Postcards of my Forebears
Day: March 1, 2022
Ancestor Count Reviewed
Almost every day I devote some time to my genealogy, mostly adding ancestors to my family tree and trying to find more information on particular ancestors. There’re lot of win goose chases involved in this process but usually it yields interesting information. In March 2019 I had 17,481 ancestors on my family tree. Today, March 1, 2022, I have 23,941 ancestors on my family tree (Janet’s Family Tree). An increase of over 6,000 ancestors. Mind boggling I would say, and fun in the process. Ancestors stretching back to the 14th century. Knights and nobles and ordinary folk through the ages. Most of these people located in New England and their forebears came from the British Isles.
According to Ancestry.com my ethnicity as determined from my DNA is as follows:
England and NW Europe. 65%
Scotland. 15%
Sweden & Denmark. 9%
Wales. 5%
Ireland. 5%
Norway 1%
“Lilacs”
In 1912 my father, Jack (Jacob) Schwartzman, was born in Vinnytsia, a town then under Russian control in the part of eastern Europe that is now Ukraine. In the 1920s his family escaped from the tyranny of the Soviet Union and came to America to be free. Upon his arrival here he spoke Russian but not a word of English. He learned quickly and soon became a craftsman of his new language.
The tyranny now engulfing Ukraine makes this a right moment for a poetic essay that my father published in the spring of 1966, when we weren’t even half-way through the original Cold War. Now that we’ve entered a second one, the essay is as timely as it was 56 years ago. Feel free to repost this in a spirit of solidarity.
Solomon and Anna Schwartzman in eastern Europe in 1923
with their younger son Isidore and older…
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Janet's Thread 2 