micky107 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 24, 2019 7:03 am
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All my grandparents were born in North America. Go back to great grandparents and it's Irish, English and Swiss.
How bout you, Per?
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Just Swedes basically, but on my mother’s side, there was a priest back in the early 17th century who was very active in pursuing witches and having them burnt at a stake, and his third wife, who was the mother of the son my family comes from, was Finnish. Also, on my father’s side, there was a French protestant bishop, who came to Sweden as a refugee in the 16th century. One of his sons later worked as a pirate in the Caribbean, the Dutch paid him to attack Spanish ships. When he died of old age in Amsterdam, he owned large parts of Guyana and some 60 barrells of gold, but had no children. The lawyers his siblings sent to Guyana managed to get the deeds for the plantations in their own names and stayed in South America, while the Dutch government collected the gold barrells for safe keeping till it could be determined who the rightful heirs were. Unfortuntely the barrells seem to have been misplaced since, but there is still a group of descendants renewing the claim to the Dutch courts every twenty years or so. Maybe some day they will succeed in getting reimbursed for the 60 barrells of gold. I’m descended from one of his sisters, but I haven’t registered with the group as I doubt the Dutch will ever cough up what they owe us....
Also, my paternal grandmother, one of my aunts and a cousin all have (or had) a gene that causes cancer in the ovaries. That gene is normally just found on the British isles, so there must probably be some sort of Celtic or Anglo-Saxon somewhere in the family tree, but for all I know it could be some viking age thrall. I mean, we can usually just trace neritage back to the 16th century here in Sweden, unless you come across nobility, in which case you might be able to trace it further back. That Finnish wife of the witch-hunting priest does add that. She came from nobility, so that particular lineage goes back to the 13th century, but then you get back to Sweden, because the nobility in Finland was mostly Swedes...