OK Webstermark, you want to add insult to insult, go ahead, I have square shoulders and can take your gauntlet.
Where were YOUR ancestors in 1472, WM ?
I'll try to solve this puzzle singlehandedly, without knowing you, so my approach will be pragmatic and scientific; I will think (in writing) as an amateur historian and anthropologist.
1472, 20 years before the declared discovery of the Americas by Columbus.
As I do not know you, WM, I will have to go by trial&error and a good dose of hard facts.
1) IF your skin is white, then you are presumably of British / Germanic stock OR of Hungarian / Slavic stock, which leaves us with four possibilities:
1.1 : British: as the 20th generation of a British expatriate, you were either a soldier (press-ganged into serving His Majesty King James or King George) or a civilian sentenced by His Majesty's Court to the Galleys (oar-driven warships where the oarsmen were chained, unlike Genoese / Venetian ships where the oarsmen were free men and would contribute to the assault); incidentally, the United Kingdom was the ONLY European Nation where a WHITE FREE MAN, a KING'S SUBJECT could be sentenced into SLAVERY because he couldn't pay his debts; see Shakespeare and his tragedies.
1.2 : Germanic: this includes the Austrians, the Dutch and Flemish as well as the Pomeranians and Alsatians. You were most certainly a peasant, possibly recruited into a Regiment of Lansquenet (Flemish) or Landsknecht (German), the poorer than dirt foot soldiers armed with a long pole and anything they could tie to it (generally the farmer's sickle they hung at their belt) and which were infamously feared by the French and the Italian Bishiops for their careless pillaging of churches, abbeys and monasteries; until the Croatian War of Independence in the late 1990's, Landsknecht were the ONLY soldiers in European history to rape nuns in convents.
1.3 Hungarians: (also known as Magyars) descendants of the Tatars who invaded from the Ukrainian steppes; they ran wild and careless and ravaged whatever they could find, and were known for their ruthlessness and their spite for art and culture, until they started trading with Byzanthium (Greek city and Capital of the Roman Empire of the East) and Venice.
1.4 Slavs: be they the RUS who ravaged the Baltic Sea or the Vikings who sailed the Northern Atlantic, the most they contributed to humanity was a cartoon character by the name of Thor and his ill-tempered hammer.
2) IF (and that's a big IF) your skin is black, then you most probably come from the region of the Gulf of Guinea between the two infamous posts of Dakar (Senegal) to the Northwest and Libreville (Gabon) to the Southeast. Much (too much) has been said (and misquoted) about the slave trade from Western Africa and the Americas. What is generally shushed away are two hard facts:
2.1 The slave trade was possible because the local kings and warlords would pillage each others' villages - so it was the local peoples which actually fueled the availability of slaves in the first place;
2.2 The slave trade was "monopoly" of the arab and somali pirates and merchants since biblical times - see King Solomon's efforts to protect his mines and workers (slaves = POWs) from pirate raids in the Red Sea... see the "United Emirates" which became the "Trucial States" when the Royal Navy got there, but were earlier described by merchants of Europe and Middle East alike as "Villains of the Sea" (the 1001 Nights is a rich source of history, by the way)
I deliberately leave out the Hispanics from my analysis, because a) it would be too difficult to determine if you are of Maya, Olmec or Azthec origin vs. Spanish proper, and b) because successful Hispanics stay where the family lies.
--- ooo ---
Having said that, let's see what MY ancestors were doing in 1472, shall we ?
My
Father was Tuscan, and his family served the ArchDuke of Tuscany (mostly the Medici) for many, meny hundreds of years of *documented* history.
His family come from VOLTERRA, which is so ancient, it was an Etruscan city well known in the "Dodecapolis" (Confederation of the Twelve Cities) in the 8th Century BC.
That's 2200 years BEFORE your furry underwear...
My
Mother comes from Istria, that diamond-shaped peninsula just east of Trieste, from a village named "Pinguente" (abundant) now called Buzet in Croatian.
My Mother's family has a distinct history of being Venetian or Austrian Magistrates, my last great-Grandfather being the Chancellor of the Court of Law in Fiume (today, Rijeka in Croatia) for the Emperor Franz Joseph.
You don't become the Chancellor of the Imperial Tribunal for nothing.
You can't just go out and buy the job.
What were my grandparents doing in 1941 ? You mean, while in the US the third party was the Nationalsocialist Party of America?My maternal Grandfather, having already fought 4 years in the Carpathians for Austria against the Russians, was too old to be recruited;
furthermore, he was a teacher and a Party Official, and his social position was more useful in town than on the battlefield.
He descended from the deposed dynasty of the Marquis de' Gravisi, Lords of Istria from 1420 to 1797.
The title still stands to this day, but is pointless in a Republic, and the lands were all seized by Dictator Tito of Yugoslavia in 1946.
My paternal grandfather was a Captain in the Italian Merchant Navy and, regardless having little/no radio communicatuions the way we use them these days, successfully dodged the Royal Navy and delivered supplies throughout the war effort.
I would avoid tattling over ancestry with anyone from the Old World, WebsterMark, because if you think about it, you don't stand a chance.
Maurizio Pescatori, Esq.
Marchese de' Gravisi
Signore della Rocca di Pietrapelosa
(this is what's left of the family castle after the Napoleonic War and WW II, the Austrian Emperor, then Tito's Communist regime forbade to restore it)
For more Coats of Arms of the Gravisi Dynasty, please see
http://www.crsrv.org/pdf/monumenta/182-223.pdf
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