darkerhorse wrote: 07 Jun 2022, 22:03
Based on what your family told you or on documents you have.
Pretty much squares with what I knew going in. My paternal grandparents are both from Italy, Pescara and Sicily. My maternal side is Irish and Hungarian.
On my paternal side, my grandfather's parents both have deep roots in Chieti, Pescara, going back at least hundreds of years (I'm back to my 5x great-grandparents). And while I haven't found much of anything for my paternal grandmother's side yet, she did tell me when I was a kid that her family came from Termini Imerese.
On my maternal side, all I knew prior to the AncestryDNA test was that my maternal grandmother was Irish, and my maternal grandfather (I never knew him) was Hungarian. Happily, my mother also took the AncestryDNA test, and she got rather detailed community results on both the Irish and Hungarian sides. Interestingly, there was a fair amount of English/Scottish on her maternal side. And because my maternal grandmother's maiden name is one of the more widespread surnames in Ireland, there already exists a rather deep genealogy for that line, and several hundred years back, there was a line of English and Scottish who married into it.
Hampering me a little bit is that my maternal grandmother's grandfather seems to have been "Famine Irish" and simply put on a boat as a youngster (age 10 or younger, as near as I can tell), and I can't seem to find a ton of paperwork for him either before or after he showed up on the shores of the U.S. The rest of the Irish side seems to have come to the U.S. pre-famine, as both of my maternal great-great grandparents appear to have been born in the U.S., with my 3x great-grandmother born in Ireland.
Circling back to the paternal grandmother side, I really can't seem to find much paperwork on them at all. And making things more difficult, it looks like her grandfather (*maybe* g-gf) and his brothers seem to have made some arrangements where they named all of the males after each other, so I have multiples of each name with relatively close birthdates. So it's like trying to pick needles out of a needle stack.
I was communicating with a 3rd or 4th cousin from that line, and he ran into the same issue trying to sort it out. And we both agreed that we are related - and grew up only about 5-10 miles apart - but we can't seem to sort out where each of our direct lines branches from the tree.
And making it even more difficult, as I was talking it out with myself the other evening, my paternal grandmother had numerous siblings, but mostly sisters, and of the males, one died unmarried and childless in the 1960s. and the other married but had no children, and died in the 1980s, so I don't really have any extant relatives carrying on my grandmother's maiden name to consult with.
So that's basically where I'm at.
