Ukraine: from the sublime (in the worst, archaic sense of the word) to the (slightly) ridiculous

I never did the ancestry.com thing, but my grandmother was heavily into genealogy. I'm related to Revolutionary War and Civil War generals (Lee) and allegedly, some famous train robbers.

 

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Yes, whenever possible, there's no substitute for documentary evidence.
Along those lines, I especially like how, on both sides of my family (landing in New Hampshire and Maryland, respectively), the most prominent Scottish 'patriarchs' were both criminal transportees.

 

@+VGO.DVCKS : Glad you enjoyed my coin and thread. Sadly, I can't take credit for alerting you to those authors- I'm afraid I've read very little on the history of this region.

Since everyone else is posting their ancestry DNA estimates, I might as well share mine:

From documentary evidence, I knew that three of my four grandparents were of Italian descent (both maternal grandparents from Sicily, paternal grandfather from Calabria) so the 74% Italian descent (mostly of Southern Italy) checks out. My paternal grandmother was supposedly half Irish, half English, but the DNA results seem to imply that my British Isles ancestry is mostly Scottish, with a sprinkling of the others for flavor. Of course, there was a lot of population flow between Ireland and Scotland for centuries, so who knows. And Sicily has been a huge mixing ground for every culture that ever managed to sail a boat in the Mediterranean: the first versions of this estimate had me at about 12% Middle Eastern, which could technically be true considering the lengthy period of Muslim rule over Sicily. But in the centuries since, those "Middle Eastern" alleles have been blended into the general population, so they're now just another part of the Sicilian meta-genome. Anyway, it's best not to put too much trust or importance on commercial DNA ethnicity testing. It's more scientific than astrology, but it doesn't necessarily tell you anything important, either.

 

Being into butterflies, I found it so weird that one ssp. of parides aeneas aeneas was found on the North Obidos/ Para side of the Amazonas R. the other ssp. a. marcius on the S. side Santarem. They never flew across the River.

 

Found out that I am related to this guy, in the federal pen, back in who-knows-when, courtesy of Ancestry.com. Enough said.

 

He looks pretty mean.....

 

I suppose. It's not the kind of photo you'd post on a dating website.

He was my uncle Louie. The story is that he ended up murdered in Chicago, where he was a cab driver back in the 20s or 30's, not sure about the dates.

 

@Parthicus, you really nailed it about Sicily. ...To wallow in the obvious (never stopped me before), you could say the same, to a lesser degree, of places as divergent as the British Isles and South Asia. Pretty much everyone who got there in the first place stayed put. That much of either water or mountains might do that. And yep, I can heartily second your characterization of commercial DNA testing.

 

One of my other hobbies is genealogy. This fellow is my 2nd cousin, 7 generations removed. In other words, cousin George's maternal great-grandfather William Ball (1614-1680) is my 8x great-grandfather through my paternal grandmother's line.

 

...You will just never guess. The arrowhead got here today.
I'm aghast. I had So written it off. I hope the seller and his family are okay....

 

I've never bothered to do the blood test thing, but I did spend some time creating a family tree. My paternal grandmother's paternal grandparents were born in Lvov, in modern day Ukraine. That being said, our family is Jewish, and historically they lived separately from the local population.

Nevertheless, I guess I can say that I'm 1/16th Ukrainian. Of course, by that analogy I'm also:

1/8th Austrian
1/4th Luxembourgish (whose passport I carry)
1/8th English
1/8th Turkish
1/4th Spanish
1/8th Bulgarian

Or, to put it more simply, I'm 100% mutt. In Roman terms, my ancestors were almost entirely barbarians.

Genealogy is a lot of fun. One of my great-great-grandfathers from Luxembourg was an inventor. I still have his patents and the diagrams of his inventions, along with old letters. From online I have the ship records when they arrived in the US, along with a newspaper clipping (that none of my family believes) about my great-grandfather being arrested in NYC for selling pornographic postcards.

As an aside, a huge percentage of our friends are Ukrainian and Russian. For everyone's sake I hope this ends soon.

 

Stuff. Serious stuff. Many thanks for the CBC video. Yes, the CBC easily could have been fourth on the list you got from me.

 

That is a good point, but it is not just metal detectorists and ebay sellers who are guilty of relableing almost everything as Viking or Kievan Rus. Even auction houses like Timeline Originals do that. Thus, objects of the Kievan culture of the 2nd or 3rd century or the Penkovskaya culture of the 6th and 7th centuries are regularly and customarily called "Viking".

 

One encouraging thing about this detectorist is that he did label other artefacts as being of other, earlier cultures --although they all went sailing over my head. And yes, lots of other people were listing obvious fakes for comparison. I have a medieval English arrowhead, and some other stuff along those lines, and it's good enough to fool me.

 

As an aside, I've seen a huge number of coins from Olbia and Pantikapaion hit the market recently, though the prices don't yet seem to reflect this.

Is this related to the situation the last few years?

 

No more on war, falls into political discussion. We will start giving infractions.I fully understand your feelings, but they are not allowed.Remember what happened through the Covid days.
Thanks Jim

 

I have posted this little gem a couple of time before, but it seems to fit here:
One of the earliest coins ever made in what is now Ukraine (and one of the earliest Germanic coins):


IIII-IT — IIIIII - laureate and cuirassed bust of Maximian left.
II — IISIII (the S reversed) - helmeted Roma seated left on throne with X beneath seat, holding Victory on extended right hand and resting on sceptre held in left.
Aureus (gold plated over base metal core), irregular mint in western Ukraine
Chernyakhov culture, ca. 300-310 aD, found in the Ternopil region, Ukraine
19,83 mm / 2,56 g / pierced in antiquity
Oleg Anohin "Counterfeiting among barbarian tribes in the territory of modern Ukraine and Moldova. Catalog of barbaric imitations" (2015), Nr.87 (this coin);
ex Savoca Numismatik 17th Blue auction (01.03.2019), lot 1894

 

On a different note, I'm sure a number of us have coins that were manufactured in Ukraine, though we're not aware of that fact.