Your Background/Family History

[khardinal]

Well, I'm french but my family was Spanish some years ago !
My grand grand ....................... father was a nobleman and a conquistador who reach south america.
But, he kept a lot of gold for himself, while he haved to give it back to the crown.
So, he lost his noble title and the " DE " in front of his name ( sorry don't know the name of this )
Even though, he was bury in Spain like a knight !

Luckily, I found a letter in wich he have write the place where he buried a treasure, somewhere in Chile ...
No, no, this part is just my last night dream ^^

 

[unmerged(367857)]

My Scotch-Irish, English, and German ancestors migrated to the New World (America) by the early 1700s. They settled on the Pennsylvania Frontier and Virginia. Many of my ancestors fought the British during the American Revolution. After the Revolution their descendants moved west to states like Kentucky and Missouri.

One line of my family is very interesting. They were Puritans who fled England in the early 1600s and went to Amsterdam Holland. They changed their name to a Dutch version. Later they immigrated to New Amsterdam in the Americas. When New Amsterdam was taken by the English, they changed their name back to the English version. Many of this family fought in the French and Indian War, and the American Revolution. They moved to western Virginia and had very large families, so that the surname "Workman" is one of the most common in the region today.

So, your name was "Werkman" during the Dutch time?
btw, New Amsterdam wasn't "taken" is was part of the peace treaty of Breda after the Dutch won the Second Anglo-Dutch War (the Dutch traded it for more valuable places).

They also talk about Nieuw Amsterdam in this documentary I posted a couple of days ago:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?705195-Emerging-Empires-Collide-(documentary)

 

[IcePenguin]

This thread sure is interresting to read.

One of my great grandfathers served as a pilot for the british under WW2 (he was a Dane). Don't know much about him besides that, and that after the war his plane crashed into the ocean. We also have a fake drivers license he had at the time.

We also got a fun family tale about one of my great grandmothers. Her family were all blondes, while she had dark (black) hair. The time her mother would have been pregnant fits perfectly with the time a spanish ship was in the docks, so we like to believe we got some spanish blood in the family Her hair remained black even as she got old.

A family member also found out that we are related to the teacher of H.C. Andersen. So our family can ''brag'' about having beaten H.C. Andersen when he was young

On paper my family is also catholics because one of my great great grandmothers came from Poland.

 

[anzac1915]

I had a feeling there are great family anecdotes and histories , that is why I decided to create this thread, so every can type their family histories and other people can read them, which would no doubt fascinate and interest them and (hopefully) encourage them to type their family history, which would be a very fascinating and interesting family history for everyone to read, and (hopefully) the cycle will continue .

Please continue to post family histories, I am sure most people have (or will) read all of them (I have read all of them so far, very fascinating and interesting )

Also, I read them when I am not logged in as well, just in case anyone is wondering

 

[unmerged(633987)]

This Thread comes perfectly in time since i was searching about my family for a while now:
The family of my mother is circassian which had to flee during the russian colonization of the caucasus and the wars which followed with it, they went to Samsun in the Ottoman Empire where still some of my relatives life, some went later in other parts of the empire, like Ankara or Izmir/Smyrna, it seems like one of my ancestors was a soldier in the Greco-Turkish war, sadly no pictures or notices are left from him so we dont know what happened to him later on.

My Fathers family is from Bulgaria (mix of bulgarian convertites and turkish immigrants) probably somewhere in the mid/late 18th the family split into two main branches - two brothers, one, which i descent from, went to Adrianople later to Constantinople where he stayed, got married etc. etc..
Well the other brother... stayed somewhere in Bulgaria. We dont know what happened to him or if the branch is still living on. Its hard to find informations and names but i hope that i will be able to find something out when i go to bulgaria specially for this.

Well, and im living here, today in good old Germany, me and my brother were both born here.

 

[Qantrix]

It's all Frisian on my mother's side, it's a bit more complicated on my fathers side. Luckily the Amsterdam City Archives are online, very detailed and pretty accessible. I could trace my patrilineal ancestry up to ~1830 through family cards. The earliest ancestors I could find were listed as Lutheran - which shows they came from Germany - though by the end of the 19th century they had all converted to either the Dutch Reformed or Roman Catholic Church. I even found records of my grandfather being shot at by the cops for refusing to stop while he was transporting illegal meat during WW2.

In the personnel records of the Dutch East India Company (also available online) I found several people with my surname working as sailors or soldiers and hailing from places like Saxony, Thuringia, Danzig, etc. Most of them didn't return to collect their paycheck, but I guess at least one did and managed to start a family in Amsterdam. My surname originates from Thuringia.

 

[TrojanAC]

I'm 100% german but with some oddities, my paternal granddads side had been owning a brick factory in saxony before the war(which has been run down by socialism), his wife was a refugee from pommerania, but strangely he managed own one of the only private ventures in east germany producing ski poles (equipping the east german, czechslovakian and hungarian national teams in cross country skiing). The lineage of him can be traced back around 200 years, always stayed in saxony, the records of my grandma are lost trough the displacement and for obvious reason she never really talked about this time (here mother and her brother where shot on the flight from the red army).
My maternal side can be traced back till ~1450 when my grandgrand...granddad was the first mayor of a neighbouring city. after that they owned taverns for 300 years and finished as butchers. After the war he fled to west germany, visited his old native country saxony, made my grandma pregnant and was forced to stay here trough social convictions. They married based on the pregnancy, good divorced later but the berlin wall had been build an my granddad had to live in east germany (which was just half bad, his family came from here and it was and is his home, the only problem had been socialism).
And finally my Grandmothers side... child of a prussian junker who died on the eastern front, my grandmother survived by trading the interior of the Gutshof for food and as usual the property got dispossed by the GDR... after the fall of the berlin wall the former gutshof was a ruin used to store chemicals... extremly poisonous soil, 7/8 of the land is now part of poland ... so long story short ... i have an interesting background marked by to criminal maniacs (like the history of nearly everybody east of the iron curtain)

edit1: spelling

 

[Evie HJ]

Near-complete Quebec French-Canadian, and Quebecer on every side since 1756 at the latest.

My maternal grandmother is descended from Louis Hébert, who was part of the attempted colony at Port-Royal, traveled with Champlain on some of his journeys of exploration, and who became the first permanent settler of New France. My paternal grandmother is descended from a French soldier in the Royal-Roussillon regiment, who participated in the battles at Carillon and Fort William-Henry (but who may have been on marriage leave at the time of the Plaines d'Abraham). My paternal grandfather's ancestors (long generations ago) came here as a servant to some religious order and eventually got his own farm; and my maternal grandfather is descended from Acadian settlers who were forced to relocate during the Great Upheavals (either deported or fled).

Three of the four branches had settled down in a fifteen miles radius of where I grew up by 1750s: my maternal grandmother's family in the mid 1600s (in Saint-Marc sur Richelieu), my paternal grandfather in 1680 near Varennes, and my paternal grandmother in the same vicinity (Varennes/Verchères) during the Seven Years War. Only my maternal grandfather's family came later, when my grandfather was a kid.

So as close as it gets among French-Canadians to 100% French. As close as it gets being because at least one ancestor married a converted Huron girl, and some of my French ancestors from Normandy and Brittany, before leaving France, were apparently engaged in cross-channel fishermen families wedding, so traces of English ancestry as well.

 

[unmerged(571919)]

Both sides of my family have lived in America a long time. On my Mother's side, my Grandfather's family was made of poor Irish farmers who left Ireland in the early eighteenth century and settled in Pennsylvania. My Great grandmother's and grandfather's family came from Germany and Ireland respectively, and were some of the first settlers in America. My Grandmother likes to joke that her family "came here on the second boat". My Father's side of the family has a more interesting history. My grandfather's family were Swiss Anabaptists that settled in Lancaster in the late 17th century, and my great grandfather and great grandmother left the Mennonite church in order to get a divorce. My Grandmother comes from a line of rich french merchants who converted to Protestantism. After converting they moved to the palatinate in order to avoid prosecution, but they didn't like be surrounded by Germans and left for America several years later.

Military wise, My Grandfather on my mother's side fought in WW2 and my grandfather on my Dad's side built fighter planes for the Korean war.

 

[jcinq4]

On my mother's side, It's all German, but the details are hazy and i haven't looked into it too much. My father's side comes from Palermo in Sicily, but again the details are pretty thin, sadly. :sad:

 

[justin6477]

Well it'a funny dilemma.

I grew up listening to western pop and classical music, reading western literature (some turkish as well but not really significant). As a result of the alphabet revolution, I can't read any writings on any walls or fountains from the Ottoman period(even though it's more or less the same language written in arabic alphabet). There's a huge cultural gap between the children of the republic and the Ottoman heritage. (At some point I was playing with an american saxophone player who was really into turkish music and culture, and knew turkish music a lot better than I did).

Today's reactionary pro-islam ideologies in Turkey are fueled from this, and they're trying to fill this cultural gap themselves . It's a sad outcome on some parts really.

Thanks for the incite. I've been looking into what's going in Turkey a bit, but I don't feel that my frame of reference has been appropriate to understand the situation. Having that sort of divorce from your culture's history sounds... tragic.