ancestry is a strange thing

[archersangel]

years ago my brother did the ancestry.com thing just for the hell of it and had some interesting results.

it said we were less than 3% from finland, around 6% from france or germany, less than 1% from greece, less than 1% from india & the rest was Polish and that part of europe.

over the years they have refined their data and we lost everything except the Polish & that part of europe.

well, after a few years of not looking he signed in last week. we are like 92% Polish, slovak & that area, 6% russian, & 2% norwegian(?!).

it's possible the norwegian comes from some viking. poland has a coastline on the baltic sea. plus, vikings went up rivers where they could.

if we hit the lottery, we want to have someone look up our family history. many years ago our mom tried to do it with her family, but no one wanted to talk about the family history.

Comments

[nialla]

I did a similar one, and the results were essentially the majority was from Ireland, England, and Scotland, which tracks with my dad's side of the family. I've got it back to my ggggg-grandparents on the paternal line; he was (probably) from England, she was from Ireland. They literally met on the boat.

I was surprised there was some Scandinavian in the mix, but like you, it was probably Vikings. Also at least one ancestor from Africa, which considering how that probably got into the mix is... yeah. I'm thinking this may explain the tales of an "Indian Princess" somewhere in my father's side of the family. Just in case a kid came out a little too dark, Native American blood was slightly more acceptable than that of slaves.

I really wanted to learn more about my mother's family, but I've got very little past my gg-grandparents. I did some of my own tracking via Census records and confirmed one immigrated from Germany, which tracks with what I've been told, but there's always this niggling question of something in that branch of the tree. I'm about half convinced the family was Jewish, as we have lots of Yiddish in our family language. I didn't know it was unusual until I got in trouble in high school because a teacher thought I was trying to sneakily use bad words.