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Your Ancestors From Long Ago & Far Away

Bear Up North

Bear Up North

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This Bear was doing some internet research on my family name. During previous searches I knew that my long-ago ancestors were instrumental in founding a large city in northern Europe. Tonight I wanted to clarify some details of that adventure. Here's what I know.....

My dad always talked about his Mother and her recollections of life in the area that is now northeastern Poland. Before my grandmother and her family left this area, sometime around the turn of the century, this countryside was sometimes Poland, sometimes Russia, sometimes Germany, sometimes Lithuania. That much I knew. But there is more, from way, way back.....

In 1437 King Casimar IV of Poland ceded a large chunk of land to my family. This land, located along the Bialka River, was given by a King who was ruling Poland, and later Lithuania. (One of King Casimar's sons would later be canonized as Saint Casimar.)

That land became a village, then a city, known as Bialystok. It now is a larger city, with a central city population of 291,000 and a metro urban population of 350,000.

You all have enjoyed a polio preventative poke.....Albert Sabin, famous for his polio vaccine, is from Bialystok.

If you have studied any history of concentration camps and urban ghettos that contained Jews during World War II, you know of the burning of the "Great Synagogue". Nazi exterminators moved 3000 Jews into the largest wooden Synagogue in Europe, locked the doors from the outside, and set it on fire. That horrible scene became the "logo" of the much-acclaimed television series many years ago, "Holocaust".

Bialystok is not my family name, but I do feel a certain kinship to this place. Perhaps there was also a lumbering bear-like family member, bringing smiles to the faces of friends and neighbors, all along the banks of the Bialka River.

What say you? Know anything about your long ago and far away ancestors?

Bear
 
I'm 4th or 5th generation Floridian, my ancestors coming from Illinois on my Dad's side and settling in the Sarasota area, then he came to Orlando in the '40's, after law school.

On my Mom's side, the Bairds came from Scotland a couple hundred years ago. There's a family history in book form that my Mom has, but I haven't read it yet. They settled in PA, and my mom came down here in the '40's. Her grandfather was the first dentist in Orlando, in the 1800's.
 
On my mother's side - UEL family buried in a cemetery with founders of scarborough. The family joke is that we waited for a letter from the mayflower before we decided to come over.

Father's side - BUN so it is your "family" and "friends" that did all those horrible things to mine. ;)
 
Grandpa Jake immigrated from Finland before 1900 with three other families. The families homesteaded communally on some redwood forests in Calfornia and made their lives off the fat of the land (making split stuff, shake bolts, railroad ties). Grandpa Jake died during the 1919 flu pandemic before my dad was born. My uncle Waino raised my dad. Dad met my mom during the Big War (WW II), in England. She came from a nationally known disfunctional family (that explains a lot about me (and I know little about them)). Grandma Jake lived a long life into the 1960's and never learned a lick of English. That's about all I know about my past.
 
I can trace my father's side of the family back to Dieppe, France in the 1500s. My mother's side of the family... well, that's a bit more difficult. Given the emphasis that has been put on male heirs over the years, the maternal side of a family tree is normally hard to trace.
 
Tracing the name back is one thing, but after a few generations back, family trees begin to lose meaning because the number of people involved gets to be so huge. Consider:

Code: 
            |  Number of direct 
Generation  |  ancestors in generation
------------|---------------------     
 0 me       |  0
-1 parents  |  2
-2 grandpts |  4
-3          |  8
-4          |  16
-5          |  32
-6          |  64
-7          |  128
-8          |  256
-9          |  512
-10         |  1024

So if you go back seven generations, you have to look up over 100 people, just in that generation alone, and they are all direct ancestors of you. Three generations later, that number's up to over 1,000 people. Realistically things quit mattering after generation 5 or 6.
 
I have a relative from the 14th century that was a silk trader in Denmark. He was apparently quite influential and friends with the royal family. He left part of his estate to the king and established a fund to be used by any widows in the family as a means of social security, which fund was managed by the royal family. In the mid-70s, my family received a letter informing them that the fund had dwindled to about 3600 kroner ($900 US), the royals were tired of being the family bookkeepers, and the check was in the mail. They sent it to my mom who used it for airfare to visit her mom on her 90th birthday. I have the geneology form they used to verify we were the rightful heirs -- pretty cool stuff.

On my father's side, my grandmother swore up an down that we were directly descended from an Irish king -- Brian Boru. He, uhh, apparently fathered a substantial number of "heirs" via the backdoor.:)
 
I only have several claims to fame via my ancestors. My family started out to what amounted to game wardens in the Black Forest. My great grandfather's generation were movers and shakers in northwest Indiana, but lost their influence during my grandfather's time.
 
On my fathers side, my great great grandfather and his wife and three kids came to America in 1881 from Germany. They were on the Gellert and left from Hamburg with a stop in Havre and then to New York. From there, they stopped in Ohio to visit family that had previously emigrated, and then came up to Michigan.

Above is just my dads paternal side. His mom was adopted, so we have no information on her family. On my moms side, her family was french and then prussian. I am fascinated by ancestry, but like JordanB said, it gets overwhelming.

Gedunker said:
On my father's side, my grandmother swore up an down that we were directly descended from an Irish king -- Brian Boru. He, uhh, apparently fathered a substantial number of "heirs" via the backdoor.:)
Click to expand...

I didn't think one could reproduce that way :-D
 
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My dad’s side is from a small Island of the cost of North West Ireland.

My mom’s side is from some other place in Ireland.
 
1. Gabriel Budgie (b. 1750?) was a Revolutionary War vet from Harford County Maryland.
2. Thomas Budgie, son of Gabriel, m. Lorena Cahill, moved to Fayette County, Ohio in 1803 and later lived in Allen County, Ohio and Louisa County, Iowa.
3. James Budgie, son of Thomas, lived in Fayette County, Ohio and Allen County, Ohio. m. Elizabeth Jane Ireland.
4. Thomas Budgie, son of James, lived in Allen County, Ohio and served in the 118 OVI in the Civil War. He married Sarah Hastings and migrated to Greenwood County, Kansas in the winter of 1869 along with several other relatives (most ended up in Coffey County, Kansas). Died in 1873 due to lingering Typhoid Fever he picked up during the war.
5. James Robert Budgie, son of Thomas, was born in Lima, Ohio and grew up in Greenwood County, Kansas. M. Margaret Mahala Curry.
6. Earl Roy Budgie, son of James Robert, lived his entire life on the farm in Greenwood County, Kansas. Married Icie Amelia Oliver.
7. Earl Junior Budgie, son of Earl Roy, grew up in Greenwood County, Kansas and became an oil man. Lived in several places including Bolivia and Indonesia. M. Velma Mae McIlvain.
8. Dennis Eugene Budgie, son of Earl Junior, grew up in Madison, Kansas and spent 22 years in the Air Force. Married Rosa Linda Sowers.
9. Budgie Budgie Budgie, son of Dennis Eugene, lived a life of indulgency and Cyburbia. What a waste. Married the "Woman Formerly Known as Spouse".
10. Three Kiddoes.
 
My family's not big on this stuff. Nobody kept in touch with "the old country." The story goes that after the "Great Famine" my mom's side immigrated from rural Western Ireland to the Kensington neighborhood in Philadelphia before my grandfather decided he'd have better job prospects in the Coal Region of Pennsylvania... (too bad 30 years later the mines were all closing down, but I guess I don't fault him for not being a mind reader). When my mom was in her 30s, before she got married, she went to Ireland to try to find any kind of lineage, but the only clues she could track down were the possibility of birth records of people who may have been related. When she found the church that was supposed to have such recordings (as apparently the Catholic church controls all legal documents in small towns over there), she was told that all the records had burned in a great fire that consumed the entire town at one point.

My dad's side are Pennsylvania Dutch (a term which bastardizes the term "Deitsch" to mean German, not people from the Netherlands!) and even less in touch with their roots. We have a very small family. My parents were both only children, my grandparents' siblings all died before marriage (they had a lot of them but this was back in the days of awful access to medicine for the poor), and there are (including myself) 5 living people we know who are related. In fact, I'm the youngest male in the family, and if I got hit back a Mack Truck tomorrow without passing on my seed, the "family name" would die.
 
michaelskis said:
Anyone know of any sites or starting places for family history research? (Free sites are best)
Click to expand...
http://www.familysearch.org/
http://www.ancestry.com/
http://genforum.genealogy.com/
http://www.genealogy.com/index_r.html
http://www.rootsweb.com/

Family Tree Maker is a pretty decent program if you get into it. There are also some shareware programs that work pretty well to.

I have over 2000 names in my file, going back up to 12 generations.

If your getting started, make sure you record the source of the information you find. Be cautious of information done by other researchers. There is a lot of conflicting information.
 
Perhaps one of my Potratz line had a few laughs from the Bear ancestor back in Poland. Most of my people came out of Ireland though. Some from Larne, where I would like to visit sometime. I also have a line that came out of Ireland and ended up forming the village of Rineyville, KY. Interestingly enough, that line includes another Cyburbian.
 
I was basically told from my mothers side that "I didn't need to know, that stuff doesn't matter" Mostly because my grandmother had wound a very desrtuctive web of lies about the paternity of my mother. To this day I really don't know but all the variations of the stories are interesting. I have no clue about that side.

I was able to trace my fathers side.

Maiden name "Harloff " definately German.

We were late comers to America. Late 1800's, long after the civil war, so I can truely claim absolutely nothing to do with slavery!

It looks as if they entered through the great lakes area. Interesting picture of great grandfather and his four children shows a caucasion male with four children that are all much darker skinned with wildly curly hair. But no know pictures of Great grandma. The explination was that he had lived in the Pennsylvania Dutch Area.

That's about what I know except that there are very very few people with my last name.
 
I know my ancestry comes from the part of Germany that was given to Poland after WWII. My ancestors came to America sometime in the 1800s and settled in Chicago. One of the reasons they came to America was because of land disputes between Germany and Poland going on all the way back then. I am, in fact, of German ancestry, though, and that land will always be Germany's!!!
 
Back in 1066, my ancestors left their homes in Normandy to help take over a little soggy island called Britain.

Later one of them gave Henry the Eighth a whole bunch of money to finance his army and Henry knighted him. Some members went over to Ireland to mess with them. He sent his second son to Oxford to study beer-making. His second son went to sea and eventually became a sea captain who sailed between England and the New World.

His son immigrated to Virginia, and began our family's slow migration west and south across North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. All along the way displacing the natives.

Our family is truly Anglo-American. We've worn out our welcome in several countries and states! We've stolen land, killed natives and owned slaves. An American success story.
 
The "Boik"er name goes back to somewhere in SE Poland/Czech/Ukraine area based upon the information passed down to me. Whether or not the name was americanized is questionable. My great grandfather settled in NE South Dakota and raised a family of a 8 kids to labor on his farm. I'm 3rd generation to carry the name. I really have no idea what employement or significance any of my past family was.

Mom mom's side was traced back through generations of mothers to the late 17th century in Nova Scotia. Mostly a French heritage on that side.
 
My grandfather was born in 1893. His mother was apparently widowed at least by 1880. How is this possible? OK, I know how.
 
I never met any of my grandparents. I think two of them died a long time before I was born, one died before I was five years old, and one died in East Germany in 1996. My dad is 80 and I am 40, so my dad is only a year younger than my husband's grandmother who lives in the same town (my husband is my age -- to within a few weeks). I never got around to reading the family geneology on my father's side that was sent to me some years ago. It was thrown out this year, along with almost every other imaginable thing I owned. I suppose I am now a woman without a past. :a:
 
hey cuz......

otterpop said:
Back in 1066, my ancestors left their homes in Normandy to help take over a little soggy island called Britain. Our family is truly Anglo-American.
Click to expand...
My maternal lineage descends from William the Conquerer of Normandy. I have a great family geneology dating back to the 10th century. I wonder if we were warring families or friendly ones.....??

Currently doing research on my paternal side right now -- have traced dad's family back to the Indiana, PA area circa 1850 or so.
 
The Nellises were politcal refugees from the Palatine region of Germany, who went briefly to England, and were then sent to the New World as janissaries, i.e. as expendable settlers who formed a buffer in the Mohawk River valley - the Indians would raid them first, before moving on down to the settlments on the Hudson. They came just in time to fight in Queen Ann's War (1711) and later on fought in the Revolutionary War. Like many families, they split and the Tories moved up to Canada as Nelleses. How my immediate ancestors got from NY to Kansas is less clear, but they came to the Grouse Creek Valley in the 1870's and had just gotten well established when the Depression/Dust Bowl hit.
 
My family were very early immigrants to the US (1600s, not far behind the Mayflower). They were also early settlers in Texas shortly after the Texas war for independence from Mexico. Prior to that everyone was in the British Isles. Mother's family was decended of Scotish nobility--don't get excited though because they were kind of the black sheep of that clan based on what we've read. My father's side of the family were blacksmiths in the eastern portion of England near Cambridge.

My mom is big into geneology and has portions of the family back 14 generations. I'm kind of like jordanB once it gets past generation 7 or 8. It's still fun to know some family history though.
 
My lineage is traced to the second crossing of the mayflower, a famous battle in boston was fought on my forefather's land. Other lines came in from Ireland later. Both of these sides were early settlers of the Michigan Territories, one around SW Michigan, and settled the towns/hamlets of Macellus, Breedsville and Three Rivers, the other Settled Flint/Fenton area. Grandpa's family eventually owned a store somewhere in flint, then moved to Detroit to work in the Building (local term for the GM Building) somewhere along the way grandpa went to study theological music at the Catholic Univeristy of America. Grandma was raised by spinster aunts in Fenton, then went to Michigan Normal College (now eastern) to become a teacher. They married in Flint had their first home in Royal Oak michigan, then moved to Detroit.

My dad's side were recent immigrants from Poland/Germany. They go back to the turn of the century. We recently sold the family farm on (sometimes in) the Saginaw Bay which was used by the family for subsitance agriculture in the years that the economy was not doing so well and that factory jobs in Detroit were not so pletiful. One of my polish grandfathers was a big time drunk. He left his family (wife and kids) in Poland to settle in Brooklyn but ended up in Detroit. He was at a corner bar one night getting hammered and in walks his wife with his kids. Great grandma was brandishing a rolling pin and beat the paczki out of him.
 
On my mother's side, we came over on the Mayflower (according the geneology research the family hired in the 1900s). Other than that, I want to research more about the history of that side, them having lived in the South since and prior to the Civil War. I may have some Confederate Civil War history in me.

As for my Father's side, my grandparents immigrated to South Bend, IN from Hungary in 1949. Upon researching the sites that have been offered on this thread, there is a current organization of Hungarian immigrant history for South Bend and St. Joseph County, including a breif summary of the Hungarian history there. Pretty neat, I may have to contribute and research that too, asking my Grandfather and Father about stuff. They even had photos and a website to their old catholic church and my Dad's old school out of that said church. I thought that was pretty neat!:)
 
Ellis Island

http://www.ellisisland.org/

This is another valuable website. They have everyone who went through Ellis Island. I have found ancestors on my wife's side here. You can even get copies of ship manifests with the actual signatures of the imigrants.
 
DetroitPlanner said:
Zman... we could be family! :-c
Click to expand...

We could! I may have to dig out the book we did on that side of the family. Or at least have my mom bring it up from their house in Denver.

We should have a reunion. For some strange reason, I have always wanted to visit Detroit. That would be wild if we are family. (I wonder what my virtual brother Burb Fixer would have to say, his family only followed the Mayflower).
 
my Mayflower family name was Breed. Battle of Bunker Hill was fought at Breeds Hill.

Detroits a big giant industrial town, lots of stuff here you don't have anywhere else. For example, my office window is about 1/2 mile north of the canadian border!
 
My mother's side of the family is traced back to Irish and Czech immigrants (my great great grandmother on that side was pure Czech and didn't even speak english).

My father's side is half Irish, the other half being from the cajuns of Louisiana. My grandmother was cajun and it was hard to trace her ancestors. All we know is that her father's side came from Mexico and her mother's side was decended from the creoles of Louisiana. A big mix of races and cultures for the most part.

As for me, I'm mostly Irish (double dose from both sides of the family) with that screwy dose of cajun thrown in the mix :-c
 
Several years ago I visited the Smithsonian in DC and saw an exhibit on 18th century plantation life in Virginia. The plantation owner had the same last name as me, and had a couple of traits that are very uncharacteristic in African Americans, but semi-persistent in my family -- red hair, green eyes and freckles (I have the green eyes).

Anyway, the exhibit ends with a story on how the owner killed his wife after an argument. She was fed up with his dalliances with the slaves and confronted him, and he killed her. He was sent to prison, and his property, slaves included, was auctioned off, mostly to plantations in South Carolina. This is where it got interesting, because my family's from South Carolina.

With help from the Smithsonian, we were able to determine that the plantation owner is my great-great-great-great grandfather on my father's side. We also found out that his family is one of the original settlers of Maryland, from the early 1700s, and they came to the USA from northern Ireland. As far as the African American part of the family, I can't find any record of them beyond the plantation they lived on in South Carolina.
 
My Mom's side of the family has been in Nebraska since before Reconstruction if not the Civil War. My great-grandfather lived in Custer County, NE up until the early part of the 20th century when he moved to Omaha in the 20s. He became on of the first black firemen in Omaha and was stationed at a firehouse on Lake Street across the street from his house. Know one really knows how old my great-grandparents were since they lied about their age upon arriving in Omaha to get jobs. According to the state of Nebraska my great-grandfather was born in 1898 and my great-grandmother was born in MS by way of St. Louis in 1900.
BTW: My great-grandfather's family has a brief profile in a book called The Black West by William Loren Katz. We also have our own section of The Great Plains Black Museum in Omaha.


My dad's family is from Evansville, IN the moved to Indy as a kid, then moved to Omaha as a teenager.
 
Like Boiker, my family is suspicious that our name was Americanized when my ansectors came from the Ukraine but no one has any proof. The Ellis Island website didn't offer any clues. It doesn't help that my last name is a variant of a popular Irish name so all the Ellis Island records are of Irish people. As Ukrainian Jews in the beginning of the 1900's I'm not sure if they were persecuted until they left, or if they were just searching for better opportunities. I also don't know what kind of work they did other than my great grandfather who came from Poland and started a window cleaning business that my grandfather still runs.

Of course I imagine my ansectors telling contractors in 19th century Kiev that violating the maximum FAR will result in public beheading. ;)
 
well.....

While at my family reunion last year, my wife found out that she was related to Nathaniel Brown Palmer:-o (Discovered Antarctica):p How cool is that.....Her family first came to America in 1676:-o !! (Stonington, Connecticut) One of the coolest towns in all of North America:p
 
This line of Chukkys hail from Poland/Germany (nice little area that changes sides of the border every hundred years or so) via South Africa. Or on the other side I'm third-generation inner-west middle-class Brisbane. But...looks like I'm moving across the river soon! First Chukky on the southside! If my grandmother was still alive she'd probably disown me.
 
My dad's family is originally from Brno (Czech), via Trieste, then Milan. fabric mercahnts, I think. Originally Jews but it didn’t stick against Catholic Italian Mammas. Just in time to not be wiped out by our German friends from north of the Alps. :-c Mom's family have been in Milan since the 1600s (parish records) but probably as early as 1300s. I grew up in Italy and the US. My wife's half Spanish Barcelona) and British (Merseyside). The kids WILL be confused. :)
 
Well i come from Polish and England/Scottish/Irish heritage. Although both parents were born in Oz, we definetley have a polishness about us, well us kids and dad.
Have no idea whereabouts in Poland they came from, all i knows is that they are amber jewelers. My nan and uncle did family trees for each side of the family- but alas we are boring really.
 
Well, 3 out of my 4 grandparents have German last names... And One Spanish one (Typical Chilean here, huh?) Though I can't say I know much about where they were from... My paternal side (both Germans) both come from Western Germany... Too damn close to the French.. so I guess that's why they came here... :D
 
Going to bump a bear thread based on a comment in Random.

We did an Ancestry DNA test some years ago and they recently updated it with new information. For my wife, it is funny because for her entire life, she was always told that she is almost entirely Danish. Well, the test showed that she is more Irish than Danish. For me, I was always told that I was mostly Irish and knew about the Lithuania connection, and we can clearly trace a couple more recent lines back to parts of Ireland. However when I put together my family tree some years ago, I was getting info that I was form all over the place. The updated DNA test confirmed it:
1761150682201.png


Have you ever had one of these tests done and how accurate is what you thought vs what your DNA says?
 
I'd like to do that test. I don't question much where my ancestors are from. I do some amateur genealogy work as I like to see my past. As pointed out earlier, the vast number of people you are direct descendants of doubles every generation. I honestly do not put much stock in whose name pops up 10+ or so generations beyond. Was record keeping that accurate? Are kings of Scotland and France really my direct ancestors? Likely not. I have some lines I can go back to 600 AD. Really?
 
My test results assigned me Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh and a tiny bit Iceland. And update came last week that added German and other parts around Germany.
 
My aunt did my dad's side of the family with a couple lines going back to 1600s in England. With the information she collected, it was determined we have Welsh, English, Scottish and French in our system from that side. Don't know much about mom's side after my grandmother, but based on surnames and other characteristics, it's primarily English & German.
 
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