Published on 12, July, 2020
II'm amazed at how many people here say English isn't thier first language and presumably thier heritage isn't either. How fascinating, in my stunning and vast ignorance I'd assumed that most people here would be from the UK, how international are we as a group of users? By the way I think multinationalism and multiculturalism are great, so I'm not trying to make anyone uncomfortable or unwelcome.
I'm English and have the usual English problems with language, I can be dyslexic in as many languages as you want to try me with, including English. I recently had my DNA tested with an ancestry site as I was researching my family history and found that I'm 84% southern English, which is apparently quite rare, most British people are a mix of Saxon, Irish and Scandi genes, so it looks like my families have been knocking about the place for hundreds of years.
I am from the US. English is my first language. I also know some Spanish from school, but not really enough for a real conversation. This is an interesting thread!
So how did all those of you who arn't living in the UK come to be on this site?
Has anyone else traced their ancestry? I seem to be 100% peasant, many of the ancestors I've traced have worked on the land, a fair few criminals, murderers and fraudsters, its seem that every couple of generations has someone who's been in prison. No aristocracy that I've found so far and few of my ancestors seem to have moved far. I seem to be hitting a wall around the late 1700's, what records there don't seem to have been digitalised, or if they have they've often been mistranscribed. I think some of them have been recorded wrongly at the start, I can just see some of my peasant ancestors mumbling in a thick vernacular accent to some educated clark who can't understand them and writes what he thinks they've said. I have 7% Iberian DNA, that covers anywhere from Lebanon to Portugal, it must be on my Dads side as my Mum's DNA came back with no Iberian, but I can't find out where it came from. 7% suggests it's fairly recent, I have a possible candidate, but I'm finding it hard to go back further with them than the mid 1800's.
Most of my male ancestors seem to have been craftsmen of various sorts: iron moulders, gunsmiths, potters, stonemasons, watchmakers. I have a connection to Colonel William Careless, who hid Charles II in the oak tree, when he was being pursued by Parliamentarian solders after the Battle of Worcester.