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I was wondering if there were any other people interested in family history/genealogy on the forum? I have been researching my family history since 2005. I originally started to find my biological father and to learn more about my Mauritian grandfather's family as I never asked before he passed away in 2003.
I found my father in 2006 and my research has helped him a lot as he didn't know too much about his own family. I confirmed the Dutch ancestry that he had heard about on his mother's side from Noord-Holland, Friesland and Groningen. Further back some of the branches going back to Hamburg, Southern Denmark and Belgium. I still have a lot of brick walls on my father's paternal side in London some suspected Irish and French Huegenot there.
The Mauritian side turned out to be a lot more complicated than I anticipated due to difficulty accessing records. Though with the help of the Mauritian genealogy society CGMR I have been able to get a few generations back on that side but nowhere as far back as my mum's Dorset side. I'm only a generation short of the last generation to be born into slavery in Mauritius on that side of the family and there are some slavery registers on Ancestry but I just need to find out the parents of the generation between to find out the names to look up but I'm not getting replies from the civil status office to my enquiries (been trying since way before covid so that's not an excuse). My mum's maternal side is mostly from the West Dorset/Somerset/Devon border region with some Cornish a bit further back that I've found so far.
My mum and I took DNA tests on Ancestry, 23andme and FTDNA back in 2016/17 and learned a lot from that, we were told we were African and European growing up but it turns out we're a lot more Asian than we are African. My mum came back about 32% Asian (Chinese, Indian, Southeast Asian), 18% African (Mostly Southern and Eastern Bantu) and 50% European (English). My dad took a 23andme test and came back heavily British & Irish with some French & German, Scandinavian.
It has been a very challenging and rewarding process so far, I have so much still to work on in my tree it's one of those things that doesn't really have an end
I found my father in 2006 and my research has helped him a lot as he didn't know too much about his own family. I confirmed the Dutch ancestry that he had heard about on his mother's side from Noord-Holland, Friesland and Groningen. Further back some of the branches going back to Hamburg, Southern Denmark and Belgium. I still have a lot of brick walls on my father's paternal side in London some suspected Irish and French Huegenot there.
The Mauritian side turned out to be a lot more complicated than I anticipated due to difficulty accessing records. Though with the help of the Mauritian genealogy society CGMR I have been able to get a few generations back on that side but nowhere as far back as my mum's Dorset side. I'm only a generation short of the last generation to be born into slavery in Mauritius on that side of the family and there are some slavery registers on Ancestry but I just need to find out the parents of the generation between to find out the names to look up but I'm not getting replies from the civil status office to my enquiries (been trying since way before covid so that's not an excuse). My mum's maternal side is mostly from the West Dorset/Somerset/Devon border region with some Cornish a bit further back that I've found so far.
My mum and I took DNA tests on Ancestry, 23andme and FTDNA back in 2016/17 and learned a lot from that, we were told we were African and European growing up but it turns out we're a lot more Asian than we are African. My mum came back about 32% Asian (Chinese, Indian, Southeast Asian), 18% African (Mostly Southern and Eastern Bantu) and 50% European (English). My dad took a 23andme test and came back heavily British & Irish with some French & German, Scandinavian.
It has been a very challenging and rewarding process so far, I have so much still to work on in my tree it's one of those things that doesn't really have an end