2 September 2019, Mount Pleasant PA USA
Two years ago when my sweetie Glenn and I went to Italy together for the first time, I told him I was apprehensive about traveling with him. After all, his DNA test identified the Moors as the single biggest contributor to his genetic make up … and with all of the USA’s issues surrounding immigrants and all our new travel warnings, what if they wouldn’t let us, native-born Americans, back into the country? Horrors — I’d have to live in Italy until my last dying breath. (You do realize I wrote all of that with my tongue placed firmly in my cheek, right?) Anyway …
A few years before, Glenn had done a DNA test that showed he was mostly Moorish; the biggest European contributor to his DNA were the Hungarians, my people. All of this for a man who can identify the small villages in northern Italy from whence his four grandparents emigrated and where legions of their forebears lived. He repeated the test; same results. Then I got an update of my DNA results from ancestry.com (still mostly Scottish and Hungarian am I, with a smattering of various invaders to those homelands). So Glenn decided to ask his 90-year-old uncle, brother to Glenn’s father, to have an Ancestry DNA done (kits were half price) to see if he could learn which half of his ancestral family tree provided the Moorish DNA. His uncle agreed, spit in the tube, mailed it off and got a more expected result — he’s about half Italian and half French with a smattering of invaders thrown in. That spurred Glenn to have a third DNA test done, this time by Ancestry so he can more easily compare his result with his uncle’s.
As you can imagine, waiting for the result has been hellish. Glenn’s been tracking the progress of the test package online multiple times a day. Saturday, while we were showing out-of-town friends the sights, his phone dinged a message from Ancestry: his test result had been posted on his ancestry.com site. Since for some reason Glenn couldn’t open the link on his phone, his first act on returning home was to power up the laptop and open his Ancestry account.
And the result is …
Glenn’s basically half Italian and half French. No Moors in sight. Not sure how the previous DNA results were arrived at, but this one seems more likely since it almost mirrors his uncle’s. For now, we should have no problems returning to the US from our overseas travels.
Since we’re talking about ancestry, one of Glenn’s favorite topics, let me ask a question. How many of you, especially you Americans, have ever heard of Haller’s Army or the Blue Army? When we’ve posed that question to various friends and acquaintances, only two have answered affirmatively … and yet that army, with US, Canadian and Polish roots, played a significant role in World War I.
Glenn and I learned about Haller’s Army from friend Ewa, our translator for Center board meetings in Sandomierz. Ewa, knowing Glenn’s interest in ancestry, asked if he could help her find her relatives in the US. She said she knew her grandfather’s brother had emigrated and had been part of Haller’s Army. The name Haller seemed vaguely familiar to me, then I recalled why — I’d walked on ulica Generala Jozefa Hallera (Gen. Joseph Haller Street) in Warsaw. So this fellow must’ve been important.
Well, Ewa’s great uncle did indeed serve in Haller’s Army in the French theater of World War I and return to the US afterwards. Poles who had emigrated to the US saw an allied victory as a way to reunite Poland into one country after 100+ years of division among three conquerers (Prussia, Russia and Austro-Hungary).
Haller’s Army was formed in mid 1917 by some 20,000+ Polish immigrants to Canada and the US. Ignacy Paderewski (pianist, composer, politician and later prime minister of Poland) addressed a convention of the Polish Falcons fraternal organization in Pittsburgh about forming a Polish army to fight alongside the Americans. President Wilson, though supportive of the Polish cause, wouldn’t sanction training a foreign army in the US. Thus, training took place in Canada. Because France had already announced it would form a Polish army, the North American immigrants (men and women!) joined the French in the final six months of the war. They wore blue French uniforms, thus the Blue Army moniker.
After the war and with much political maneuvering in the “new” Europe, Haller’s Army was transported to Poland to help fend off the Ukrainians and Russians on the eastern front. That success kept Poland independent for more than 15 years. Fighting over. Now, a dilemma. The nascent Polish government had little if any control over this private army and little money to support adding so many to its army or to return them to the US … and many of the veterans wanted to return. Prior to their leaving for the war, the US government had agreed they could return without the red tape of new immigration. Thus, US troop ships were dispatched to return the Haller’s Army vets to the US … and Ewa’s grandfather’s brother returned to Michigan. And eventually, through Glenn’s research, Ewa was connected with the family.
Hello All from Suzi 