Help Clarifying My (Probably Serbian) Ancestry (Thank you!)

[Andrea Gregovich]

I've gotten a number of excellent helpful responses to my query about my
ancestry, more helpful than I had hoped!  While I'm more unsure than ever
whether the family was Serbian, Croatian, or maybe even a mixed marriage
(very possible, if I extrapolate from certain vague family tales), I'm so
grateful to have pinned down their departure point in Boka Kotorska, and I
do feel like I have a much better sense of how to proceed in my research.
As I commented to someone off-list, my knowledge of the Balkans is much
more that of a traveler than an academic, so this list has proven once
again to be a very valuable in its guidance.

In the midst of this, I got an email from a woman who knew my grandfather
personally whose deceased husband was an Austrian immigrant and certainly
knew the difference between Croatian and Serbian.  He always said Nick was
Croatian (based on their daughter's memories), but the mother herself
remembered him as Serbian, and had some solid anecdotal reasons to back up
her memory.  It is more and more ambiguous at every turn!  I've hit a point
where, for the initial things I'm writing, I may just call them "immigrants
from Montenegro".  My grandfather's stories are really wild west American
stories, so the Serbian/Croatian distinction is not of paramount importance
there, but as the project continues, I will definitely want to delve into
the immigrant generation.  In fact, perhaps the real story is the
complicated nuances of identifying an ethnicity from that region, and the
way the family simplified it into "Yugoslavian" then to some extent shunned
the Serbian possibility for political reasons.

I'm communicating with several people off-list, but if I lose track of
someone I want to respond to, please know that every email has been very
useful to me.  It will actually take me some time to process all the leads
I've been given.  Thanks again!

Andrea Gregovich

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/seelang/attachments/20130824/76dc0026/attachment.html>