User blog:Jeremiah Garland/I'm Russian... O O

Well, I'm back from my spring break! And in case you didn't read my latest blog, I was visiting family and friends in the UK. While there, I learned something very interesting (well, to me it's interesting; probably not to you xD)...

During the week, I visited my maternal grandmother in Glasgow. She is huge on genealogy, and has done countless research on my family. Well, one night I was talking with her about genealogy, and she told me she had discovered something recently: my great-grandfather (my grandfather's father) was 100% Russian.

In case you want to know the backstory to this (which you probably don't, but still gonna say it :D), my great-grandfather, whose name was Ivan (lastname withheld for anti-stalker reasons) was born in Kazan, a city not far from Moscow, around the mid-late 1800s. He grew up in Kazan, but soon moved to St. Petersburg when he was in his early 20s. He lived there for a couple years, married, but never started a family. In 1917, the Russian Revolution broke out. Being a strong supporter of Tsar Nicholas II, my great-grandfather, Ivan, and his wife didn't want to get mixed up in the chaos of the Communist Bolsheviks. By 1918, they had exiled Russia, and moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands. Upon arriving there, my great-grandfather decided to "go-native", as nearly all Russians were unfavoured in western nations at the time. He adapted a Dutch name, Johannes (the Dutch version of "Ivan"), and immediatly learned Dutch. Shortly after, about 1921 (my grandmother wasn't sure on the year), his wife who had left Russia with him, died of typhus or something of that matter. Johannes then remarried to a Dutch woman, Eline, my great-grandmother. Together, they had one son, my paternal grandfather. My paternal grandfather, also named Johannes, then immigrated to Britain when WWII broke out. There, he married (my paternal grandmother), and had my father. So for all this time, going back to my great grandfather, we never knew he was Russian, but Dutch since he had a Dutch name, lived in Holland, and spoke Dutch fluently. So, from what my grandmother has told me, my national heritage looks like this:
 * 50% British
 * 20% Russian
 * 20% Dutch
 * 10% Other (German, Belgian, Austrian, Czech, Polish, Norwegian)

Anyways, the moral of this story is,'' da Tsar of Russia ist legit!!! :D''