th century. Going back several centuries, there is probably Baltic, Russian, and perhaps even Swedish interbreeding here.

My father's side of the family was (and still is, except for him) from southern Poland, Gallicia, specifically. Until WW1 they bred horses for the Austrian army. His last name is apparently German in origin, which makes me suspect that they were more Austrian than Polish. (I also look a lot more "Austrian" than I do "Polish") There has also been significant Turkish inbreeding, I suspect; my father's side of the family, especially my paternal grandmother, have skin, hair, and eyes far too dark to be purely Slavic or Germanic.

So, I suppose that I am mostly West Slavic with some East Slavic, East Baltic, Germanic (especially) and faint traces of Turkish thrown in. Of course, all of this is meaningless to me. I am, first and foremost, an American.
 
i consider myself an American, but by blood, i'm German, Swiss, Welsh, English, Scotish and some sort of Scandanavian.
 
Maternal:
Grandmother--about 3/4 Swedish (her father was half English)
Grandfather--1/2 Swedish, 1/2 Danish

Paternal (biological father):
Don't know a whole lot about their background, but
Grandmother--1/2 Swedish, 1/2 Scottish
Grandfather (never knew him)--mostly Swedish, some French Canadian, possibly some other stuff, not sure

Paternal (adoptive, but still consider them "ancestors"):
Grandmother--a mix of German, Welsh, and Cherokee
Grandfather--German and Irish

So biologically, I'm somewhere between 1/2 and 5/8 Swedish, 1/8 Danish, 1/8 Scottish, 1/16 English, and some small trace of Canuck and possibly other stuff.

My maternal grandfather served as a Navy corpsman (medic) in WWII, was on a hospital ship off Normandy.

My maternal-maternal great grandfather was in the army during WWI.

Most of my Swedish ancestry emigrated here around 1880-1890. The French Canadian ancestry of my biological paternal grandfather were supposedly "voyageur" trappers who were among the first Europeans in what we now call Minnesota. My adoptive paternal ancestors have lived in the mountains around the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia since antebellum times, but the German settlers in those parts were generally neutral in the Civil War, didn't own slaves (this was hardly cotton-growing land), and were actually Republican in the 1800s (and today, they still are, lol).

I wish I knew more about the history of my ancestors in Europe--what I DO know is mostly about the maternal line (come to think of it, my family is sort of matriarchal in a way), my maternal-maternal great grandmother's mother (whew!) was the daughter of a sawmill owner from near Huskvarna, Sweden who "got in trouble" (got pregnant) and was sort of "sent" to America because of it! And interestingly enough, she first settled in Washington state (the Spokane area, where a lot of Swedes settled), before moving east to Minnesota.
 
let me see: I'm swiss, swiss, swiss and some swiss tossed in. Boy that's boring ;)

there are rumours that there's some german blood in me, but nobody dares to speak it out loud :p
 
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