I find genealogy very interesting, and I have spent a few days gathering information about my origins from wikipedia and my parents. So Hubski, how far back can you trace your ethnic roots? Anything interesting?
My roots, according to my dad, are explained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagullanka#History
Basically, during the 11th century, the Tamil King Rajendra Chola gifted a group of 18 Brahmin families, the Konaseema Dravidulu, to his daughter and son-in-law, from which my dad came from. They performed fire rituals for the most part, which explains my last name (which I am not at liberty to disclose). Thus, they had to move to his son-in-law's kingdom up in Andhra Pradesh from Tamil Nadu. They settled in a few villages that were gifted to them and adopted Telugu customs and intermarried with the indigenous Brahmins (my mom is a native Telugu). Of course, there was intercaste marriage, but social norms discouraged it for the most part.
So I am a Telugu-Tamil-All-South-Indian-freedom-loving-non-commie-more-adjectives dude.
The best part is that my grandparents own a piece of land which was part of the original few villages that I can go frolick in every few years. It's also more fertile than y'all's mothers (sorry couldn't help it).
My maternal grandmother was Jewish, from central europe. There is quite a lot of genealogy on the internet. Loads of people from that side of the family died in the Holocaust. Looking further back I'm descended (as are loads of other people of vaguely Ashkenazi descent) from Vilna Gaon. One of my friends from my old school said that he was also descended from him. Six degrees of separation applies in terms of human relationships, I wonder what the number is in terms of blood relations.
all Jewish people are 3rd cousins. there are some remarkable mathematics to be sure of a common relative with another human you only have to go back 1000 years.
I have a crazy uncle that has traced our geneology as far back as Brutus - as in "Et tu, Brute?" but I'm not sure I trust it all. It's pretty solid back through England and Scananavia for several hundred years. The name hasn't changed a lot.
Be Careful of any genealogy that goes through Charles Martel. I have one that goes back to Adam who was begat by God. on the way there Thor son of Odin and Agamemnon
It is actually quite a famous (fake) genealogy you share it with some famous people.
oh wait is the brutus genealogy Italian or Mormon? if it is English perhaps it was this Brutus that was originally meant.
funny you ask, and I can't say for sure since I haven't done any research on his research... I am a latter-day saint, but the crazy uncle isn't... but since a bunch of geneaology gets done and recorded by other members of my faith, I would bet on the latter (no pun intended).
I have a bunch of White Indians in my tree thanks to some Mormon 9th cousins but on the whole y'all are a boon to the community. The census encoding was a godsend.
yah... if you're into genealogy... LDS folk are good allies. and they have released a TON of it online for free. I have a friend who works at ancestry.com and he tells stories of his company and the LDS church getting into bidding wars for access to records. who'd have thunk there would be "fights" to scan archives.
My Fathers Father is descended from some Mayflower types Bierces, Fullers that sort of thing (I am 5th cousins once removed with George W. Bush).
his wife
My Fathers mother is from Los Mochis, Sinaloa, Mexico her father is from Surrey. My moms dad was born in Copenhagen her mom is Descended from Jewish Cowboys (actually owners of Jew Stores mostly jews from the pale) and Bilah Levy-Franks.
I don't have much to go on. My grandparents are all from small villages/towns in Latvia. My dad believes that we have an ancestor from the Czech area, but other than that my family is from Latvia (and the surrounding area) many generations back. My dad also has a partial family tree and that only goes back to the early or mid 1800s (with a lot of holes). The most interesting thing I know about my ancestry is that my siblings and I are the first people to break the chain of farmers (or people who have worked on farms) that go back possibly to the beginning of civilisation. We're rebels, we are.
My family history only goes back to when the country was colonized and even then, before 1850 it gets fuzzy. Still, in my family, there's been a prison warden of the largest prison island of my parent's home country, a leader of a cult whose immediate family hold significant political power, some local gangsters, one of the first women to attend Yale on a full scholarship, who also happened to be classmates with Chomsky, and also is the woman that conducted the research behind the many successful ad campaigns. Part of what makes the genealogy so hard to trace is the sheer number of offspring. My dad for example is one of an untold number of siblings. He found out that the had yet another sister when we went to clean my grandfather's grave for his remembrance day one year. There are many times many "extra" children in the family. An aunt commissioned a family tree, of only my grandfather's descendants and then had to stop as it needed to be updated so often. Still, I do wonder. There are some deeply rooted characteristics in my family and it would be interesting to know more.
I'm descended from one of these on one side of my family -- my last name is actually a midsized city in France that we were apparently associated with in what I guess would have been the 16th century-ish. On the other side I'm descended from a Daughter of the American Revolution, but so I would imagine are many people. My grandmother was way into genealogy at one point.