I have records from the late 1600s of my ancestors settling North America. One funny historical document from those records is a court filing from one of my ancestors against someone who scammed him.

The reason it's funny is because tobacco was the currency used in the contract my ancestor made with the scammer. Now we have Bitcoin, which is both a currency and a permanent historical record.

We traced my poor Scandi heritage back eleven generations. Every single one of them are farmers in the south of Sweden.

Pretty unexciting, honestly

My great-grandparents on both sides of my family were Spanish. On my mother's side, they fled the wars in Spain, and on my father's side, they came seeking a better life in Cuba (at that time, Cuba was a Spanish colony). My grandmother (on my father's side) recounted that she was also among those who fled to the Spanish side against the Cuban Mambises. Some of my grandmother's brothers became "counter-revolutionaries" after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, and some were imprisoned.

We have no information about the history of my great-great-grandparents or anyone else... only that they came from the Canary Islands to Cuba.

Now, regarding the final question, my wife and I were talking about this a few days ago, since our family no longer lives in Cuba. We are now migrants in Brazil, and we honestly don't know what will become of us in a few years, whether we will still be here or move to another country.

But I liked the idea of going out to find our ancestors; perhaps I'll start creating our family tree so that our grandchildren will one day know exactly where they come from.

I kind of know due to records. Small subsistence farmers. Rarely a few trades jobs. And low-ranking military in the Austrian-Hungary army and/or cavalry. But mostly small-scale subsistence farmers.

There has been everything, from good people to sons of bitches, 100 years is very little in history and a lot for a generational branch. Immediate, great-grandparents until grandparents, farmers, before that who knows? The record on paper is not reliable and or non-existent, the DNA is less fault, I haven't done a search yet and I don't intend to.

My ancestors, ironically on both sides of my inverse family tree, are only back-traceable to the mid/late 16th century. Every record before that was either destroyed by the Spanish armed forces (for being Protestant) or simply non-existent because the regions people migrated from were not keeping records. The best documented "beginnings" of both ancestral sides were as refugees. Must have been tough to flee and start over.

Not much has changed since the 1580s. People still get judged and made an enemy out of based on the geographic region they were born in, their ethnicity and their religious beliefs, and as a result, people still get driven from their homes and are forced seek refuge. It would be a great outcome for this to be an alien concept to future generations, but the more time I spend in this world, the more I find it likely that the tool of dividing people against eachother will keep on being used by those seeking to gain or consolidate their power.

Thus, we work to develop tools that undermine the power any aggressor can exert over us. Bastions of sovereignty.

When I ask myself, the impulse is to project myself into the past/future. So maybe my ancestors were some kind of unruly (the Irish part) enterprising craftsman (the Persian one). My descendants, assuming I have them, might be engineers or artisans on some intergalactic vessel or owners of a remote pleasure planet.