Evan ProdromouYes
Yes, but...
No, but...
No
Poll ended at .
Please don't ask me to define "ancestral homeland" nor "been to".
Travis Scott@evan yes but as a child so will at some point as a adult..
@evan "been to" sounds hard, but for "ancestral homeland" Switzerland came up with a handy simplification: every citizen has an official "place of origin", which is inherited together with the citizenship (with a preference for the male genitor in case there's a choice, of course. Remember that women got the right to vote only in 1971 over there, and they still don't have public healthcare). When foreigners acquire the citizenship (after a long and arduous process, obviously), the place where they reside at that time becomes their "place of origin" (should we call them "born again Swiss"?)
Jacqueline@evan I consider myself to have multiple. If I'm going to knit pick, Europe is my ancestoral homeland.
Lucas Treffenstädt@evan yes, it's the one I live in right now.
James M.@evan I don't even know where my ancestral homeland is. Probably among the English Isles somewhere.
@jamesmarshall the answer seems obvious to me
@evan maybe New Orleans? Yeah, I've been back to New Orleans. ⚜️
Dan JonesSome of them. @evan
To expound a bit on my answer, if I look at my patrilineal ancestors, the Joneses I descend from came to the American colonies in the mid 1600s from England.
I have spent a little bit of time in England, but the closest I went to where they were from is probably Heathrow Airport.
But if I follow that line of Joneses further, I find that they moved (immigrated?) to England from Wales. I've never been to Wales. I can't find any records before the 1400s, so I can only guess where they came from before Wales.
But that's only one line. I also have ancestors from Scotland (I've been there), Germany (I've been there), and France (I haven't been there). I might be able to trace my lineage back to Charlemagne (I'm not sure I trust some of those records), but from Charlemagne, I could probably trace some lines to other parts of Europe (I haven't been to any other European countries).
So, to summarize, my ancestral lands are Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida, if I stop at my grandparents, and I've been to all of those States.
@reiver ⊼ (Charles) 
Some of them, yes. Others, no.
(My ancestors didn't all come from the same place in the world.)
Jimi Lend@evan yes, and my tribe lives there since the liberation of the peasants.
greets from Styria, Steiermark, Stajerska.
greets from Styria, Steiermark, Stajerska.
halfredgreenapple@evan I was born and raised on Norway but I have some relatives from Albania and Sweden either
Jay@evan
I'm 1/4 Roma what's my ancestral homeland
I'm 1/4 Roma what's my ancestral homeland
Dr Pen@evan how far back? Apparently the "indigenous" English (aka Celts) are all descended from emigrant Iberians 6000 years ago, so yes I've been to Madrid 🙃. I'm also half east German so that skews things a lot.
Stephan@durchaus @evan Its always possible! Various sets of people crossed the water into the british isles at different times in history. We have a lot of Danish heritage because of Danelaw in the mid ages, and there is historical record of the Gauls, from Brittany and surrounding areas. But the Iberian immigrants are from much earlier. Its fascinating. This seems a reasonable summary, if youre curious https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/celts-descended-from-spanish-fishermen-study-finds-416727.html
@DrPen @evan Yes, a lot of genetic movement has happened over such a long time frame, so it's virtually impossible to identify a single or only a handful of ancestral countries/regions. It can only meaningfully applied to a handful of generations, maybe a few hundred years.
However, every single person's DNA actually gets split up and modified in every generation, so already after some generations, a single person's DNA is unrecognizable/insignificant.
Nelson@evan My family name is from Czechoslovakia. You may notice a problem with visiting there: the country doesn't exist anymore. We thought we were visiting our ancestor's homeland in the Czech Republic, but when we got there it turned out their ancestral village was on the other side of the border in Slovakia.
Fortunately my mom is from Hong Kong and we succeeded in visiting there, just as the British were handing control back to China, so it was briefly under the same government as her childhood
Rob 🏳️🌈 Rartsy Humanist@evan No but I don't identify as having one. I wonder if my experience is common among USians from families that have been here a long time. Every generation people intermarry. I know the ancestry of my 4 grandparents' names though all were born in the USA:
Father's parents English & German (My own parents divorced when I was young & I didn't know them)
Mother's parents English & Irish.
I've been to Germany.
My grandmother seemed into Irishness but was 3rd generation American.
aeva@evan I figure my ancestral homeland is Wisconsin, because any farther back and we have to spin the wheel of genealogy to pick which one gets to be the homeland or cut me up into like 50 pieces to visit all of them at once
OrlayaAs far as I know my ancestors, and that's a few generations, I don't live more than a few hundred kilometers away from them all.
scully@evan answered “yes but” because while I have been to Wales, England, Ireland and Scotland — which made up my father’s heritage — I have not Italy, which is my mother’s heritage. I did do some genealogy research in the UK which is why I answered as I did.
gergo@evan yes but what is an ancestral homeland :) (we see about 2 generations back... beyond that, I might originate in central asia, or the middle east, or france...)
David B. Himself@evan What is an "ancestral homeland"? Your homeland is where you were born and raised. I know many Americans think that culture is transmitted in the genes, but do we want to enable them here?
Also, for quite a few of us (I'm tempted to say a majority on the Fediverse) our "ancestral homeland" is... our regular homeland?
Also, for quite a few of us (I'm tempted to say a majority on the Fediverse) our "ancestral homeland" is... our regular homeland?
@evan My question was rhetorical. 🙃
@DavidBHimself Oh, was it?
El Duvelle
John Francis 🇨🇦🦫🍁@evan some in space, none in time.
coldclimate@evan 8 generations back within 100 miles so I guess I never left
ricardo vacapinta@evan Answered No because I don't have an ancestral homeland. The history of Humans is mostly a history of migration. And anyways all of us likely have a common ancestor as recently as 2,000 years ago:
https://isogg.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor
https://isogg.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor
@vacapinta your bio says "Mexican-American in Amsterdam". Don't you think of Mexico or the US as your ancestral homeland?
@evan I'm an immigrant now. My Mexican-American parents are recent immigrants from Mexico. My Mexican family, only a couple generations ago, came from other parts of Mexico or from Europe. Portuguese Jews fleeing Europe I think. The PT Jews were fleeing from somewhere else.
I come from people on the run... :)
I come from people on the run... :)
Allen but one of the good ones@evan lol, I have so many, which one do you mean right now?
Unless you mean the place where my parents and three of my grandparents were born, because I've always lived there
cuan_knaggs@uastronomer @evan ah yes, another good south african mut
Leon Cowle@mensrea @uastronomer 🙋🏻♂️me, too!
Both parents, one set of grandparents*, and their ancestors going back to ... errr... the 16 or 17 hundreds.
But if we define "ancestral homeland" as where even those distant ancestors came from, then also yes. Been to the Netherlands, France, the UK, and Ireland, which, I believe, covers all my genetic bases.
*the other set of grandparents were British, which is precisely what afforded me the "ancestral visa" back into the UK, and eventually citizenship there. Grateful.
@leoncowle @uastronomer given za history it's likely even more colourful than that
·J Mopp@mensrea @leoncowle @uastronomer The one ancestor I can trace directly to Britain was an 1820 settler who married a Xhosa woman and had 9 children
Erwan 🚄@evan Quite complicated, ancestors coming from very different part of France...
Paul Turnbull has moved.🇨🇦@evan Yes, but figuring out the whole story of where has been tricky. My Scottish ancestors turn out not to have been highlanders as the family thought but likely immigrants from Northern Ireland before heading to Canada a few generations later. I’ll be in Northern Ireland for the first time next month as well as Glasgow where they lived later. Also while I’ve been to England I’d like to visit the specific regions my English ancestors came from. 1/n
@evan I’ll also add I have adoptive ancestors through my mom’s step-dad and my two step-dads. I have yet to visit the Netherlands or Ukraine although I have been to France.
All of which is to say often families are complex and the concept of an ancestral homeland becomes tricky.
2/2
Maj - 🇨🇦On my mother's side:
Ireland - yes
Germany - yes
On my father's side:
England - yes
Scotland - yes
???? - ???? [can only trace back to Tennessee in 1830s - I have passed through, I think we stopped for lunch?]
Ben Werdmuller@evan It's complicated!
On my dad's side:
Switzerland - yes
The Netherlands - lived there
Indonesia - not yet
On my mother's side:
The US - unfortunately I live here
Scotland - I lived there too
Russia - yes
Ukraine - not yet
Greem (Graeme. Not Graham!)@evan Yep.
I couldn't be more British if I tried; I have English, Scottish (3+ gens back), Welsh and Irish (4+ gens back) in my line.
According to my DNA there's a bit of Scandinavian there too, probably linked through the Celtic ancestors from the Vikings.
1300+ people in the family tree so far, going back to the late 1400s, and nobody from outside the British Isles!
Dreaming of dad jazz.@evan most of them. I've been to Slovakia and Ireland, but not Germany.
CaveDave@evan ... I was born and raised there?
@engravecavedave so, you've been there?
@evan indeed I have
Tattie@evan currently on holiday to (one of) the ancestral homeland(s)!
Nathan A. Stine@evan No, I have yet to leave my country. However I do have a 4x great grandfather from Montreal. I will be visiting Montreal in about 6 weeks.
Philip Mallegol-Hansen@evan I would be curious to see how people respond to the inverse: Have you ever *left* your ancestral homeland.
squinky@evan Ukrainian tourism isn't doing so hot right now but I'd love to visit once they're finished handing Putin his ass
Jon A. Cruz@evan I really can't say, since the Spanish completely wiped out our local cultures (on my father's side) and I have no record of which i came from nor where it might actually be. Or rather, *used* to be.
planeguy@evan yes, I still have a something awful forums account
Matt Mascarenhas@evan Yes, but a) only briefly for 4 days (this brevity made up for by visiting the actual homes of my ancestors there) and b) only one migration back before the one to here. As my surname is Portuguese, I'm pretty sure the next migration back would've been from Portugal, which I haven't visited yet.