My great grandfather shot and killed a man in Mexico. He fled the country and changed his name. I found the handgun said to have been used in the shooting cleaning out my grandma’s basement after she died.
The stories of other sides of my family are somewhat less colorful than that.
Paternal grandfather: came over from England, to join his brother. Why his brother came, I’m not sure. Paternal grandmother’s family has been here since the 17th century, originally from Wales by way of Nova Scotia.
Maternal grandparents were both born in the Azores, and came to the California central valley to milk cows.
Mother’s mother’s side: After watching his family murdered (the men) or raped, then murdered (mother and sisters), my great grandfather left the Ukraine via Spain and went to Africa, where he mined diamonds until he could steal enough to buy passage to the US, where he promptly jumped ship in harbor and settled in Irvington or Newark, where he ran a successful butcher shop and lived in a house, both of which he won in poker games.
Mother’s father’s side: The whole family left hungary in 1914 or so (right before WWI by most accounts). Great grandmother and her family then came to NY, apssed through Ellis island and settled in Brooklyn and Irvington.
Father’s sides: From what I can piece together, they’ve been in Monmouth county, NJ since 1850 or so, originally from County Galway in Ireland.
On my father’s side, my grandparents came over from Greece in the 1920’s to get away from all of the wars that were going on over there at the time. We found copies of some old documents, and you can see just how little english my grandfather spoke. On one form, he mispelled pretty much every single thing on the form, including his own name (he spelled John as Gohn). My father actually spoke Greek up until the time when he went to kindergarden, at which point he had to learn English rather quickly.
My mother was born in England, and grew up in London during WWII. She spent some time hiding out in the underground stations, which were used as makeshift bomb shelters, then she and the rest of her family were shipped out to different relatives outside of the city for the remainder of the war. After the war, her oldest sister married an American soldier and moved to Ohio. My mother came over to visit for a year in 1955 and never went back, and eventually became an American citizen.
Hey, me too! What is is about those horny Irishmen?
Why Bastard? Wherefore base? When my Dimensions are as well compact, My minde as generous, and my shape as true As honest Madams issue? Why brand they us With Base? With basenes Bastardie? Base, Base? Who in the lustie stealth of Nature, take More composition, and fierce qualitie, Then doth within a dull stale tyred bed Goe to th’ creating a whole tribe of Fops Got 'tweene a sleepe, and wake?
I’m another bastard, birthed from a stew of Scots-Irish, Huguenots, Germans, and various and sundry other ethnicities who had all managed to congregate in the Deep South by the early 19th century. Three grandparents born in Mississippi, one grandmother in Alabama.
My most recent emigrant ancestor was an Irishman, James Kelly, who stowed away on a ship to New Orleans around 1800. Seven Confederates, five in Mississippi and one each in Tennessee and Alabama, all of whom made it home alive. One great-great-grandfather hid in the woods when the army came to enlist him, so he escaped the fighting. Some of them were good people; some weren’t; eccentricity is a given. My biological father’s family has an unfortunate history of insanity, murders and suicides. My mother’s side is your usual mix of moonshiners and sturdy farm folk, largely illiterate until the turn of the century.
The Melungeons migrated from the Appalachias to northeast Alabama after the Civil War. I find it highly amusing that my great-grandfather, a Klansman, has documented African ancestry through his mother, who’s family came to central MS from Robeson co. NC. Some Germans who were loyalists during the Revolution; others with British surnames were patriots. I’ve got a few famous relatives, notably folksinger Townes Van Zandt and author Fanny Heaslip Lea Agee.