In my ancestral/genealogy research, I keep finding buried reasons as to why I feel the way I do or act in certain ways or why I am different from most people around me, but on some level there is ancestral intuition.
The question I have been asking is WHY did my ancestors choose to leave their respective ancestral lands? I've had conversations with my father about this and he didn't have any insight about the Ukrainian/Polish/Slovak sides of recent ancestry - the ones that came here in the 1910s. Historically speaking, I can piece that together easily enough between - the Russification of Ukraine, World War II, Russian Revolution, etc.
My matrilineal German ancestry (PA Dutch) came over due to ethnic persecutions in the late 1700s at the very earliest through the mid to late 1800s. I don't know much about my Irish ancestry as my Great Grandmother died very young and we didn't have any connection to her family otherwise from what I can gather.
My fathers side is much harder to figure out because the last names all have numerous spelling variations which sometimes seem to be country specific and as languages change so does the last name, and I have to research the history of several different countries during various time periods and their archives as well - often challenging because while I am learning the Ukrainian and German languages and have dabbled a bit with Polish and Romanian.
Now, looking at the current state of decay in the United States, I kept wondering why I feel the compulsory need to flee the country and move to our ancestral areas of Europe. I have been trying to understand this and made sense of something, I knew without knowing, without having confirmation, until now.
I have been trying to piece together our now trace Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry and also to find the missing connections that seem to get muddled if not entirely erased somewhere in the 1600s, which I think is due to the Habsburg influence and Imperial Russia, but a lot of the missing parts seem to all fall around the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 1780-90s. There is a missing connection point on every branch of my patrilineal ancestry. I've been bouncing between various regional/country histories to try to connect the dots. Someone has to have survived, right? Otherwise, we would not be here.
It would seem, as I suspected, that some of the more recent ancestry that stayed behind in Poland/Ukraine ended up in Dachau concentration camp in Germany during World War II as political prisoners from what I can ascertain. I found some records in the United States Holocaust History Museum of archive of database of names one definitely matches up with the Dźwiniacz that I believe my great grandparents we’re from on the Polish Ukrainian border. I am still researching other family names and variations, however, I do not know how common some of the names are or were at the time. I also do not know what happened to those that survived Dachau and where they ended up after liberation.
I tried cross-referencing the USHHM records with the Yad Vashem database of names, but it is a little harder to navigate because I don’t know Hebrew so I can only read some of the documents like there’s a few that have my exact spelling last name, but they have it as a first name or there’s so many variations of spellings, but I did see a few, and am no closer to figuring out the Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry either.
Now, I am asking myself, is the urge to flee some sort of ancestral intuition? Will I know when there is no other choice, but to flee? I long suspected those that stayed behind did not survive or were displaced and relocated elsewhere after World War II and the Cold War. This is why I work with my ancestors. It's not a flex. It's not anything new as I have been low key doing a lot of this work for a very long time. This is ongoing work that I talk about on my blog and on our YouTube channel as well.