You bet your dupa I'm Polish...

[MickinMD ★]

and Irish and Lithuanian and German and Swedish and Jewish and Finnish...

...according my Ancestry,com DNA analysis:

The numbers -which the plusses and minuses ancestry also provides - basically agree with the ethnicities of my greatgrandparents, though I wouldn't have been surprised if some Mongol had worked his way into my Polish blood or some Spaniard or Viking had done the same with my Irish blood - maybe that's where Swedish comes from.

It was also a thrill to see how many distant relatives - whose parents or grandparents or greatgrandparents I personally knew in my youth - turned up in the DNA matches Ancestry provides. I'll have to drop each of them a note.

I was pleased with the 14% Baltic, almost surely Lithuanian, blood because it confirms the research I did - and mentioned here last year - about the origin of my Polish grandfather's last name, "Gryskiewicz."  I determined that that first "Gryskiewicz" (meaning son of Grzegorz) almost surely owned a farm near Suwalki, Poland. The Lithuanian connection: "The Suwałki Region remains a major center of the Lithuanian minority in Poland.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_minority_in_Poland

By the 1800's, over 1/3 of Suwalki's city residents were Jewish, escapees of Russian Pogroms against the Jews - who are almost surely the source of my 1% Jewish blood since the Ancestry.com DNA results of the three others I know who are also descended from my Polish grandfather are also 1% Jewish.

So my 14% Baltic, almost surely Lithuanian, blood and 1% Jewish blood fits perfectly with an ancestor named Grzegorz who owned a farm near Suwalki, Poland.

 

[MoseySusan]

I recently heard in a travel show on PBS that people in Switzerland have Italian ancestry from Roman occupation of the region. 

My 23 and Me results turned up ancestry from the Ural Mountain region and from modern-day Turkey. 

[shootingstar]

It's enough to know even as a kid, that I'm primarily of Han Chinese ancestry.  Even if I tried to "ignore" it for months, then someone else "reminds" me.  It would be interesting to know which village area family originated from centuries ago...but I doubt through non-English language channels.

Interestingly my half-Chinese niece uses a pseudonym as a romance writer which has a Chinese surname which is not her mother's maiden name. Even in real life at a recent conference, other attendees call her by her pseudonym.

[Wilbur ★]

Wow!  All that mixing makes you "white". 

[MickinMD ★]

On 8/11/2019 at 4:32 PM, wilbur said:

Wow!  All that mixing makes you "white". 

I thought, for sure, some Mongol, etc. must have passed through town at some point.  No luck!  But at least I got 1% Jewish, as did two other grandchildren of my Polish grandfather, so my I'm going to tease the hell out of my anti-Semitic cousin who has the same grandfather!  Oy vey!

My ancestors were mostly rural folk in Northern Europe, so I guess they didn't get much of a chance to mix with other races.

I was able to trace back in Ancestry.com to Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandparents Johannes Franz Zimmerer and wife Maria Zimmerer, both born in 1709 in the sleepy, small town of Tuttlingen, Germany about midway between Bavaria and Alsace and a little north of Switzerland.  Their Great-Great-Granddaughter, my Great Grandmother Wilhelmina Zimmerer was born there as well in 1853, probably making Tuttlingen the town longest continually inhabited by my ancestors over the past 300 years!

Wilhelmina and husband John Hartzer of Alsace emigrated to America in 1871 and one of their daughters was my favorite Grandma who babysat me so often when I was very little and another daughter was the extended-family matriarch, Great Aunt Helen who we called "Aunt Lainey," - which we didn't realize at the time was a tribute to the Alsatian/Tutlingen pronunciation and nickname of "Helen," so I feel a definite connection to all those Zimmerers!  It's like Tuttlingen was the launching pad that spent a century and a half preparing to produce Great Grandma Wilhelmina and send her to America where she provided two of her daughters to interact with me as well as her genes!

 

[MoseySusan]

Zimmer is German for room. Did they run an inn? 

 

[MickinMD ★]

55 minutes ago, roadsue said:

Zimmer is German for room. Did they run an inn? 

 

Update: Zimmerer means "Carpenter" in German - or at least in Tuttlingen:

Google translation:

Whenever last names came into use the earliest Zimmerer probably was an carpenter. Until recently Wilhelmina Zimmerer was one of two greatgrandparents whose name I don't think I ever knew and I'm just digesting the information about names, dates, and locations.  Histories are next.

I set up my family tree on Ancestry.com and some of the rectangles would light up and I'd get the message that the site had a candidate for the mother/father of the last person whose name I entered.  It was a thrill when I entered the first great-great-grandparent name I'd ever known and another rectangle lit up saying there was a candidate for THAT ancestors father or mother and it continued back a couple more generations! Here's how it went from Wilhelmina's parents Karolus and Helena where one of the rectangles to the right of the leftmost column (which is great-great-grandparents) would light up, I'd check it out and accept it, then another and another, etc. until 7 great-great-great or more direct ancestors were confirmed: