This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Author: jdteske1 Surnames: Teske Classification: queries Message Board URL: http://boards.rootsweb.com/surnames.teske/230.2.1.1.1.1.1.1/mb.ashx Message Board Post: Hi again Janet, The various immigration boards and data bases are terribly unspecific about where people came from in Europe. The most common of these was actually edited by a colleague of mine, Vera Filby and her husband (whose name I forgot, both are now deceased.) Vera Filby was my instructor early in my career in Intelligence Reporting. I worked for NSA (back when we played by the rules, I retired before the present commotion although as you might imagine, Edward Snowden is no hero for me. BTW....NSA is the "funny thing which happened to me on my way to becoming a schoolteacher in some Wisconsin Podunk." In college, I had never heard of NSA, the largest and most secretive of the US Intelligence agencies. They came to me when I was on campus. I was one of the few French (and also English) majors who was male (see the 1960's mindset here), straight, didn't do drugs who had learned two languages (the other was Italian.) I came to Washington two week after graduation in 1964 and was sent! to school to become an Arabic linguist, which I did for the first half dozen years of my career. I left languages when I was offered a management track (where I could advance higher), was a codebreaker, intercept planner, staff officer, went to Cuba seven times, worked in the US Embassy in Mexico City chasing Colombian drug lord....just the usual boring government stuff. I retired in 1999, am now 72, and keep very busy as a symphony violinist in high-level volunteer orchestras. The Filby's edited what is probably now a 20 volume or so transcription of the ship lists from Bremen...a major emigration port, as recorded in New York City. Our Germans came long before there was an Ellis Island so that resource isn't much of a help. My Teske family is recorded in one of those volumes and dispelled (along with later LDS records) a lot of family legends e.g. the eldest of my great grand father's siblings was born at sea during the voyage. I have birth records for her from German! y (thanks to that "other" John Teske) from two years earlier and even a stillborn to my immigrant ancestors some 4 months before they landed in NYC. A lot of these NYC records simply say "Germany" even though Germany didn't exist as a political entity for another decade when Bismarck unified most of the German-speaking kingdoms and principalities under Prussian control. Some simply list Bremen (or Hamburg, the two biggest embarkation port. My ancestors were listed as "Bromberg" [Present day Bydgoczsz, Poland] which we now believe was an administrative center where papers were issued giving permission to emigrate. (It also was where a train station was which would get them to Bremen.) I remember when Charlotte Teske won the women's part of the Boston Marathon. The NY Times, which we got in my office had a big sports page headline that "so and so won the [men's] marathon; "Teske Beats Women." So the wags in my office clipped the "Teske Beats Women" part of the headline (nothing to indicate what was "beat" and pasted it on my cubicle. LOL. That she was from Hamburg (she was a nurse by trade) means about as much genealogically speaking as my being from Washington, DC area does now. There was an awful lot of post- WW II resettlement and anyone who was an ethnic German in the Eastern third of pre-war Germany was displaced, expelled, an early example of ethnic cleansing. The Poles basically purged the land they got in reparations of anything German, probably with some justification. Many of the novels of Nobel Literature prize winner Gunther Grass, are based on the post war expulsion of the Gemans. So a lot of present day Germans are really from somewhere else. German sources I found in the NSA library from the 1930's when many people were VERY concerned how German they are (or specifically how "un-Jewish" they were) cite the Teske name as! a Slavic Short form of the "son of Matthew" paradigm, so over the centuries since Germans were beholden to adopt family names (13th-14th centuries) is is likely that many Teske's were a mix of Slavs and Teutons and as such likely to come historically from the eastern regions of German influence. My immigrant gggrandmother actually has a Jewish family name, Gruenberg [Greenberg in English] though I found Christian infant baptismal records for her. Our family appeared to be either Evangelisch (Lutheran in America) or Reformed which basically was a little more conservative form of Lutheranism. This was pretty typical for the northeastern parts of the German empire. Germans tell me that these provinces....Mecklinburg, Schwerin, Stettin, Pomerania, Posen, were sort of the "West Virginia" of Germany. Even in the former GDR, all the manufacturing, universities, culture etc. was in the areas south of Berlin (Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz) whereas the areas to the north and east of! Berlin tended to be somewhat backwards and poor...probably a good inc entive for our ancestors to get out. When I encountered this other John Teske a decade ago and knowing that he was president of a genealogy group, I fed him what info I had, and by dumb luck, my family was among those he had cataloged (to date we have not established any real family tie between us except some degree of proximity.) He had my immigrant gggrandparents church records nailed in LDS records, my gggrandfather's trade....a very long word that meant "pitchfork maker" which tied in nicely to his US trade of blacksmith. John conveniently lived just on the other side of the Potomac from me and we did lunch about a week after we met on-line. He gave me copies of the records he had and a bunch of monographs, some of which he wrote, from the Germans from Russia society. (He is originally from South Dakota.) Those monographs, while not specific to my family, did explain a lot of why there were there....and why they left. Nine years ago, John and I commissioned two Polish genealogists from Poznan city to go up to our villages and they came back with these photos http://www.grhs.org/chapters/gppr/teskephotos.html Heliodorowo is my family's village. Four-five km away is the small town of Szamocin where according to family legend my gggrandmother went to the Polish school (probably Catholic) so she could learn Latin. There are also some photos of the Notec River and the reclaimed land that apparently my ancestors had some role in developing for the noble Polish family of Racynskis. Heliodorowo is named for one of the Racynski sons, Heliodor. (The reclaimed land looks a bit like rice paddys when viewed on Google Earth.) I'm happy to correspond with you. We don't have to do this on the Ancestry board (I'm not really a member in the paid sense.) My "real" email is jdteske@verizon.net Jon Important Note: The author of this message may not be subscribed to this list. If you would like to reply to them, please click on the Message Board URL link above and respond on the board. <br>