6guns, I believe vaccine mandates to travel will eventually vanish. Australia already has it hard convincing tourists to go on the excruciatingly long flight to get there. Adding more hoops will only make more people decide to travel elsewhere when things get more normal.

As far as Sweden goes man if the opportunity arises I say do it! I had a GREAT time in Göthenburg Sweden. The locals were pretty darn friendly and many spoke perfect English. The signs were hard to figure out and I did get lost on my way to the Volvo museum but a Syrian refugee (I kid you not) who spoke English helped my friend and I get back on the right tram. I was traveling with a friend from Nigeria who was living in Ireland at the time (his wife is an American and knows my wife). It sounds like something you would read from a hyper progressive blog trying not to say refugees are amazing but this actually happened.

A day or so later our whole group was on a tram headed for the archipelago islands off Göthenburg when the tram broke down. The intercom began explaining something in Swedish to which my friend attempted to guess/translate what it was saying. He was being silly. A local laughed and told us what the announcement was really saying, which was that another tram would pick us up in about 15 minutes.

The breakdown allowed me to hop off in some random small town and buy a red Bull in the local shop next to the tram. Buying a Red Bull in hand language / gestures since the clerk didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Swedish was one of the highlights of my trip. It was pretty cool. The locals I saw were pretty darn friendly and most seemed shocked and happy we were there. “Why are you vacationing in Göthenburg?!” was something we heard quite a few times.

It is a bit expensive over there so that’s one thing to anticipate.

Stick, I hope and think you're right that travel restrictions will eventually go away once it's seen tourism $$$ are way down. We will see. Sounds like you had an eventful and memorable trip there!

I have been to Sweden twice, but I was much younger and didn't have time or desire to do any investigation. And I wasn't in the part of the country where my family was from.

If things work out, I do think it'd be a kick to connect with family there. I wonder if they even know about me and my sisters. Or if they are even alive?

I have been twice to the town my dad's side came from in Germany. They came over in 1850. No relatives living there but my relatives were there from the 1750's from what I learned.

Still trying to figure out the Irish side.

I still have curiosity on my heritage and what my Grand Parents had to endure and escape from during WW2. I am told I have cousins/uncles etc who I have never met.

That said, I have absolutely no interest in visiting them. I am glad to be born and raised here in the States and while my heritage is Chinese, I'm an American first and foremost.

On my dad's side
Colombia & Mexico, with known drug runners on the Colombian side & don't think they really get along with the Mexican cousins too much.

On my mom's side, she's adopted, so, unsure.

My mom has had some contact with cousins in Wales. They are pretty distant cousins, being about four generations removed, but cousins nonetheless.

My English forbears came to the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so those cousins would be harder to track down.

The bulk of my ancestors are German, though, and I don't know much about them prior to the very late 1800s - my great grandparents. Their ancestors came to the U.S. in the early nineteenth century.

quote:

Originally posted by flashguy:
While stationed in Germany I did visit our ancestral castle--Hohenzollern--but I didn't try to look up kinfolk.

Wait a minute. Are you telling us you are the Kaiser?

I'd love to find some ancestors from (then?) Poland when my father's side came over circa 1890 or so.

What's funny is I've been told my surname is Polish all my life but for shits & giggles one day I did a Google search on my name and there's like twice as many of my last name in Germany than there are in Poland. So that leads me to believe that my ancestors lived in what was then Poland but is now Germany.

When we were in Ireland I was tempted to go visit Dingle which is where my stepmother's family all hail from but they are Moriarty and there's like a million Moriarty's in Ireland!

It is interesting to find out where the folks came from, and what they did, and why they left.

Sweden kept good records of its population; almost everyone who went to the US or Canada departed through Gothenburg, so ships' records are copious; and none of the old records were destroyed in WWII, as happened in other parts of Europe.

Comprehensive records of emigrants from Sweden are open to the public at Utvandrarnas Hus, the Emigrants House, in the city of Växjö. Well worth the trip, if you have Swedish ancestors.

We visited the settlement where my wife's Great Grandmother came from - and found the actual house. It was a miner's house, for the adjacent copper mines (they were recruited to go to Michigan to mine copper in the 1870's). Six families in one house, central fireplace, house partitioned into six rooms... we found a man there cutting his lawn (he was a retired engineer from Saab Aviation, and the old house had been turned into a retirement cottage) and he allowed us to come inside... it was interesting to see the conditions they left, the reason why they came to America. The hand-cranked iron handled water pump shared by the families in the ten similar houses is still there outside the houses.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: RoverSig,

quote:

Originally posted by jhe888:

quote:

Originally posted by flashguy:
While stationed in Germany I did visit our ancestral castle--Hohenzollern--but I didn't try to look up kinfolk.

Wait a minute. Are you telling us you are the Kaiser?

No. Reputedly, my maternal grandmother was a 4th cousin to Kaiser Wilhelm. That's such a distant relationship I didn't think it worthwhile to pursue it. Schloss Hohenzollern is a beautiful castle--not as big as Neuschwanstein, but very nice. I visited it prior to the earthquake damage in the 1980s. I believe the damage was successfully repaired.

On my father's side, the first ancestor to come to this continent was a Privateer for Queen Anne, and a friend of William Penn. So I've got a real pirate in my ancestry.

flashguy

quote:

Originally posted by flashguy:

quote:

Originally posted by jhe888:

quote:

Originally posted by flashguy:
While stationed in Germany I did visit our ancestral castle--Hohenzollern--but I didn't try to look up kinfolk.

Wait a minute. Are you telling us you are the Kaiser?

No. Reputedly, my maternal grandmother was a 4th cousin to Kaiser Wilhelm. That's such a distant relationship I didn't think it worthwhile to pursue it. Schloss Hohenzollern is a beautiful castle--not as big as Neuschwanstein, but very nice. I visited it prior to the earthquake damage in the 1980s. I believe the damage was successfully repaired.

On my father's side, the first ancestor to come to this continent was a Privateer for Queen Anne, and a friend of William Penn. So I've got a real pirate in my ancestry.

flashguy

I still think you would look good in a Picklehaube.

quote:

Picklehaube.

^^^^^ I had to look that up--I'd never known what to call it. I found them for sale on the web for between $90 and $2500 (that one had a big golden eagle wth wings spread instead of a spike). I think I'll pass on it, though.

flashguy

Nope, not even for a second. My family are refugees here. The ones that didn't make here were incinerated. I looked up the town that my family came from out of curiosity, zero living Jews left there, which I find both almost statistically impossible and very alarming. My family pretty much owned the entire town and it was taken from us. My grandfather went back and pissed on something (a placard or some other memorial of some kind). I laughed my ass off when he told the story.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm American with no hyphenated word before it.

My wife has been heavy into geneology for 20+ years. Her ancestors emigrated to the U.S. in 1844 from a small village in Germany named Algermissen which is near Hannover. In 2005 We took a trip to the World Jet Masters event being held in Hungary and then a side trip to the Algermissen area. My wife's activities with regard to family search had been seen on the internet by relatives in Germany so we had an invite to meet them in Algermissen. The wife's family name is Rufkahr. The people we met with were related through their mother whose maiden name was Rufkahr.

My wife took her laptop with her and was able to show them what she had found researching the family tree which they were all intensely interested in; especially the pictures she had. It seems we were the talk of the town while we were there. They had a museum in the village which they opened up just to give us a tour. They also gave us a tour of the Catholic church which even included going up into the bell tower. Other folks in town organized a dinner party for us and had a real houseful of people show up! There was one gentleman living in Algermissen with the Rufkahr surname. It was absolutely uncanny how much he looked like some of the photos of other family members in the U.S. They could have been brothers!

All in all it was a great experience. My wife was the only Rufkahr to return to Germany to visit relatives since her ancestors left in 1844.

quote:

Originally posted by jhe888:

quote:

Originally posted by flashguy:
While stationed in Germany I did visit our ancestral castle--Hohenzollern--but I didn't try to look up kinfolk.

Wait a minute. Are you telling us you are the Kaiser?

I was wondering if anyone was going to pick up on that surname.

As for me, I’m 1/2 Irish, 3/8 Dutch, and 1/8 German (Danzig, Prussia). Given all the tromping around in that area of the Baltic, not much was left after WW2 that I’d find.