Ancestry

Worldly and otherworldly topics
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Lilith
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Location: Shangri-La

Re: Ancestry

Post by Lilith » Thu Mar 18, 2021 3:45 am

Spanish, Filipino, Japanese and Chinese descent.

I’m thinking of getting that 23&me and see what the percentages are and if there’s another side of my ancestry I am not aware of.

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ashi
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Re: Ancestry

Post by ashi » Thu Mar 18, 2021 6:03 am

Madrigal wrote:
Mon Mar 15, 2021 11:03 pm
So, I saw one member post something that seemed to indicate Italian ancestry, which reminded me that I'm really nosey. :ph34r:
So, funny story, I am actually zero percent Italian but thanks to British and French shenanigans my paternal grandparents fled different wars in the middle east and met in a charming Sicilian city the Arabs called Qal'at al-Nisa (Fortress of the Women) and we called her "noni" both because it is the Sicilian word for grandmother and (it also meaning "nine") because into their 90s my grandfather would gaze upon her with stars in his eyes and insist she was the ninth wonder of the world.

I am unsure any other detail I could share about my background or heritage could say any more than that. Though perhaps I should add that growing up around these people in a tiny village left me terribly old-fashioned, so I do make a point of warning people, especially prospective romantic partners, that I am inexorably wed to a range of 1800s values such as enlightenment, socialism, vegetarianism, and feminism.

No one ever laughs but it is a silence to which I am well accustomed.

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Madrigal
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Re: Ancestry

Post by Madrigal » Thu Mar 18, 2021 8:40 am

TeresaJ wrote:
Tue Mar 16, 2021 7:44 am

A lot of seafarers and gamblers on my mom's side. Some relatives worked in the opera house in New Orleans working on sets and costumes, and there's a line of siblings named after operatic characters. Seafarers and shopkeepers on my dad's side. Generations who declined to fight for inheritance with greedier cousins on either side, so a long gentle slide from wealth to middle class.
We've got seafarers too! My grandfather on my mother's side and some Spanish uncles were sailors, and there is a story about how you could track that line of the family down to a famous pirate.

My maternal grandparents were both born in Spain, in Finisterre (end of the Earth), Galicia. My grandmother lived nearer to the sea and had a lot of stories about people fishing for squid and octopus, and also lots of stories about eating hard bread and being hungry, and the King fleeing Spain in a third class wagon (or so the popular imagination immortalized it), and the whole run up to the Spanish Civil War. My grandmother never had a dime but she read a lot of literature and especially poetry, and always knew many poems by heart and had a very romantic mind. My grandfather, who married her, was from the mountain area considered to be the home of less refined people (although, nobody in this story had a cent, they liked to make class distinctions among each other) and she always resented having married him, since she was in love with another man but wasn't allowed to date him because he was from a slightly higher class.

The whole Spanish family was very numerous and they all came to Buenos Aires and none died in the war even though they fought on both sides of it (as they were forced to). It was nice getting together with them for Christmas or birthdays and listening to them clap and sing songs from their youth, because that's what they would do, clap and sing to entertain themselves. My uncles and grandfather would tell tales of women throwing themselves into the sea for their unrequitted love and we would clinically assess which was the more impressive tale and who was the biggest heartbreaker. They didn't really want to flaunt these stories but were egged on and pitted against each other by the younger generations. My grandfather was said to have saved numerous men from drowning but he never wanted to talk about it. In all of these get togethers there was a moment when one would say "but I already told this story many times" and then everyone would deny ever having heard it (much to the indignation of some of the older females).

On my father's side, my grandmother was a school teacher of Italian descent but born in Bs As. She eloped with a man 11 years younger, my grandfather who died young and was of Spanish descent. He used to sell prefabricated houses and made a good living off it. He also used to play in a band and sing tango. They called him 'the moor' because he had dark skin like these Spaniards descended from Arabs. They say I look like him but there are no clear pics. I have asked who were the first Italians to come to Bs As on my paternal grandmother's side, but I guess nobody that's alive knows.

Even though ties to Spanish culture were strong in my family - in fact any time you entered my grandparent's living room you'd see my grandfather sitting in his armchair smoking a pipe under a huge tapestry of a matador stabbing a bull - I never felt in any way Spanish. So any Spanish customs I may have are just habit. I feel even less Italian, even though my paternal grandmother did make some references to Italian food or vocabulary. I always wonder about people that feel strong links to their heritage even when they have had little to no contact with ancestors from a distant land. It seems to me that it's a big deal in the United States to find out what your heritage is.
ashi wrote:
Thu Mar 18, 2021 6:03 am
So, funny story, I am actually zero percent Italian but thanks to British and French shenanigans my paternal grandparents fled different wars in the middle east and met in a charming Sicilian city the Arabs called Qal'at al-Nisa (Fortress of the Women) and we called her "noni" both because it is the Sicilian word for grandmother and (it also meaning "nine") because into their 90s my grandfather would gaze upon her with stars in his eyes and insist she was the ninth wonder of the world.
Were your paternal grandparents Arabs? Was the food growing up influenced by Sicilian cuisine? This is funny, actually, going back to our chat from another thread, Sicily makes a big deal about their oranges, their red oranges are even celebrated in the Sagra dell'Arancia Rossa.

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MoneyJungle
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Re: Ancestry

Post by MoneyJungle » Thu Mar 18, 2021 9:22 am

My grandma (not the one I never shut up about) came over from Poland as a tot and there was zero Polishness in her household. She would just cook the same stuff my other (Cornish) grandma would. Her family just wanted to leave the old world behind. They changed their name on the way in from one that ends in a vowel and has a ton of consonants to an English word for a profession. I probably use more paprika than average but it’s really more about color than taste. I really don’t get amerimutts who grasp onto a quadrant of their heritage and make it an identity, even if it’s the origin of their last name. I guess I’ll take it over other identities people substitute for a personality, but only by default.

(I’d say it extends to St Pat’s but almost nobody I saw was wearing green today. I did and I’m not Irish I just look good in green. I like holidays. Sue me.)

My mom was adopted so that element of taking a DNA test was enlightening. The 12% Ashkenazi surprised me but it hasn’t really changed my approach to life or how I see myself.

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Limey
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Location: Scotland

Re: Ancestry

Post by Limey » Thu Mar 18, 2021 8:39 pm

I thought I had a grandparent from the four corners of Britain in England, N. Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, but after DNA testing, it looks like the Welsh one was more Irish and has a clear line traced from Dublin to Liverpool (she was from Liverpool)

I'm 96% British and Irish, 2% French and German, and some Scandinavian and some unknown (alien!)

My closest DNA relative shares 5% DNA and fuck it, I could probably just name him, because there's probably a million people in Ireland called Patrick Kelly.

I've got both the North and republic covered, or just call it the Island of Ireland. Interestingly, they're all the native swarthy Catholics, none of those fucking invasive protestants or orange people.
Last edited by Limey on Fri Mar 19, 2021 12:42 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Utisz
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Re: Ancestry

Post by Utisz » Fri Mar 19, 2021 12:35 am

Limey wrote:
Thu Mar 18, 2021 8:39 pm
because there's probably a million people in Ireland called Patrick Kelly.
I only know of one them.



You would need some pair of melons to throw yourself at a sliotar like that and risk losing at least one if not both of your melons.

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Senseye
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Location: Canada

Re: Ancestry

Post by Senseye » Fri Mar 19, 2021 6:49 am

MoneyJungle wrote:
Tue Mar 16, 2021 6:28 am
This changes practically every time I log into Ancestry. I could’ve sworn they said I was Irish a year ago.
I feel ya. I was about to reply to this thread, and thought I better check Ancestry again since I haven't logged in for a while.

Sure enough, significant changes according to them:

1) I started out as mostly English and other parts of the UK (about 25% English + 15% other UK), 25% Norwegian, 25% Germanic Europe and a mishmash of other European regions
2) Next big update I was about 30% Norwegian, 30% Germanic, 25% UK, and the mishmash
3) Latest results have me 40% Norwegian, only 15% Germanic, 13% English + 21% other UK , 11% Russia and the mishmash of other.

I'm getting more Norwegian and less German by the day it appears. Anyways, geographically/biologically, my mother's family came from Norway and my father's family from Germany so Ancestry is kind of on the right track. Must have been some UK/Norway intermingling as the UK DNA seems persistent even though it bounces up and down a bit. The German DNA seems to be getting short changed, but who knows what those damn continentals got up to over the centuries. Also, who knows what Ancestry will say six months from now.

Anyways, I was adopted by a British/Belgian combo and have an English surname, but that is of no mind to Ancestry.

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Roger Mexico
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Re: Ancestry

Post by Roger Mexico » Wed Mar 31, 2021 6:27 pm

At present I possess copies of two professionally compiled genealogies tracing the ancestry of each of my grandfathers.


The one for paternal grandpa only goes as far back as the family emigrating to the US from Norway in the 1870's, but the one for maternal grandpa goes back to the 17th century.


So the earliest documented ancestors of mine that I'm currently aware of were Dutch Mennonites fleeing to Westphalia because of anti-Mennonite persecution that the Dutch government was apparently engaging in during the Thirty Years' War.

Their descendants then spent roughly the next two centuries in northwestern Germany before a married couple and the husband's brother are recorded as departing from Schleswig to resettle in the USA in the early 1840's. (A decision that presumably had something to do with the war over the Schleswig-Holstein region between Denmark and Prussia that was going on at the time.)


While I know far less about my paternal grandmother's family, there's a somewhat interesting story on that side in which her first-generation immigrant ancestors seem to have successfully concealed the fact that they were Jewish from everyone they knew, for the rest of their lives after moving to the US.

This was evidently due to paranoia because they'd been driven out of Germany by a pogrom. However, they also received one of the plots of farmland that the federal government was handing out for free to European immigrants at the time--but which they were technically not eligible for because the program's rules disqualified Jews.

Or so the story goes, at least. The secret was so well kept that no one in my dad's family knew about it until one of his cousins figured it out in the late 90's.

(By my dad's generation, his entire extended family were all avid Lutherans. Nothing whatsoever of a culturally Jewish nature has ever been part of my life. The math supposedly works out to my dad being 1/8 Jewish, which makes me 1/16 Jewish--and a grisly bit of trivia I happen to know is that 1/8 was the official cutoff for being considered "legally Jewish" under the race laws in Nazi Germany, which would technically include him but not me.)



So if you add up the various fractions on both sides, my ancestry is something like 5/8 German, 1/4 Norwegian, and 1/8 miscellaneous/unclear.

The latter would be my maternal grandmother's branch, though my mother usually says that her mother was "half German and half Scots-Irish" despite lack of any details beyond that statement.


For most of my life I thought the term "Scots-Irish" was meaningless gibberish, but somewhat recently I happened to encounter a person who was able to explain some of the relevant history behind it.

(Including the fact that a rather large percentage of so-called "Scots-Irish" people were neither Scottish nor Irish at all, but rather English people who got lumped into the category because they lived near the Scottish border. So I still find the term humorous in its rather nonchalant lack of substantive precision.)

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Utisz
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Re: Ancestry

Post by Utisz » Fri Apr 02, 2021 6:32 pm

Roger Mexico wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 6:27 pm
For most of my life I thought the term "Scots-Irish" was meaningless gibberish, but somewhat recently I happened to encounter a person who was able to explain some of the relevant history behind it.
The term "Scots-Irish" makes a lot of intuitive sense to me in terms of shared celtic heritage between Scotland and Ireland (Scots Gaels vs. Gaelic, Shinty vs. Hurling, Whisky vs. Whiskey, etc.). There's a lot of shared culture there.

But reading the Wikipedia article I see that it means something entirely different:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-Irish_Americans wrote: Scotch-Irish (or Scots-Irish) Americans are American descendants of Ulster Protestants who immigrated from northern Ireland to America during the 18th and 19th centuries, whose ancestors had originally migrated mainly from the Scottish Lowlands and Northern England (and sometimes from the Anglo-Scottish border).
Yeah, that's news to me.

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horvack
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Location: US/NC

Re: Ancestry

Post by horvack » Fri Apr 16, 2021 6:40 pm

ashi wrote:
Thu Mar 18, 2021 6:03 am
No one ever laughs but it is a silence to which I am well accustomed.
How do we add to the quote list on the index page?

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