50% Hungarian: Mom born Manhattan 1929 but raised in Pittsburgh PA, her mom raised in Portage (coal miners) and her dad in Pittsburgh, her grandparents all born in Hungary in the late 1800's.Family names,GG parents: Danyi, Uveges, Molnar, Kovacs. All farmers as far as I know. My grandmother's family were all musical, her dad played several instruments (I've been told he could play anything he could lay hand to.)Grandma had a good singing voice and loved to sing. My grandfather played violin and a few other instruments. As a young man he played in a "gypsy" band. they were quite poor when my mother was growing up-- she took violin in school using grampa's violin till some bastard broke into the school and stole all the kids' instruments. It was the Depression; Grampa never owned another violin, though they became prosperous later in life.

50% Danish: Dad born and raised in Warren PA 1930, his dad born in the States (probably Warren? I never asked)-Grampa's parents born in southern Denmark. Family names: Coppel/Fredricksen(my greatgrandmother married twice), Kuhre. His mom's family came from Odense, they were Jensens and Rasmussens. Everyone sang in that family. My dad learned violin in school and taught himself to play OldTime fiddle when we moved to Southern Ohio.

Music was a constant in my childhood. We sang together much of the time.The other family pastimes were camping/nature, and fighting. (They were nominal Christians-- but the Viking and the Hun were still there underneath it all.) As an adolescent I taught myself guitar after a fashion. Dad had a love for the old Child Ballads, my sister and I picked that up. Collecting songs is still an obsession. Perhaps more importantly I grew up with the musics of my ethnicity. Particularly my maternal grandparents made sure their children and grandchildren celebrated their heritage, and many family celebrations featured Hungarian music and dance. I am grateful for that. My dad made sure that we heard the music of Denmark. He like my mother grew up with the culture-- his community featured not only a Danish population, but other Scanadinavians, Italians and Seneca Iroquois. We learned early to appreciate our heritage and that of others. It is possibly for this reason I fell in love with Celtic culture.

Curiously I was looking into links between Celtic and Scandinavian culture (none of us are really pure, you know! our ancestors in the main were great travelers, even the more settled folk). The BBC apparently did a program called the Blood of the Vikings -- DNA samples indicate that some portions of Britain are very high in Scandinavian genetic material... not all of the mixes we see are due to conquering hordes, though I guess much of them are. Sometimes there was actually peaceful coexistence.

Bekki