I know! Our Immigrant ancestors would not be pleased with all this. It seems most of them wanted to forget “the Old Country” and worked hard to erase accents and even changed their names to as not to sound too ethnic. I admire their grit and determination, but it also left their descendants, us “white folks” in cultural poverty and grasping around for our roots.
Now recent immigrants are doing the opposite, taking steps to preserve those things for future generations.
I love to watch the genealogy shows…Who Do You Think You Are, Finding Your Roots, etc…and I find it so funny when family stories turn out to be utter crap. Like the UK version of WDYTYA where John Hurt was devastated he wasn’t Irish!
One thing about my family I would love to know the backstory on is how in the world, somewhere down the generations in Appalachia, my ancestors went from being Irish Catholic, to my great-Grandmother Katherine Lenore Cooney telling my great-Grandfather when she married him that she “didn’t want any of that Catholic mess” in her house. Somewhere along the line they became hardshell Methodist.
All of my grandmother’s ancestors were Slaven, Burke, and Milligan, from the darkest backwoods of Ireland. And she was a Holly Roller who actually said Catholics were idol worshippers.
We have some Burkes, too! My theory is that generational poverty and living a rather simple mountain life for a few generations brought them into the “Old Time Religion”. No priests and nuns in the holler.
