Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Nowhere Man 1966
BTW, Mom's side, German and Swedish although my grandmother said we might have Irish in us somewhere but I cannot confirm that. Dad's side, Russian, Russian Jew and Serbian, my last name is Serbian in origin.
Chuck M.
|
Jeez, on my Mom's side, who knows? The Nazis put her whole village in a concentration camp in 1940, when she was only 3 years old, and she was the only member of her family to get out alive. The camp records show an ID number and her origin (Stanisicz, Croatia, which is now 20 miles inside of Serbia), but not her name. Franciscan monks gave her a name, since she didn't remember what her name was; "Helene" is French, while I suspect that "Horvath" is something that the monks thought sounded Croatian (though it's not). From some of the few memories she has from before the Germans came, I strongly suspect she was originally Croatian Muslim; from some of the rituals she remembers her parents doing, I also suspect she might have had some Gypsy somewhere in there. But who knows?
There is a firm in the US that will, for $150, send you a packet of swabs and test tubes so you can swab the inside your mouth. In a month, they will have used mitochondrial DNA to chart out your family's origins back up to 200,000 years. I hope to do that for her one day; it won't tell her any family names, but will give her an idea of where her ancestors are from.