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Genealogy has become a passion. I don't know if it is the mystery, the history, pushing the limits of the computer and internet technology, the hunt, or what. The reason is probably, "all of the above." My mother, Regina Heintz, used to tell me a story that our family decended from Irish, French and German ancestors. That combination always sort of nagged at me because originally I thought, "how could our family have all of those blood-lines? That was the mystery, and genealogica research provided the reasons why Mom's story was a plausable.
So it goes like this: The Celts from Ireland/Scotland around 400 BC conquered and probably settled and intermarried with tribes in what is now Alsace (near the Rhine River between Alsace, France and Germany near Stausbourg. Villages such as Weissembourg, Kandel, Karlsrue, Landau, et.al. were the early homes of our ancestors. Alsace was governed by the French, then the Germans and finally and today, by the French.
The French revolution occured in the 1799's and in the late 1700's, France's northern borders were being attacked by Austrians, Dutch and other neighboring countries. Napoleon led France's government at that time. He began to conscript any male along the northern border, thus, our ancestors were facing a stint in Napoleon's Army.
Alsace was not the best place for our ancestors during that era because Catholics were facing religious persecution from the French rebels, the population density of the Alsace region was increasing so jobs/work were hard to find, and Napoleon wanted to draft all able bodied men into his Army. Leaving the region required the permission of the authorities, and getting approval was not a simple matter. Therefore, our ancestors were extremely interested in the invitation from Catherine the Great, the Czar's wife, and a german herself.
Around 1800, our Alsacian-German ancestors immigrated to what is now the Ukraine near Odessa, north of the Black Sea, the faced tremendous hardships; e.g., extremely cold winters, lack of food and housing, disease, broken promises by the Russian Government, and land that had never been tilled. They did not mix with the Russos, peasants, or Ukrainians nor did many of them inter-marry with Ukrainians. Consequently, our blood-line remained pretty much intact, German.
Our ancestors, two generations removed and around the late 1880's and early 1900's, immigrated to the USA and settled in North Dakota with some moving on to Washington State and southern Canada. Today, we are spread out across the USA. Our family has grown rapidly and we have sort of lost contact with one another over the years.
Our research has led to identifying several generations of our ancestors prior to those that immigrated to Ukraine, back to teh mid 1500's. We have also established a link to a branch of our family that immigrated to Rumania from Speier Ukraine.
The research is never finished. It goes on and on -- that is what keeps this project so interesting.
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