For those of you who are able to trace their ancestry back to another country...

[wnylib]

72. I have never been to any of my family's

ancestral countries and probably never will go, due to health issues now. But I have found a lot of information about them and the names of cities and villages that they came from.

Tracking down where my maternal grandfather's family came from was quite a challenge. My grandfather was born in Buffalo two weeks after his parents arrived in 1888 from the German Empire.

My grandfather told me the names of the two villages that his parents came from, right next to each other, in West Prussia, the ruling nation of the German Empire. He said that they were on the Polish border. I did not know what the German and Polish maps looked like then so I looked in all the wrong places. The region that is now northern Poland is where East and West Prussia were in the 1800s. So the border that my grandfather meant was the southern border of Prussia with Poland. That area is now west central Poland.

A German born librarian at my college's library found a historical map of Prussia and located the two villages for me. They have Polish names now.

I would probably not be very welcome looking for a German ancestral site in modern Poland. The Poles despise the Germans who once ruled there and who occupied their country in WWII. My g-grandfather was landed gentry, similar to an English manor lord.

When Poland was liberated at the end of WWII, all people of German descent fled. My grandfather's relatives fled to what became East Germany and changed their name. They sent a letter to their American relatives to update them, but due to communist rule, did not dare maintain contact. My grandfather knew what name they took and where they went, but would not tell me. It was the 1960s, height of the Cold War. He feared that I'd someday try to contact them.

My grandfather's surname was Polish, but his wife's and his mother's surnames were German. All first names for generations were German. But I wonder if the surname came from Polish/German intermarriage. There's a Polish village not far from where they lived that has the same name, so I also wonder if the surname came about as a location name, e.g. "Johann of (village name)." I'll never know.

My mother's mother came to the US from the German Empire, too, in 1890 when she was 3 years old. I found immigration papers that listed their village as Dargun, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, near the Danish border.

My paternal ancestors were Seneca, Mohawk, and British on one side. The Brits were mostly English, but there were some Scots and Welsh, too. They were colonial Puritans. I have a LOT on them and the villages that they came from

The other side of my paternal ancestry is Native American (unknown tribe), German from Hamburg, and German Swiss from Bern. I know very little about them except that they settled first in Missouri in the mid 1800s, then went to southern Ohio, and finally to northwestern PA. While the rest of the country was moving westward, they moved eastward. :

As a resident of western NY, I already live in the homeland of my Seneca ancestors.