re: #132 freetoken

Lots of Scandinavian records even back to the 1600s. Surprised that you can’t find anything more on your Scandinavian ancestors.

As for Eastern Europe - certainly WWI and WWII destroyed lots of connections and records.

But that is one of the goals of war - to eliminate your enemy, and that includes erasing their history.

Another reason that war sucks… Destruction of records.

My family history disappears at about 1700 on my father’s side and 1944 on my mother’s, due to the aftermath of the Thirty Years War and WW2, respectively. My oldest ancestor came to Pennsylvania in a Palatine ship in 1738, and I know his father’s name and what village he came from in Germany. I can’t find any sources further back than that. The village he came from was completely destroyed at least twice during the various wars of the era.

Same for my mother’s side, her father came from Ostpreussen, which was ethnically cleansed and completely Sovietized. Unless people carried papers out with them on donkey carts in 1944, there’s nothing to know.

Just FYI for anybody researching their backgrounds, there are such things as fraudulent genealogies out there. Look up Gustav Anjou for an example. Apparently it was good business to cook up false family histories for monied classes in New England at the turn of last century. Mr. Anjou alone is responsible for something like 200 completely fraudulent family trees, and he took great advantage of disruption in record-keeping due to wars when cooking up fake connections. I fell victim to this myself, as some people online have genealogies which connect my ancestors to alleged French nobility using big lateral leaps through the gaps caused by wars.