On ancestors...we all have them, so...  

Hi peacefulwmn9, I cant say much of our ancestors. I have always wondered why we looked a bit different from other people out here. Quite recently I learnt that ours is a warrior community that actually hails from the kingdom called Kalinga which Ashoka the great massacred. Kalinga was peaceful nation believing in love and kindness. Most were Buddhists. When Ashoka the emperor came with his large army for war, people sent away a few able women and children in all different direction to keep the race alive, and the remaining fought the war till they died. Ashoka's soldiers caught many of these women and children and had them also killed. Very few who reached south survived. Within our group we again spread over different villages adopting the names of villages. Most of it is what I learnt from wikipedia. :) But it was fascinating no doubt. :)

I am very interested in genealogy and my ancestros, but I do not know much about them =( I am Middle Eastern and now that I live in the US, it's hard to find out a lot of information, because I do not have much relatives here. I have heard I have ancestors from Albania or Turkey, I'm not sure which, maybe both. I also heard I have ancestors who were royalty which I thought was pretty awesome =D I love how people are so mixed, it makes everyone soo interesting.

Hello Karen, I am not 100% sure on my ancestry as my mother was an only child out of a family of 12 kids. my grandmother was married twice and in between those two marriages hooked up with my mother father and only had my mother. My mother knows who here dad was but he passed before she had the chance to know him and there are no other living relatives. My grandfather was brought up in a foster home and while he grew up with one last name and was then given another that his children and my grandmother took as their own. My mother on the other hand was given the last name of my grandmothers first husband and first 7 children. My grandfather that was in the foster care was Polish and my grandmother was German and then from what we have been told by word of mouth my mothers biological father was Irish so it seems that we have some Irish and German in me but other than that I can't say as I do not know my fathers side...

Hi, Karen, interesting to read about your ancestory. I know the history of our ancestors upto 4 generations back. We belong to South Indian Hindu Nair caste. Our large joint family broke into nuclear families some 35 years back. We don't have a mixed heritage. There were many lawyers, writers and artists in the elder generations. New generation all technically educated, engineers and doctors, many settled in the US and gulf countries. We have a family get together once in an year, when many get a chance to meet. There is a lot of unity in our family relations.

Over the years, I have learned quite a bit about my ancestry, but there is still so much that I want to know. It seems like the more I learn, the more I want to learn. I haven't learned as much about my mom's ancestry as I have my dad's. Her dad was of African desent while her mom was Native American. My dad was Creole (French, African and Native American) . Both of his parents were children brought to America from Southern France.

In my culture we have tribes and from these tribes we are divided into clans. Each clan has a name and a clan praise. From the clan praise we are able to gather the names of our ancestors, the verly old ones. What this essentially does, it identifies all the descendants, for example if I had to come to America and meet someone with the same clan name as mine, even though I've never seen the person, that person is family and that means " no intimate relationship". We always take the clan praise of the fathers side.
From my mother's side my great great grandmother was white but i'm not sure if she was dutch or not. I'm assuming dutch because dutch people are the ones that settled close where they lived. I am still perplexed about how she managed to do this, get married to a black man in south africa when racism was still ripe. I have never met her side of the family and i assume she was disowned. We dont have her photos but part of her complexion is still lives on till the 3rd generation.

My husband and I are genealogists, we not only do our families but others also. It's wonderful to find out where you came from and some of the things your families went through. It's also very important to write your memories for the sake of your children and their children. I wish I had more of mine. Part of my family were German Jews and they are all just wiped from the earth if part of that family had not come to the US around the time of the Civil War, I would no nothing before my Dad and his father. The other side of my family came before the Country was born and I have most of their history. But warning, genealogy has become so profitable that many scams abound. My family even passed many of these tales off as truth, it wasn't until I did the research and found the dates just didn't match that I was able to separate truth for fiction.

well my grandmother is german an my grandfather is american indain an french an on mom side american indain an french candain I have been researching my family tree an you wouldnt belive what I have found its like all the members of my hubbys family go back to england were miners an when they came here they became thats right miners an he is related to the hatfields an mccoys an daniel boone an jesse james on my mom's side we are related to robert guolet ,madonna celine dion an the dionne quints

My surname is a Viking name. The part of England where I grew up has towns and villages all with Viking suffixes on the end of their names. So when I was working in Norway a couple of years back it must be no surprise that I felt very much at home!

I am the only member of my family to have left the UK, and the only one to have married a foreign national. My sister moved to the South of England after she got married, and she and her grown-up offspring all live near London (not where I would want to be). Most of the rest of the family have stayed where they have been for centuries.

And as I have no children of my own, and none of my sister's adult children seem set on having families, the seed will not spread very far for the foreseeable future.

i have never investigated my ancestry and am not sure it would be very easy given that some of the background to both sides is a bit murky. i can tell you that half my family comes from england and the other half from scotland but not a great deal more than that. i do know who my grandparents were...