Replies

I can understand that feeling, I am just glad my mother’s parents came here over a century ago from East Prussia. My grandfather was a marine engineer in the Kaiser’s Navy and didn’t like the political direction being followed, so took my grandmother to the US around 1890. She left 7 siblings behind, except her homely sister later came to help her with 6 children while my grandfather was working at sea. They died before I was born so I only knew my Tanta Lena. From my childhood in WW2 I have vivid memories of helping remove my fathers business samples from his car so he could do his sky watch duty after work, helping pull the air raid shades, stomping to flatten tin cans for war scrap, and taking bacon fat to the butcher for nitroglycerin.

My mother and sisters had visited Germany several times in the the early 1030s since they had teaching jobs and ocean liner fares were very cheap during the depression. An aunt married a German furniture factory owner, and ended up stuck in Germany throughout WW2. I remember Tanta Lena and my mother having long worried talks in German so I could not understand what they were saying. I only was told as an adult that they were worried about their relatives there, none of whom were Nazis. My grandmother’s sisters, a Dentist and Gynecologist retired in Berlin, had committed suicide when the Russians came in and revenged themselves on the German women. In 1948 my aunt and cousins finally got back to the US. Later she received a letter from her husband saying he would not be coming as he had a severe heart condition, and to not be a burden to anyone he committed suicide. So a lot of family worry and distress as a child that I did not understand.

My grandmother came from a family that Shirer’s book referred to as the impoverished Prussian nobility. Her father had the honorific von in his name. He dropped that when he lost most of his land in 1871 when a potato blight forced him to sell his land to buy costly potatoes to meet his army contracts for the Franco Prussian war. My son recently had his DNA checked for ancestry with a service that also gives info on both parents. My maternal half included German and Baltic DNA, but also 6 to 9% DNA from the far, far, east. I wonder what tribal group that was likely to have been as certainly the Prussian area had seen conquest from the east by people who would have helped father the ruling class. I also wonder about much earlier ancestry as I have two shoveled upper incisors and very large molars. Unfortunately, the service he used did not test for Neanderthal or native American. My husband was 1/16th Cree Indian, and had the massive muscles, and red hair, very blue eyes, and volatile temper that suggest possibly more than the usual amount of Neanderthal DNA. I guess one of these days I will have to be tested to find out. I wonder if the VA hospital would still have any of my husband’s blood as he died 20 years ago. Could a service use an old hat or brush?