My grandmother on my mom's side researched her family lineage from iceland. She was able to trace back severeal hundreds of years. They even had a book published about our family tree which includes all our relatives from that line up until my generation.
My father has been researching our family tree on his side. Our family is the only family in Canada with our last name. There are two people in the USA with our last name, and we've found a handful in the UK and Poland.
My father came to Canada as a small child after the war. My family was torn apart during the war, and most records lost. From what I have been told, my family on my Polish grandmothers side was very wealthy before the war, and once the war came, they lost everything. Many members of our family did not survive the war. My grandfather was aparently some sort of bodyguard/security for someone whom I was told was a very important figure of some sort. Much of our family on that side was from Lodz.
I recently decided to help my dad and on facebook I have tracked down a few more people with my last name, but they all seem to be in the same boat as me. They do not know alot about ther ancestory pre-war, and have had difficulties tracing htem back as their grandparents are now deceased and or do not like to talk about anything from before or aroudn the time of the war as it is very painful for them.. Some of people I have spoken to have given me a name or two of grand parents and great grand parents or cousins, which share the same names as relatives of mine, but we just have not yet been able to peice together exactly how we are related. We have noticed a trend were many relatives are named after other relatives, and without dates of birth and marriage records and such (as all records were lost) it's been kind of hard to figure out exactly how the tree goes.
My dad did find one a cousin of ours who had a picture of his mother and some of her siblings when they were young. He published a picture that he had in a polish newspaper, and recieved a call from a woman who had a copy of that same picture, as well as others, that she was given by her grandmother before she passed. Now that I'm thinking about it, I should maybe do some more searching, as a few months has passed since my last search, and you never know what new things will come up this time around!
