User:Shreknangst

Shreknangst

A compound term and variation of a name which first appeared during the latter sixteenth-century plague period.

Shrek: (as in the fictional green ogre character) means fear, or horror, and as Das Schreck -- The Horror -- was a World War II reference to the V-1 & V-2 Rocket bombardment of the "London Blitz" .

Angst: a sense of fear or dread.

Together they represent a fear of fear and lent itself to the descriptive surname adopted by refugees during the Thirty Years War.

Variations on the name are: Schreck, Schreckengast, Schreckengost, and Schreckenghost. Each of these names appear to originate with a Lutheran, or Catholic family that migrated to American (Pennsylvania) in the decades immediately prior to the Revolutionary War. Another family, or branch of the same family -- who were apparently Jews from the Alsace-Lorraine region -- arrived in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Today, descendants of sons and daughters of these lines comprise approximately 1 percent of the American population.

In 2004, one member of the family was yDNA (male DNA) tested. The results indicated a relatively rare, and apparently ancient, marker set (haplotype) within the R1a1 Haplogroup. It is hoped that, eventually, other members of the family will be tested.

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