Many (maybe most) Canadians have ancestors who've arrived at different times. My mom's grandmother on her father's side came from England, but her husband was second generation English. One of mom's mother's parents came from Scotland three generations ago. The other's from England a generation earlier. One of my father's grandparents arrived here from Ireland, and another is native to Canada for as many generations as have been historically recorded. After that, it starts to get complicated. So it's not easy for me to say exactly what generation I am. Just call me a Generation X Canadian. Peacelove, Aldousage
11th generation on one side and probably a gazillion on the other side ...lol...2 of my great-grandmothers were native ...but my european ancestors have been here since 1668
very true The newer arivals in my blood line were 3 and 4 generations back, Ukranian-Canadians who lived in both Manitoba and Ontario. My Papa (maternal great grandfather) was the most recent imigrant. He arrived in the early 1910's, as a young man, alone with nothing but a trunk full of some simple belongings from the old country. He worked and sent most of his earning back to his family in the Ukraine and was even going to return, having had some difficulty learning the english language and getting settled, but the ship he had passage on going back to europe was called back to halifax a day after leaving harbour because WW1 was declared. All non essential travel was suspended durring the war years so he ended up moving to Ontario, an eastern european community in Oshawa in particular, where he met my Nana who was a first generation canadian who had grown up in Manitoba of a Ukranian mother and Scotish father. She taught him english, my grandmother was born, some 19 years later she met my grandpa, (a mix of methodist and presbetryian blood from all over the british isles, who's ancestors had farmed and worked as tradesmen in Ontario for some 100 years or so) when he gave her heck for crossing the tracks at the CPR train yard in Oshawa where we was working at the time. She told him to blow off, she'd been crossing those tracks all her life, who the heck was he to tell her what to do...they fell in love. Fast forward 20 some odd years, my mother meets my dad; shaggy haired football jock, who's mother comes from a long line of central ontario loyalists pioneers and who's father an even longer line of St Lawrence and Ottawa Valley habitants. The paternal line it'self, that of Beneche dit Lavictoire, (we're just known as Lavictoire's now) goes back to 1735 when Joseph Beneche, who had taken on the dit name of Lavictoire following his voyage to new france, left his ancestral lands in the south-west of france; the lands surrounding the bastide of Agen in particular, a fortififed settlement which dated back some 2000 years to the gallo-roman era being an overland crossroads between the atlantic and mediteranian. I'm sure there is some native blood somewhere in there too, almost certainly on the french canadian side of things as it's a definate trate of french canadian DNA 99.9% of the time. The more I learn of my geneology the more I realise how much it mirrors not just the foundations and history of European settlement in Canada but extrapalated far enough it becomes a connection to all places and time in history. No wonder the common root of all religion and spirituality is ancestral worship. It's all about the roots man, vernacular history through human eyes, that radiates from our core, the story of humanity lurking in our very being, just waiting to be discoverd and understood, not the jaded acounts of scoundrels and conqueres which we mistakenly take as truth because of our devotion to the written word and our obsession with a distinctly disconnected reality. Hmmm, nothing like a good stoned ramble to get the creative wheels turning, I have to go write a research paper on restoring traditional sash windows now. Seriously, I'm a history nerd, I'm actualy excited by the prospect. Peace folks, and please SHARE YOUR STORIES!!! our genology is a story and wisdom waiting to be shared
