Your Ancestry

[Shawn]

I have a retired mother with nothing better to do with her time than exhaustively research her and my dad's genealogies, and thanks to the Irish Catholic Church's meticulous and publicly-available Baptismal records, she's been very successful.

I'm 75% Irish and 25% Ukrainian. Catholic on all sides. The Irish has surprisingly little pre-1820s English admixture, and no Scottish.

The Ukrainian side is in all likelihood actually Romanian ethnicity; my great-grandfather was from Chernivtsi, on the Romanian border. He was drafted into and fought for Tsarist Russia in WWI, deserted with the rest of the army when the Eastern Front fully collapsed in 1917 as the Revolution began, walked from Ukraine to Amsterdam, and sailed to Boston. The fact that he was Roman Catholic and not Ukrainian Greek Catholic points to being ethnically Romanian and not Ukrainian.