Homelands descriptions (Poland area in particular)
Hi, not sure if this is the correct place to post this but I recently got an email from FS showing my ancestor's homeland and it had details about the culture, favorite foods, etc. The issue is that it showed Austria as my maternal grandmother's birthplace and that part of south-eastern Poland was only under the Austrian flag between WW1 and WW2. Before that, it was the Kingdom of Galicia among other things but most people there were Polish. My grandmother was born in Ropczyce, Poland in 1904. When she immigrated to the US in 1921 she listed Austria as her country of origin. On Census records she and my grandfather who came from an area near there always said Poland or Galicia as their place of birth. Thanks.
Comments
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The email campaigns are very generic - with no attention to such details. In your settings, you decline to receive those emails.
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This particular email campaign gives you specific information about a homeland based on the standardized country associated with your ancestor's birthplace. If it your grandmother's standardized birthplace is Austria in Family Tree, then that's what the campaign will send you information about.
The details about what is the correct choice for your grandmother's birthplace is something you will need to decide based on your understanding of the history, timing of your grandmother's birth, and available options in the list of standardized places. You've clearly done some good research, and these issues are tricky (my very Italian great-grandfather is listed as born in Austria). So make your best choice, and explain why you chose that in the reason statement, providing details such as those you posted above.
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The problem with that specific campaign -- and with the general idea of equating birthplace with nationality -- is that nationality is not ethnicity.
The only valid conclusions to be drawn from the highest jurisdiction in a person's birthplace are political or administrative: "Your ancestor was born within the boundaries of Austria, which was ruled by So-And-So, and was divided into N crown lands that each had their own administrative structure." But that's not the sort of detail that most people are interested in, because it's impersonal. Therefore, FS makes generalizations: most people born in France were French (unless they were German), most people born in Spain were Spanish (unless they were Basque), most people born in England were English (unless they were Welsh, or Scottish, or Irish, or heck, Dutch or German), and so on. These kinds of generalizations break completely for multi-ethnic countries like Austria-Hungary or Belgium, but that doesn't prevent FS's campaign from making them anyway.
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