> So if you can trace your ancestry back to say King Orry of Man or
> William the Conqueror, both of whom had known ancestors in the
> Shetlands/Orkney Islands, the Icelandic genealogies take them back,
> in most cases, to Western Norway and from there to myth-history
> --e.g. to Ingjald Illrada, Harald Blotanda, etc. all the back to
> Odin, making you Torsten distant cousin.
It's not like I don't want to be Andrew's distant cousin, but I
actually can only trace my family back a few generations. My paternal
grandfather was a farmhand on Northwest Fyn who married the farmer's
daughter and moved to Copenhagen to study and became lektor of Latin
and German in a prestigious school in Northern Copenhagen. My father
left a sketch of what he had been able to gather about his family, but
I haven't gotten around to reading it properly. The earliest I know of
my maternal grandfather's family is a German (from Erlangen)
representative of an English textile company who interned here after
the English attack on Copenhagen in 1807, and started a factory in
Nørresundby, now Ålborg's suburb north of the Limfjord. Other than
that there was a general of French/Spanish ancestry, a 'tater'
(traveller), and a long line of farmers in Vendsyssel.
Torsten