Anyone into Genealgy ?

Ancestry.com is a GREAT tool, but you gotta know how to work it... I've tried a few times to find stuff about my dad's side by using my mom's account, but I always get as far back as Russia (what is now the Ukraine), and that's about it...

My mom, on the other hand, traced her mother's side back to the 1750's to Gotland, Sweden... Apparently we come from a very VERY long line of Jacob Halverson and Halver Jacobsons.... She sort of gave up in the 1750's because of not-that-great church records and she figured the 1750's was far back enough, but it would seem my family was a fairly affluent farming family, owning a servant or two, a handful of livestock, and a radio!

She also traced her father's father's side back to Norway, Sweden, then Switzerland, back to about the 12- or 1300's, and traced her father's mother's side back to pre-1000ce Norway; I am quite literally a direct descendant of Viking warriors! :viking: And couple that with my mother's side being almost entirely Scandinavian and my dad's side being German and German-Russian (the Ukraine thing, a population of native Germans that emigrated to the Ukraine, but kept the German culture, and further were slaughtered en masse by Stalin in the 40's and 50's), I am pretty much 100% Anglo-Saxon/Scandinavian.... Probably the whitest person on earth. A few years ago I spilled a bunch of Liquid Paper on myself, and people complemented me on my "sweet tan!" ;)

Digging through your ancestry is a pain in the stump most of the time, but once you finally find that result and can confirm it, it's like a tiny little slot machine in your head that has FINALLY hit the jackpot and is dumping out all of its tokens. Stick in there, keep digging. It's well worth it. :)


- CK

P.s. A strange side-note: I was born in 1986, a Ukrainian descendant... That same year, just a few months after my birth, the Chernobyl incident happened. All my life, for some unexplained reason, I've always been sort of fascinated with the area, the effects of heavy radiation on the flora and fauna, et. al.... If I ever take my awesome trip across Europe, I'm stopping off in Kiev and signing up for the tour of the 30km exclusion zone around the Chernobyl NPP and Pripyat (the city built for the staff of the plant)... I've no idea why, but I feel like I -have to- do this... Can't explain it...