Got sucked into a free trial of ancestry.com. Never been hugely interested in all of that, but there are bits of half remembered family lore I was told about when I was young that I was mildly interested in confirm/reaffirming.
Didn't spent a lot of time on it, and no major effort to confirm most of what was being suggested to me, but the father's side family lore was basically correct: Romanian Jews fled to England in the 1860s or so, with some local non-Jewish lasses in the mix.
I had thought Black was a simple immigrant name, just chosen to be easy to spell in the new country. It is that, in a way, but also just a direct translation from the Romanian name: Negru.
Maternal grandmother's background a bit of a mystery (to me) still, but I was surprised that the grandfather's side goes all the way back to the 17th century in the US, originating in Wales.
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