The Official Genealogy Thread.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

My maternal family all came over about a hundred years ago and has been mostly based in the Springfield, Massachusetts area (and, lately, Cape Cod) ever since. We're from both Northern and Southern Italy and a few different parts of the Russian Empire, with both Litvak Jews and Gentiles (Great Russian, Polish, possibly Turkic if you go back far enough) in our ancestry. We do know through tracing the etymology of a surname that the Litvak Jews came from a place called Turau, on the Pripyat in what is now southern Belarus about as far west of Homiel as it is south of Minsk. Some of the Mezzogiorno blood might or might not have been noble (there's a bit of French and Corsican in that strain too) but the Northern Italian is unambiguously not.

My father's side I know less about, save that it includes both Protestants and Catholics from both Ireland and Scotland. (Currently the family on that side is Catholic.) A great-grandfather was a Knight of the Order of St Gregory the Great and knew Nancy Pelosi's father somehow.