TheNumber4
Registered User
- Nov 11, 2011
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...except healthier and smarter most likely.
Was Gretzky Polish, Ukrainian or Belarusian?
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MessierII
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- Aug 10, 2011
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Why is it crazy that it can’t be all 3?
You're right and it's not crazy at all. They lived in an area of identity overlap and considering that Walter Gretzky had two parents from different places then you get even more identities.
I don't know why no one has mentioned it here but Wayne Gretzky's mom has an entirely different ancestry. It's not like Wayne comes from an endogamous sect like Hasids or something.
You can only figure out so much with surnames and Jewishness. The surnames are shared among both gentiles and Jews and Jewish identity is traditionally down the mother's side, so Jews born to mixed couples will more often have gentile surnames. Outside of a few obvious names it doesn't mean much.
That's sort of the quick way of putting it. More accurately Walter's parents came from a region with a Polish elite and an East Slavic majority, where people spoke both Ukrainian and Polish.
What typically happens is that after people immigrate, their ethnic identity changes somewhat. Whereas in the old country they might have had a finer sense of being one thing or the other, once in Canada they gravitate to the culture of the broader region that they came from. For example both Polish food and Ukrainian food would feel like home. And Walter tended to identify with both in alternating fashion.
snipes
How cold? I’m ice cold.
- Dec 28, 2015
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McDavid
MacKinnon
Crosby
O’Rielly
That could be Canada’s centres at the next best-on-best.
Holy Scots-Irish Canadians.
MacKinnon
Crosby
O’Rielly
That could be Canada’s centres at the next best-on-best.
Holy Scots-Irish Canadians.
snipes
How cold? I’m ice cold.
- Dec 28, 2015
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Same thing with lots of settlements on the British Isles as well during the Great Heathen Army time and afterwards.
Malkin's mother is ethnic russian. Ovechkin is somehow from ethnic minority called 'Mordva' I've heard. Small finno-ugric minority of Russia.
IslesNorway
Registered User
Not quite with regards to Norwegian. We have two written languages and the main one is very close to Danish in spelling but not as much in speech. Norwegians understand Swedish without any trouble but most find Danish harder to understand but easier to read...As a German speaker, I can read Dutch and can understand a good chunk of it too. As a Spanish speaker, the same with Italian and even more so with Portuguese (especially the Brazilian accent). My danish / Norwegian friends tell me they have no problem understanding each other (apparently there are two forms of Norwegian — one of which, according to one friend, is “practically identical” to Danish). Both struggle to understand Swedish. Then my Slovakian friends say they can understand Polish snd Czech, but a Czech friend says he can understand Slovak but not Polish, which I’ve always found fascinating. My Estonian friends can understand Finnish; Finns can understand Estonian. It’s a small world after all.
All three languages are derived from Old Norse and very similar yet different at the same time
IslesNorway
Registered User
W
Staal in Norwegian would equate to "steel" if spelt modern, so there may well be something in it.
Wikipedia have them listed as Norwegian-Canadian but that may not be correct of course.
Staal in Norwegian would equate to "steel" if spelt modern, so there may well be something in it.
You might already know this but "Scots-Irish" is a more particular ancestry that is from the Scottish Lowlands and Northern England via Northern Ireland. It doesn't encompass most Irish and Scottish immigrants. I'd guess that O'Reilly's paternal ancestor is probably just plain old Irish and McDavid and MacKinnon's might be plain old Scottish - there are more Mcs and Macs in Highland Scotland than in the Lowlands, and it was mostly folks from the Highlands that brought recognizable Scottish culture to Canada.
- Jul 6, 2017
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They are. Their grandparents came from the Netherlands.
Raising the Staal Brothers: Hard work, humility and family
Henry and Linda are the parents of Eric, Marc, Jordan, and Jared.
The Grim Reaper
Registered User
I know very little of Canadian history, but I remember reading that there was a lot of Scottish / Irish ancestry on the east coast, especially Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, PEI, etc. I think I also remember reading that there was a lot of influence in the Yukon as well, but I could be wrong. I’ve only ever been to Nova Scotia, but the influence was obvious.
This is the answer right here.
Here, via Wikipedia, is a 1916 map of Polish populations across Ukraine and Belarus. Dark red signifies areas where Poles were the majority of the population (>50%), lighter red indicates a significant Polish minority (>10%), and white indicates marginal Polish populations (<10%). Even there, however, if you zoom in, you can see the exact percentage.
So, first and foremost, these were ethnically mixed areas. But even that does not adequately describe the situation, as the ethnic divide itself was blurred. Poles were disproportionately the economic elite of the region (szlachta), and it was not uncommon for someone to ascend up the economic ladder and subsequently adopt Polish language and culture, especially prior to the emergence of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Yet even those with long 'Polish' lineages were themselves often cognizant of their non-Polish origins and of the fact that they had more in common with their Ukrainian/Belarusian neighbours than the Polish elite in Warsaw and Krakow. This is how the leader of the interwar Polish Republic, Józef Piłsudski, could call himself "Lithuanian" and see no contradiction in his fervently Polish patriotism.
Besides class, religion was the other major divide in these areas, with Ukrainians being generally Russian Orthodox or Greek Catholic, Belarusians primarily Russian Orthodox (the Tsar having dismantled the Belarusian Uniate church in the 1830s), and Poles -- of course -- Roman Catholic. For those who were unfamiliar or unattached with the idea of a nation, which we forget is a rather recent development (large parts of Eastern Ukraine and Belarus, in particular, had no such concept sometimes as late as the 1920s), religion (the more important identifier in their lives) frequently became synonymous with it. Thus, for example, a Belarusian in the 1920s could insist in fluent Belarusian to a Soviet ethnographer that he was "Russian" (because he was an Orthodox Christian).
Funnily enough, that is an exact parallel to how Wayne Gretzky's grandmother, Mary Gretzky, defined her roots in an interview to a Ukrainian diaspora magazine in 1982 (link, see: pg. 9):
(tl;dr) In other words, in a case of the family like the Gretzky's, it is complicated. I suppose you could say they are ethnically Ukrainian, but culturally Polish. But most Poles don't -- of course -- speak Ukrainian as their mother tongue and most Ukrainians don't identify as Poles or use the Polish name for their hometown. They are a relic of an age where national identity in this part of Europe was far more fluid.
(Note: There is little that I could find on Gretzky's father, Anthony (Tony). In the interview linked above, Mary describes her by then-late husband as being "from White Russia," but then wrongly clarifies that he is from "Ukraine." White Russia and his birthplace, Grodno, are obviously not in Ukraine. But Ukrainian and Belarusian are very close languages, and even Ukrainian and Polish are relatively mutually intelligible, especially with familiarity. A linguist, if there is one on this board, is welcome to correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems possible that Gretzky's grandparents could have understood each other quite well, and that Walter's "Ukrainian," which he awoke speaking after his brain aneurysm, was in fact Ukrainian with some degree of Polish and Belarusian admixture).
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aufheben
#Norris4Fox
blankall
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- Jul 4, 2007
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Jewish people, with the exception of a few classes like the Cohens, did not historically use last names. They would use naming conventions similar to the Irish, where the last name would be son of "father". The king of Austria declared that all Jews had to take German last names in the 1700s. What we associate with most Jewish names are actually just anglicizations of common German last names: Weinstein, Hoffman, Goldstein, Levitt, etc...
Andy6
Court Jetster
There is a lot of Scottish influence almost everywhere in Canada. Irish is more regional.
snipes
How cold? I’m ice cold.
- Dec 28, 2015
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Lots of Scottish and Scots-Irish ancestry all throughout Canada. You’ll find Scottish ancestry throughout all Canada, hence why Canadians are so damn tough overall lol.
The east coast Province of Nova Scotia literally translates to New Scotland.
The Fathers of Canadian Confederation were essentially mostly Scottish Protestants and French Catholics. Many, many Canadian Prime Ministers were of Scottish descent.
