1 month ago
21
I’ve been using an ancestry website the past few days. I don’t know how accurate it is, but from what I know of my family history, it’s been pretty accurate so far. Regardless of the accuracy of names and dates, it’s nice to have a general sense of where my ancestors were from.
I knew I was Scottish, Irish, and German, with a bit of Eastern European and something relating to Vikings. But from what I’ve gotten, there’s a lot. I’m also British, Belgian, and French, with a lot of in-between France and Germany. I thought keeping track of the ancestors would be easy, but my god there are hundreds.
I have centuries of ancestors from Sweden and Norway, the earliest being from around 200 CE. I have a millennia of Irish ancestors, with the earliest being from around 2700 BCE (though I question the accuracy after around 100 BCE). So many generations wandered around England before spending a few centuries in German nations. I’ve barley scratched the surface, there are a thousand names to look through.
As said in Shang-Chi, “You are a product of all who came before you.” I am the result of centuries upon centuries of coincidence and random chance. Every choice, every stroke of luck, every love-based decision has led to me being alive. I’m not unique in this obviously, everyone else is a product of their ancestors. But seeing my own tree have 20+, 30+ layers in some places is just mind blowing. And I haven’t seen the majority of these extending branches. Of the six great-grandparents I know of, I’ve only fully explored one’s lineage. My maternal grandpa’s mom is the Irish one dating back 4 millennia, even getting a fraction of the branches open caused my computer to lag too much to be useful.
It also raises some concerns, in terms of lineage loss. My paternal grandma’s father walked out on her and her mom, she won’t talk about it. I don’t know her parents’ names. So her lineage ends with her, while her husband’s extends out to the Scandinavians of 200 CE. One decision, her father leaving, has seemingly rendered her past lost to history. Similarly, from my understanding, my maternal grandma’s dad (or his father) snuck over to the US on a ship from either Scandinavia or Yugoslavia in the late 1800s or early 1900s. I think he was in an orphanage for a time on one end of that trip, which from what I understand burned to the ground and caused all records to be lost. One spark caused that lineage to be lost to time.
At the end of the day, the people past I’d say my great-great-grandparents don’t mean anything to me, I won’t remember their names (unless they’re funny or interesting, like the Odinsson I found). I have stories of the people up to my g-g-grandparents, I have some of their possessions. It is interesting to see the trends in migration. I always assumed my Germanness came from the hub of German immigration I was raised near, but turns out a large majority of my German ancestors settled at another one a few states away. There’s a good chance my Scottish ancestors have a town named after them in South Carolina, and a forgotten little cemetery for their following generations lies decaying in a forest off a quiet country road. You see them move further south into Georgia over time, I believe a couple fought for the Confederacy. All this while my Irish ancestors were slowly moving to the US, settling towns.
My roommates are gone so I’ve got no one else to talk to about this. So that’s all for now.
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