Happy 4th of July!

[zbyszko]

Back in the 1970s, my Grandpa Pruski used to tell us about how his father came to this country on a stolen passport with a false name to avoid being drafted into Bismarck's army back in Prussia. Although he was Polish (which country didn't actually exist back then), the last place that he knew his father had lived before emigrating was Berlin where

Comments

[mel39]

That's fascinating! Just so long as you can't get expelled from the country ;)

[zbyszko]

I always liked the part where my great-aunts didn't believe the story even though when they tried to look into the family history, they got lost with their father. : )

I've been fascinated by all the World War One stuff in the news lately as that has been one of my favorite history periods. I had ancestors on both sides of that war as my dad's father was in the American Army (although I think he never made it over to Europe before the war ended) and my mom's parents were kids in Germany during the war.

I tried asking my German grandpa once about the "Turnip winter" after the war when I was taking a history class about that time period but he just said that his family had a farm and he didn't say much more.

[beachtree]

That's definitely fascinating, and an interesting dose of perspective that could be a reminder to all of the disgraceful talking heads and the mobs that they incite and rouse who've become so vocal and visible. Some of the footage that I saw the other night had crowds "expressing their feelings" to the buses with so many children, and the "patriotic adults" looked suspiciously similar in many ways in terms of physical characteristics. What? A nation of immigrants? Really

[zbyszko]

I doubt that I can get any more info about Great-grandpa - my dad's older sister who died last year at age 93 didn't know any more than what grandpa had told us

[beachtree]

It's no wonder that genealogy is such a draw, sort of like a treasure hunt. There's the cool, personal tidbits, like the ghost sighting. I'd always wished that we'd had more, closer contact with both sides of the family, but none of them lived within about 1,000 miles and my mother's parents died when my brothers and I were young. It's that side of the family with any records and all of the photos and sense of history. Some of it is fairly easy to trace because it's more public, but most of the personal aspects are blanks

[zbyszko]

I remember reading a book back in the 1980s about surnames and how they came about. It was very interesting and it even included Pruski in the section about surnames from place names.

On my mother's side, the cemetery in Milwaukee where my grandparents are buried is pretty interesting as a lot of relatives are buried around the gravesite of the relative who helped the others come to this country.