My favorite photo of my grandmother, Anna Repinsky, probably taken in approximately 1920.

I am feeling like a celebrity as I get comments and messages from members of the Polish Genealogy Society of America in response to my article which was published in the most recent edition of their quarterly magazine, Rodziny. I have been surprised how many people are interested in DNA testing as an additional search method for tracking down their ancestral origins.

First comment: “I have read and applaud your well-researched and adroitly written article about your ancestors! Thank you for presenting such a meaningful insight into searching one’s ancestors…I would value your opinion relative to DNA testing for both of us.” This comment came from a gentleman whose parents were born in Poland. His wife is Sephardim and was born in Casablanca, Morocco.

You will discover as the story from the article unfolds through RedTambourine that I discovered and met with some people in Poland who are likely relatives. Another reader urges me to ask a member of this family, the Rupinskis from Osiek-Kolonia, to do a DNA test. She says, “I think this is an excellent idea. It will either prove or disprove a familial connection. Poles do not, as a group, share common DNAs.” This reader has experience: she shared DNA test results with a family in Poland that she thought were possibly related to her family. It turned out that they were not, but the close friendship between the two families continues….a ‘win-win’ for international friendship.

I found one reader who has history very similar to mine. She is originally from Chicago area and her grandparents lived in South East Chicago. She is sure that my great-grandfather was Polish because only Poles lived in that area — not Russians. (I mention in the article that there was some confusion in tracking my great-grandfather’s entry into the U.S. because he was entered as a Russian but we always understood from family testimony that he was Polish).

This reader also believes that her ancestor was also running from Poland in order to escape military service in the Russian army. Her ancestor comes from the same region and would have lived during the same time period. She believes that he crossed the Drweca which is the river which separated the Russian and German partitions.

Probably the best suggestion to me to further my ancestral search is to check out the records in the church in Osiek. It is an active congregation and the church dates from long ago. Perhaps there would be records of baptisms, marriages, and deaths from my family.

Over the next few weeks I will reproduce my article through RedTambourine.

According to this article,’ My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding’ is a reality show, a fascinating look into “a world and a culture that most of us have little or no experience.” Right now, there are about 1,000,000 Gypsies living in the United States. There are two types of Gypsy populations described in this article: the ‘travelers’ who often live in elaborate trailers despite earning large funds in the road-paving business, and the Romanies. (This article does not describe the Romanies any further….Wikipedia lumps all Gypsy people in the U.S. as ‘Romanies’ with no difference between ‘travelers’ and ‘Romanies’ although I believe that many Gypsy people in the U.S. are now settled and not traveling as their forefathers. Perhaps this is the distinction intended in the article?)

The surprising thing that you will learn from watching this show is that despite the provocative outfits the girls wear, they are not even allowed to talk to boys except at parties. They are not allowed to kiss before marriage. Marriage for a Gypsy girl often takes place at age fourteen!

Couples usually meet at a party, in which a girl will be presented in order to find her spouse. Each week, the show takes the viewers into the lives of either a girl about to be married or a family planning a party where the daughter is dressed ‘to the nines’ in order to attract a mate. The show leads the viewers into their closed world.

Sandra Celli of Boston is the ‘go-to’ dressmaker for these teen brides and young girls who are being groomed to become brides. The gowns that are being created are more like “ball and chain” gowns, sometimes weighing up to 90 pounds with trains that require half a football field in fabric and costing about $10,000 per dress.

By seventeen, a Gypsy girl should be married to a good Gypsy boy with the first baby on the way. The end of the article finishes with the statement that “the women are stunningly beautiful and the men macho-hot.”

For generations, the world’s less-developed countries have suffered from what is described as a ‘brain-drain’ — the flight of many of their best and brightest to western economies. Now a reverse pattern is taking place. Some economic experts and business leaders do not believe that this emigration necessarily bodes ill for the United States. They claim that young entrepreneurs and educated professionals plant American knowledge and skills abroad. They have a hopeful opinion that these professionals and entrepreneurs will acquire experience overseas and build networks that they will then carry back to the United States or elsewhere. They call this pattern “brain circulation.”But there is another opinion among experts that cautions that in the global race for talent, the return of these expatriates to the United States is no longer assured.

Some of this migration is encouraged by overseas governments to attract more foreign talent by offering employment, investment, tax and visa incentives. As we see more western governments becoming more socialist in their policies–raising taxes on those who earn the most money to carry along the masses who don’t earn as much because they are in need of government programs to pay for their medical care and supplement their living expenses–these policies make employment, investment, tax and visa incentives very attractive. It is not just individuals who are making decisions to leave the U.S., it’s governments who are enacting strategic policies to facilitate this migration.

For many of these emigres, the decision to relocate has puzzled and angered many of their immigrant parents. I think that for the younger generation who is initiating these moves to their ancestral countries, it is not clear whether they will live a life straddling two countries or whether they will remain permanently in the countries of their ancestral origin. I think what is clear, is that the world has become a Global Community. It is no longer hard to imagine traveling back and forth through time zones, or managing a business via internet where communication is instantaneous. The world has become much smaller from our 2012 perspective.

A French woman choosing her 'muguet'.

Today is May Day….a national holiday all over Europe. It used to be a holiday in the U.S. I remember cutting flowers and making paper envelopes to display them, hanging these favors on neighbors’ doors during the 1950s. I think May Day ceased to be celebrated in the U.S. when the holiday was adopted as a day for Eastern bloc countries to display their military might in ‘May Day Parades’. As part of these parades, missles were pulled through the streets of Moscow as Krushchev banged his shoe on the table threatening the Western world that ‘We Will Bury You’ as part of the Cold War.

It’s a Tuesday in Paris and the streets are very quiet. Most people here have ‘taken the bridge’ which means that they took the weekend and added Monday as a vacation day in order to create a four-day weekend. Stores are filled with the bouquets called ‘miguets’, which is a sprig of white flower taken from the woods. These sprigs are usually coupled with a rose or another flower to complete the bouquet. These bouquets are known as ‘fleurs de bonheur’ and it is customary to give one to friends and family as a token of good luck.

The French are using today to attend competing political rallies: Sarkhozy, France’s current President, is speaking at a rally at the Trocadero, and Francois Hollande, the Socialist candidate who is opposing him is speaking at a rally at Bercy. Francois Hollande won the first round of elections which took place last weekend. The final election which will decide who will be President will take place this coming Sunday, May 6th.

I ran into a political parade by accident when I went for a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens. Many different groups were gathered and marching together in one large parade along the east side of the park. These groups included different Socialist groups, environmental coalitions, gay and lesbian groups, women’s rights advocates, and even a group that purported to want to ‘Free Sri Lanka’ ! It was a hodge-podge of flags, marching bands, and people walking together and passing out literature.

The article starts out by saying that ‘in growing numbers, experts say, highly educated children of immigrants to the United States are uprooting themselves and moving to their ancestral countries.” The article is referring to countries like India, China, and even Brazil because these countries are emerging as economic powers. Although it is not unusual for enterprising Americans to seek opportunities abroad, this new wave of immigration proves the evolving nature of global migration and the challenges to U.S. economic supremacy and competitiveness.

The decisions of many of these highly-educated young people to leave have, in many cases, troubled their parents who worked so hard to leave third-world economies. They find it hard to understand why their sons and daughters would choose to return to their homelands. One young man explains, “Markets are opening; people are coming up with ideas every day; there’s so much opportunity to mold and create.” Dismal hiring opportunities in the U.S. have made prospects abroad look better. A shocking statement to read is “People here (in India) are running much faster than the people in Washington.”

A 36 year old Indian-American woman, raised in Texas, was inspired to move to India while taking time off from her auditing job to travel abroad. Everywhere she went, she met people returning to their countries of origin and she could feel the pulse of “creative energy” in the developing world. She has since moved to Mumbai with her husband and works in a totally different business: she is a dance instructor and choreographer, and has acted in television commercials and a Bollywood film. Moving from an auditing job to a creative career was a big jump, but she feels she is surrounded by people who want to try something new.

Last year after my visit to Poland with a Polish genealogist that I had hired through an ad that appeared in the Rodziny magazine, I wrote an article about my work as a ‘genealogy detective.’ I began with how the search for my personal family history started with a DNA test and ended with a trip to Poland to visit with family members. In between those two events, I did a lot of historical research and made some shorter travels to interview family members to collect family testimony. I have never had an article published, but I understand that when you write a piece with a goal of publication, you need to select carefully the audience for your message. It seemed most likely to me that the members of the Polish Genealogy Society of America would be the most interested readers of my story.

I submitted my article to the editor of Rodziny last year and told him that I would be happy to send him photos to accompany the article, should he request them. I got an e-mail back from him thanking me for my submission and telling me that he would be in touch with me should he want to publish it. A year had gone by and I had frankly given up hope that the article would ever be chosen when suddenly I received an e-mail from the editor telling me that he thought he would have room to publish the article in their Spring issue.

I went through my photos and sent a number of them to him, letting him choose the ones he thought were the best additions to the text. We have been working together for the past week, editing the article for publication. Although I have not compared the article word-to-word to my original, I feel like the edited version leaves nothing out and tells the full story. I am very pleased with the end result.

The article will be published in May and circulated through the membership by the end of that month. I will reproduce it in installments on www.redtambourine.com during the month of June.

The project collects raw genetic data from participants who have been tested by 23andme and FTDNA Family Finder in order to better understand the ancestry relationships of different South Asian ethnicities. He has named the project after Harappa, an archaeological site of the Indus Valley Civilization in Punjab, Pakistan. He invites people of South Asian origin, or from neighboring countries, to participate.

I had noticed yesterday while filtering through comments on RedTambourine, that a woman I know as a genetic cousin had sent her Aunt’s raw data to the Harappa Project. She is an English Romany and shares U3b mtDNA with me. I thought it would be interesting to see if my raw data would be accepted into the project, even though my ancestors do not come from any of the countries listed. It would be a way to see if I have any South Asian bloodlines in my autosomal results. I listed one of my ancestors as Polish/Romany to see if that might help my raw data qualify. I noticed that a few English Romanies were listed in the study.

I was instructed to send my raw data text file, downloaded from 23andMe to Harappa@zackvision.com along with ancestral background information about myself and all four of my grandparents. Since none of my grandparents were directly native South Asians, this may be a ’stretch’ but I sent the file anyway, hoping to find one more clue about my ancestry. These are kind of tactics that ‘genealogy detectives’ must take.

Perhaps I should have read the small print because I saw that inquiries should be made to Zack before sending the raw data files. I subsequently sent a second e-mail with apologies!

My real reason for looking for Mikey Walsh on Facebook was to find a way to contact him. I wanted to share with him my belief that there are many Americans who are part-Gypsy. United States was a good place for Gypsies to assimilate. They came into the country along with countless other refugees and it was easy to mix in, particularly with other Eastern Europeans whom they were used to living with side-by-side. Eastern Europeans who immigrated to the U.S., in fact, were comforted by the Gypsies in tow, often because they played music at traditional occasions such as weddings and funerals. The Gypsies were part of their homelands and memories of life ‘in the old country.’

Gypsies who came to America, and didn’t want to remain as part of a Gypsy community, had the same chance as any immigrant to take a job and melt into the vast American landscape. They could change their names, they could change their identities, they could be secretive about their origins, and no one really cared. Even their own descendants are shielded from the facts because of the Gypsies’ secrecy! They could intermarry, and did, starting to mix their own blood with that of all the other foreign immigrants to the U.S.

I remember writing to a Gypsy ethnographer about my belief that my family ancestors through my maternal bloodlines were Gypsy. He didn’t give my theory much credence, and asked for examples of language, customs, or cultural beliefs. The truth is, I don’t know what language was native to my great-grandmother. I know she could speak Polish…and I think that Polish must have been a language spoken with great familiarity because my great-grandmother went to South Chicago to work in a predominantly Polish neighborhood. My grandmother who was born in South Chicago, spoke only Polish until she went to school in Pennsylvania at age 8-10. She had to depend on the Catholic nuns to translate to English for her until she could learn English herself.  My family ancestors were ardent Catholics, typical of both Gypsies and Eastern Europeans from Austria-Hungary. There are no records that I, nor a professional genealogist, can locate to document their entry into the U.S. There are very few other records documenting their life in the U.S. (i.e. birth records, death records etc.) but seven of my ancestors from this family are buried together in a well-known Catholic cemetery in southwestern Pennsylvania.

I have been plugging away at reading the book, finding it terribly depressing and sad. It is a child’s memoir of living in a home where beatings occurred and sexual abuse took place, perpetrated by close relatives. I am estimating that Mikey was a child of the 1980s.

His Gypsy family were Romanies, as distinct from Irish Travelers, and although they were ’settled’ for a while in a Gypsy camp/community, his family then took to the road again when he was about twelve years old. They traveled in modern silver trailers, built and decorated especially for the Gypsy customer. “Roma” was the brand name, and the company had done its research. The trailers were monstrosities–garish, flamboyant and overtly ‘camp’.

Mikey tells the reader that there are not many poor Gypsies — they support themselves quite well, even if not by honest or regular work. Men are likely out scamming customers over paving jobs or selling stolen merchandise at outside flea markets. He says, “All of the convoy were dealing in similar lines. Some did the same as my father (re-surfacing driveways), others sold carpets, tiled roofs, put in windows or did any other kind of job that could be botched to look good long enough to extort cash. “Mikey’s father’s scam was to offer to pave a driveway for ten pounds. When the job was done, he would call the customer out to inspect their wonderful new driveway — but then he would hit them with the actual price, bumping up the total to ten pounds a square meter. When the victim protested, he would claim it had been their mistake for mishearing what he had told them in the first place. Most often he preyed on elderly persons.

Mikey tells us that many Gypsy women shoplift. Since they rarely stay put, they have fewer ways to spend their cash, so they stack up on flashy jewelry and designer trailers, trading in their cars each year for new models. The women, with little else to do but clean, often do so in full make-up, Gucci mini-dresses and shoes by Jimmy Choo. The description is only complete if you can imagine their hands in rubber gloves, and cigarettes hanging out of their mouths.

I find Mikey’s mother an enigma, standing back while her husband beats her children yet once in awhile having enough courage to confront him: “You’ve beat the granny out of them and made us all feel miserable all the way here. What more do you want.” It is clear from the narrative that the mother knew full well what abuse was taking place in the home, including locking children up in dark places, yet she rarely comes to the rescue. At best, she picks up the pieces of the injured and abused children and life goes on.

Haplogroup U5 is estimated to be about 35,ooo years old and humans from haplogroup U5 were among the first to populate Europe. Its daughter groups of U5a and U5b are about 27,000 years old and it’s likely that during the last glacial maximum, they retreated to ice age refugia near coastal areas of the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. Daughter groups of U5a and U5b were among the first people to repopulate Europe as the ice retreated beginning around 12,000 years ago.  My friend is U5a2b1a, a rare branch of U5a2b, based on additional mutations. U5a2b is found today mostly in central and eastern Europe. It is suspected that U5a2b probably expanded from an ice age refuge in the Balkans or Ukraine.

U5 is an especially old and interesting haplogroup. One of the oldest remains of anatomically modern humans in Britain was haplogroup U5. Approximately 11% of total Europeans and 10% of European-Americans are in haplogroup U5. Haplogroup U5 and its subclades U5a and U5b form the highest population concentrations in the far north, in Sami, Finns, and Estonians, but it is spread widely at lower levels throughout Europe. Haplogroup U5 is found also in small frequencies and at much lower diversity in the Near East and parts of northern Africa (areas with sizable U6 concentraions), suggesting back-migration of people from Europe to the south.

My friend’s maternal blood line actually orginates from Sicily. The group administrator of the U5 group believes that it is possible that my friend’s maternal ancestor could have arrived in Sicily several thousand years ago, or perhaps even more recently. Sicily was an island that was invaded by many tribes and peoples.