If your ancestors had gone elsewhere

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Your great great grandfather emigrated from Europe, bringing his new wife with him.
Had circumstances been different, they would have stayed longer and then gone elsewhere in the world.
Where might they have gone if not to where you now live?

I've sometimes thought about this. Some of my ancestors moved to the US, some to Australia.
Going back further, our ancestors came from the Vikings.
So, I could have ended up in Sweden perhaps or the US, instead of Australia.
I wonder what my culture, my thinking and my politics would be?

What about you and your ancestors?
If they had lived elsewhere, where would it be and what differences would it have made to you?

Well my ancestry is primarily German, Norwegian, and Dutch(plus a smattering of a few other things) so it is hard to say. I don't think there are many other places besides the US that has Norwegian diaspora, the population is pretty concentrated in the Upper Midwest. My Dutch ancestors came over here back in the 1600s, my great great great whatever grandpa was some sort of gambler type who abandoned his family but they came over a couple years later and found him so I suppose he could of went anywhere. As far as the German part, I dunno as the diaspora is much more widely spread but they definitely weren't staying in Germany. I don't know of any relatives in other countries or the exact reasons why my ancestors left their countries.

My great grandparents fled the anti-Jewish pogroms in Georgia (when it was part of the Russian empire). Family legend has it that they did this slightly before the Russian Revolution, surely a chaotic time in whichever city they were living in. Some pictures survive of them wearing fancy and ornate clothes and headgear.
like so:(this is not my great grandmother, just an image similar to the one I saw in the family photo)


Wikipedia informs me that most people in that situation moved to the U.S. (New York City, to be exact, and there are pix of that in the family archive). But second to the U.S. were western Europe and Canada. They would probably have moved to London and set up a watch store, because that's what they did in NYC and London seems a likely place.

My great grandmother was still alive for the first part of my childhood and I have a few memories of her. I must have been 7 or 8. Mostly I remember that I could not understand one single word she said even though she talked to me at length. I asked my Dad (her grandson) for a translation but he didn't know either. She was probably not happy about that.*

My brother and sister have gone to Georgia to explore our roots. I regret I didn't go too. These days, such an adventure would require bringing along an autistic child who doesn't like unfamiliarity. It would not go well. Perhaps when she's an adult.

*she must have been unspeakably old by that time. However, unspeakably old Georgians were a thing when I was that age, since Dannon based an ad campaign around Georgian longevity and attributed it to (Dannon) yogurt. It was via this ad campaign that my family explained our roots. "Those are our 'cousins' in the ad". They said it was homemade yogurt, not Dannon that they ate. My parents also made their own yogurt and it was good! When my brother and sister returned from Georgia they had a new theory for Georgian longevity and attributed it to nearly non-stop exercise. Apparently it's very mountainous (the Caucusus to be exact) and navigating Georgia involved an amazing amount of walking up and down hills and mountain trails. They said the locals bopped around like mountain goats, elderly included.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9RJBgNB1ZI


edited to add the Dannon yogurt commercial with 'my cousins' (as I was told). the youtube link didn't work so follow the url. it's cute

My original bloodline is kurdish but my ancestors kept moving from place to place and mixing until that blood was nearly demolished lol, my blood is mostly arabic but with some turkish and kurdish, my ethnicity identifies as arabic

"If they had gone elsewhere" is kind of an overly open-ended question.

"What if they had stayed in the old country?" is more focusable as a question.

Of Mostly German ancestry. Though there is some evidence that some of my ancestors were from Alsace (the German speaking part of France).

Instead of Granddad fighting in the US Army in the First World War against the Germans, he wouldve been fighting in the German army against the Americans! My Dad mightve been drafted as an underage teen into the German army in the last desperate days of WWII instead of serving in his twenties in the US Navy during the Korean War a few years after the second world war. My uncle was a physicist who participated in the Manhatten project. In the alternative universe-GAWD!- he might have been employed by Van Braun to help build rocket bombs, or helped with the Nazi A-bomb program!

Our lineage seems to have come from southern and western Germany so we probably would not have ended up living in the Soviet Zone that became communist East Germany. But if the family survived the two world wars, and the cold war, we would be doing ok now in the modern European Union Germany of today.

I think the German at least on my mother's side was from or at least immigrated from somewhere in West Prussia, I believe Graudenz iirc which is present day Poland in the late 19th century. It wouldn't of been good to stay there, the history after that point gets pretty ugly.

My ancestors were French and Scots mainly, so obviously they did go elsewhere and I am here. It began with my paternal great grandfather, who was on a round the world voyage in the 19th century on one of the steamships the family in St Ives owned (many French went to St Ives and other parts of Cornwall after the revolution). He was supposed to complete this 6 month voyage and then return to marry.

When the ship was ready to sail from Samoa, my GGF told the captain to take home the message that he was never going to return to Europe. He never did, despite being the eldest son of a rich family; freedom to live his own life was more important to him, and I think I have perhaps inherited a little of that from him. He never saw any member of his family again, and they told people that he was dead, so that they would not be sued for breach of contract over the failure of GGF to marry his St Ives fiance, to whom he had been affianced prior to the voyage.

Technically viking is a profession, not an ethnicity. These people were Norse or Danes, and only the people who went raiding were vikings.

If any of my ancestors had changed a major life decision, or even certain fairly minor ones, I would never have existed.

Certainly, if my great-great-great-grandfather had never left what is now Italy for what is now Croatia, my mother and father would ever have met and I would never have been conceived.

Maybe the child born instead of me wouldn't be homozygous for lactose intolerance and would be able to eat pizza three times a day.

Well, had my ancestors not gone to America, I almost certainly wouldn't exist. But say that I did somehow manage to be, I can speculate on a few scenarios that might have altered the course of events.
My dad's people had been Germans living in the Rhine country who had migrated to the Black Sea area of the Russian Empire before coming to America. There was every possibility that my ancestors wouldn't have migrated with thousands of others to Russia in the first place, meaning that I most likely would be German today. Or, if my ancestors had chosen to stay in Russia, despite the growing intolerance they faced from growing Russian nationalism, they would have faced terrible oppression from the Czarist, Communist, and Nazi monsters who each had taken their turns to make their lives miserable. In fact, we have distant relatives who had stayed in Russia, only to have been exiled to Siberia by Stalin, who then moved Russians in to replace the German colonists, on the pretext that they were fifth columnist collaborators with the Nazis, where many of them starved to death. I could be living in a colorless, joyless Russia right now.
My mom's people on her maternal side were Prussians - who just happened to have had a Jewish family name, despite being Lutherans (obviously, someone had converted along the line). My grandmother used to correspond with a relative, till the letters from Germany stopped - during the Nazi era. I can only guess what had happened to these relatives because of their last name. In this scenario where my mom's ancestors remained in north east Germany, I suspect I wouldn't have had the chance to have ever been born.

If my mother's ancestors had gone elsewhere, I might have been part Japanese or Korean instead of Chinese. My dad may have been born in the USA or Ireland instead of Britain. Had my mother's parents not immigrated to Britain, I may have been born in Hong Kong.

I participated in the Genographic Project that attempts to map historical human migration patterns by collecting and analyzing DNA samples of people from around the world. I live in the United States. The migration of some of my ancestors was traced from what is now Uganda, through the Middle East and up to Europe. If an ancestor had not left the Uganda region, the equivalent of me would live in one of the poorest nations in the world.

Hmm I don't think any of my recent ancestors did anything too interesting other than continuing the line. My DNA test results showed they mostly stayed in one place for a long time, marrying locally and stuff. I'm a first generation immigrant myself and married a person from a different race, and produced mixed kids. The good thing is all those local mating of my ancestors seemed to have eliminated most harmful mutations and genetic defects, except autism I guess. In a place where people got arranged marriage, poor social skill didn't hinder reproduction much.

I have ancestry from so many places that if any of my ancestors had not come to America I wouldn't exist. My family name derives from Gaelic, and my ancestors with that name supported Bonnie Prince Charlie in a revolt against English rule. After the revolt failed, the survivors were divided into groups of 10 and made to draw straws. The holder of the shortest straw was hanged, and the other 9 were put on ships to the colonies. This was around 1720. Then I have a lot of ancestors from Germany, lots of Germans saw the direction their country was headed and bailed out, mostly for America. I have a guy from Germanic Switzerland, and here's where the story gets interesting. He sailed for NYC around 1902. He eventually wound up in San Francisco-just in time to live through the earthquake of 1906. Had he died, I obviously wouldn't exist. Unfortunately, he never wrote down his experience. My grandfather was a Japanese POW during WW2. He DID write down his experience, and you can buy his book online. I also have a great grandmother who was born in NYC in 1904 to Czech parents.

I think if your ancestors immigrated somewhere else then the duration of the trip wouldn't of been the same, so the reproduction wouldn't of been exactly the same as when they made their children so you and your whole family wouldn't exist.