My 16 Great-Great-Grands
I have to thank Randy Seaver for his challenging Saturday night fun posts that help me get out of my genea-blogging slumps. This time around he asks us to:
1) List your 16 great-great-grandparents in pedigree chart order. List their birth and death years and places.
2) Figure out the dominant ethnicity or nationality of each of them.
3) Calculate your ancestral ethnicity or nationality by adding them up for the 16 - 6.25% for each (obviously, this is approximate).
4) If you don't know all 16 of your great-great-grandparents, then do it for the last full generation you have.
5) Write your own blog post, or make a comment on Facebook or in this post.
I followed Randy's advice and grabbed my info from a RM4 Ahnentafel list:
1. Avraham Benjamin KIELCZEWSKI: b.? m.? died bef 1 Jun 1918. POLAND
2. Zywa Golda KRUG: b.? m.? died bef 1 Jun 1918. POLAND
3. Haim Shmuel KALMANIEWSKI: b.? m.? d.? POLAND
4. ???: b.? m.? d.? POLAND
5. Shlomo SMORGONSKI: born abt 1836. m.? d.? POLAND
6. Hanna Minka ?: b.? m.? d.? POLAND
7. Jacob SEGALCHIK: b.? m.? d.? POLAND
8. Ita ?: b.? m.? d.? POLAND
9. Jacob Yitzhak DOMBEK: b.? m.? d.? POLAND
10. Sarah Rachel KARPIK: born abt 1861 in Sterdyn, Sokolow, Lublin, Poland. m.? died abt 1941 in Sterdyn, Sokolow, Lublin, Poland. POLAND
11. Avram KREPLAK: b.? married 1874 in Kosow Lacki, Poland. d.? POLAND
12. Dobe JABLONKA: b.? married 1874 in Kosow Lacki, Poland. d.? POLAND
13. Aaron ZINBERG: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE
14. Sarah ?: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE
15. Joseph BENDITOVICH: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE
16. Miriam ?: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE
Hmmm. I have a lot of work to do. For starters, I know I have looked for all of these ancestors on JewishGen, but those databases are far from being complete. My next task should be to get some microfilm from the LDS, but how is that really going to help me? I can't read Russian or Polish or Latin or whatever language any of these records will be in. If they even exist.
At least I can pretty firmly say that I am 75%/25% Polish-Russian, which I have known pretty much all my life. And as I have written here before, the next generation after this one had a 75%/25% split for those who perished in the Holocaust. Yes, the entire Polish side. It's a good thing my grandfather fled to Russia.
So, does anyone have suggestions how I should go about filling in all these question marks?