Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun (SNGF) question made me want to respond today. He posted:
Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible music here) is to:
1) What genealogical discovery surprised you? [Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting topics!]
2) Write your own blog post, or add your response as a comment to this blog post, in a Facebook Status post or note.
A friend was just asking me the other day who my earliest immigrant ancestor to America was.
My genealogy journey has been sporadic and somewhat convoluted. I knew nothing of my father's ancestry until after he died. He didn't want us to know them.My mother's ancestry had been researched by multiple family members, including my grandmother. We thought we knew a lot about them (some "facts" proved not to be true).And I had spent many years researching my husband's Finnish/Swedish ancestry, mostly before any records were online.Much to my surprise when I got into my father's ancestry I discovered that I had a direct ancestor from Sweden who arrived in America long before my husband's ancestor.Olof Persson Stille, my 9th great grandfather, was born in Ruslagen, Sweden in 1610. As an impetuous youth he was caught stealing a piece of jewelry from the manor house where he worked, leading to his expulsion from Sweden in 1641. He arrived in New Sweden (Wilmington, Delaware) in November 1641 with his wife and two young children and became a wealthy and well-respected plantation owner as well as a magistrate. He died in Philadelphia in 1684.I was totally blown away to learn that I had Swedish ancestry.