German Ancestry

My first few blogs will describe my own personal ethnic background. Then we will go on to see how my ethnic backgrounds in the past have had conflicts with each other.Weiss, my surname originated in Germany and is taken from my fathers side of the family. The description of Weiss from http://genealogy.about.com/library/surnames/w/bl_name-WEISS.htm is” A variant of WEISS, from the Middle High German "wiz" meaning white. Originally a nickname for a person with white skin or white hair. WHITE is the English variant of this surname ". My great grandfather, Adolph, is completely German, travelled to America with his brother in 1929 to San Francisco. From San Francisco they travelled to Mexico together and ran a sausage company for a few years. Then Adolph walked up to Canada to start a new life of trapping and farming. Shortly after he met his wife Josephine, who was also born in Germany, and gave birth to 7 children, one of which is my grandfather, Adolph Junior. Josephine Straub was raised in Germany in a house by the Rhine River. This house was two stories and on the bottom floor was where the farm animals were kept, while the family lived on the top floor. This floor plan helped naturally heat the house due to the heat escaping through the animals’ bodies and manure. This house is still standing today and is a tourist attraction, which shows how many Germans lived in the past.