No Blue Bloods Allowed - How humble are your origins?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Sometimes it amazes me how drastically life can change for a family over the short course of a generation or two. It rises to my mind as I’m applying to grad school. I’ll be getting a Masters degree; my grandmother was illiterate.

My maternal grandfather was an illegal alien from China. It was his secret and something that I discovered by combing through immigration records. He probably paid $1200 to the corrupt Honolulu Immigration office and snuck in through Mexico. His gambling addiction sunk his various small business ventures and he was never able to get his family out of their Chinatown tenement.

My maternal grandmother was illiterate. As the oldest daughter in a large Chinese farming family in Hawai’i, she was pulled out of school at a young age (3rd grade?) to raise her siblings. Her marriage to my grandfather was arranged through a matchmaker. A match not quite made in heaven: she was poor and uneducated, he was looking for US citizenship.

Her mother (my GGM) was an orphaned picture bride from China. My widower GGF sent a picture of himself as a young man (he was 58) to a matchmaker and got a 19 year old wife! Once there, she got to help raise his children from his first wife, have seven of her own and help with the rice farm.

My paternal grandmother was an orphan from Ireland. Her mother died and her father abandoned the family. She was raised in a myriad of foster homes and orphanages, where she was rumored to have been abused by the priests. When she got pregant out of wedlock in America, the church forced her to marry my alcoholic and abusive grandfather.

Ironically, the most prosperous branch of my family tree belongs to his father, who was a servant! He was trained as a gardener in England and tended to the huge estates of the rich Pittsburgh industrialist families of Sewickley.

We haven’t had it easy. Care to share your beautiful tales of suffering and perseverance?

2

My paternal grandfather was an accountant for a British company in Bombay but he became a Ghandian, quit and joined the independence movement. After independence he decided he still wanted to concentrate on his social work so instead of going back to a lucrative job-he moved to the Goa-Karnataka border and became a watchmaker. My grandmother was illiterate and married him when she was 16 because she was orphaned and it was either get married or live on the streets. Together they raised not only their own children but also my grandfather’s brothers’ children (who had all been orphaned in some flu epidemic). My parents, his siblings and his cousins grew up mud-hut poor in India-no electricity till my dad had gone off to highschool in Bombay, no phone ever, well-water and an outdoor squat toilet outhouse. My dad studied for his exams by oil lamp! They were on the edge between being lower-middle class and poverty.

My mother’s family was just as poor although not nearly as interesting. They’re less progressive than my father’s family in terms of how they treated women. There were more kids, as well. Grandmother also illiterate-same, if not worse living conditions than my dad.

My parents get really nostalgic for the old days though when the high point of their lives was taking a wind-powered fishboat downstream to another poor Indian village or buying cashews and trinkets off of travelling Afghani traders. I mean, it sounds kinda cool and Dickensian and “simple” at the same time but I am so glad I grew up in North America!!!

3

Oy, that should be GAndhian.

4

My dad grew up in post-WWII Italy, living in a stone shack with no electricity or indoor plumbing, while his mother barely scraped by with enough food and money working as a tenant farmer. My dad rarely talks about his childhood but I know, for one thing, that he and his mother were so poor that having butter was a rare treat to look forward to. The other night we were watching some movie together, and in one scene a little boy was leading oxen through a field, and my dad was moved to remark, “I used to do that when I was a boy. Who would have guessed I would come so far?” Today he has a PhD, he’s a full professor at a university, and he’s travelled over four continents (and has lived in three of them).

5

I don’t have any details, but this anecdote might qualify me for the “humble origins club”, such as it is.

I was having a discussion with my dad & my husband about how “everyone claims to be able to trace their family tree back to nobility or royalty”, in which I made the point that such claims were absurd, given the statistics on how many people came to this country “because they were hungry.” At this point, my dad interjected that his father was an example. Swedish immigrant, got a job at an auto factory in Detroit, died young. That’s all I know about the man.

Also, my mom’s family were poor farmers in the Midwest.

6

Well I was born in Slough so I win :wink:
(OK I know I’ve mentioned that link before, but I find it hillareous how people from Slough uniformally despise the place, and are also proud of its badness)

7

One side of my family came over on the Mayflower, which qualifies them for humble beginnings, I think. My father’s immigrant ancestor was a wagonmaker from Prussia, which I think also qualifies.

8

Can you name a place in California that’s similar to Slough, so I can get a more concrete idea of the place?

Also how do you pronounce the name? Sluff? Slew? Slow? Luxury-Yacht?

9

Rhymes with plow/plough.

10

I have no idea what any of my ancestors did for a living. I have no way of ever finding out, either. My brother has spent two decades researching the family tree. It goes on for chapter and verse, reading very much like the phone book. He has names and places and dates, but no other identifying feature of any person’s life.

My father’s parents were both orphaned in England. She was from Cardiff, Wales, he from London, and they actually spent some time in the same oprhanage! Neither of those families was well-off, if they had to give up their children. We can’t go any further back from them, as there are no records. My maternal grandmother’s side was from Scotland. I’m unaware of anyone from her family ever making a name for themselves. My paternal grandfather grew up in Saskatchewan. I remember seeing a picture of him as a baby, taken around 1910, with some pretty impoverished-looking folks outside a ramshackle house on the prairies.

According to what we know, not a single person among my ancestors and relatives had any more than a high school education - some had less. They weren’t the kind of people who could afford it, nor were they able to send their offspring to university. There are none of “those ritzy relatives” for us to look down our noses at- nobody in the entire clan has any money, either. We’ve been the most regular kind of working folks.

11

My mother’s grandmother and family emigrated from Sweden just after the turn of the 20th century, and were near refugees; something to do with compulsory military service. They either became farmers, or worked for the railroad.

I don’t know about the other side of her family, but they were established farmers.
On my dad’s side, the family came just after the Civil War, were farmers, and spent a large portion of their life doing the pioneer and farmer routine.

As far as I know, not a drop of blue blood at least 3 generations back, and I sure as hell ain’t one now. :cool:

12

A friend of mine said that he was descended from a British naval deserter. I thought that was pretty funny.

13

My father’s side came over from England to settle in Georgia at the time it was a, um, penal colony - actually a dumping ground/refuge for the poor saps clogging up England’s debtor prisons. That’s friends in low places.
My Mom’s old man got off the boat from Italy in 1903 with an enormous $50 in his pocket. I know that because he had to show it to the good folks at Ellis Island to get into the country. He came over on The Montevideo, a quaint rust-bucket that sank two years later bringing another bunch of hopeful immigrants.
If you haven’t already, check out the Ellis Island Foundation. Absolutely too cool.

14

On my dad’s side, my grandfather owned a lot of property in Marion, Indiana, but he went broke and died. Dad’s mom fell ill and turned him over to a Masonic orphan home in Franklin, IN. Dad grew up there, and he worked his way through Franklin College, where he met Mom. They graduated just in time for WW II. They married, and he went off to war. When he came back, he worked at a credit bureau (combination bill-collecting and credit reporting.) He stumbled on to the ground floor of the new credit industry. Dad believed he would die young as his dad did, and he worked like a mad fool to buy a credit bureau in another town. He eventually owned three of them. He was a driven, hardnosed, ruthless asshole. He never knew his parents, and his parenting skills were learned at the orphanage.

Mom’s dad was a preacher in Ohio, and he married a farm girl with a cast-iron will. During the great depression, they were so poor, they had to place two of their four daughters with a farm family they knew from the church.

I grew up as a middle-class kid. Three of my grandparents were dead before I was born. I went to a racially mixed elementary school, (not all of them were in those days) and I’m glad I did.

15

My mother’s family was old money, so I’ll leave them out of this . . . But my father’s family were, quite literally, “peasants.” On my great-grandparents’ marriage license (written in pre-Revolutionary Russian), their profession was listed as “peasant.”

That side of the family came to the U.S. in dribs and drabs from about 1900-10, not a cent on them, and worked their way up to the middle class, taking English lessons at night: classic Eastern European Jewish immigrants.

16

We’ve been over a long time. In one case about 20000 years.

I have in my background…

Cherokee.

African (enslaved and later freed)(he married the cherokee woman in northern Louisiana)

A transportee from England.

At least one passenger on the Mayflower.

My parents were the first in both families to go to college…ever. Dad’s kin were dirt farmers and tradesmen in rural Louisiana. My mom’s were farmers in southern Michigan.

17

How about most disparate backgrounds that came together to form you?

We know next to nothing about my grandfather, who was alcoholic and abusive. We can find no records on his father at all, family tradition pegs him as illegitimate, and my great grandmother’s family came over dirt poor from Ireland. My father never graduated high school before he had to go to work and support the rest of the family.

My mom’s side, well…lots of Cornell alumni, a few high ranking scientists, lawyers and programmers for companies like GM, IBM and Kodak, all decending from William the Conqueror. She was a physical therapist before she got sick. I grew up in a 4 member household where a few years Christmas was cancelled due to financial circumstances.

I guess to one side of the family I’m an inspiration, and to the other I’m a massive disapointment :smack:

18

My mother’s parents were farmers when she was born in 1918, but they lost their farm and became tenant farmers. She ran away and got married (not to my dad) at 17. I can’t remember what kind of work her husband did, but it was bad. And she did laundry and sewing. By the time she met my dad, she owned her own business.

My father’s parents were also farmers, but unlike most farm families of the time, they didn’t pull their kids out of school after the 4th grade. My dad was the first person in the whole town that went to college.

19

My mother’s father’s family came out of the slums of London… Mom told me that Grampa would be running out the back door of his childhood home as the police were running in the front, and my great-grandmother was delaying them for the necessary few minutes.

They found my great-grandfather floating face-down in the Thames in 1905… robbed for his pocket-watch.

Before the mid-nineteeth century, it was ‘agricultural labourers’ in Surrey all the way back to the 1600s, as near as we can tell.

My mother’s mother was considerably more genteel… which goes a long way towards explaining why they left England and came to Canada in 1928. Just in time to hit the Great Depression <shudder>.

At one point, Grampa was quartermaster for the Army, and his family was one of only two in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, to have meat (the other being the mayor). Grampa was a tinkerer and an inventor and they moved around a lot in those days. Mom told me tales of walking to school in -40 temperatures on the wooden sidewalks of Regina…

Later, the Second World War came and Grampa took his family to Ontario in 1939 to teach mechanics for the Army.

My father’s side? We don’t know much at all.

20

Hmm… I only know about half of the bloodlines, but here goes:

My Dad’s Maternal Grandfather:
Stablemaster for the Last Czar. Was told to get the hell out of Russia when it was known that the Bolsheviks were going to overthrow the govenment.

My Dad’s Paternal Grandfather:
Not much is known about him. Immigrated to USA in 1913 from Zombor, Hungary. This was obtained fromthe Ellis Island Archives. We’re not sure if the record I found is in fact for my family, as the last name is one letter off. It is my GGF’s first name though, and the spelling archived would be the ‘correct’ spelling of our last name. It is believed that he was an orphan, and all my father remembers about him is a serial number tattooed on his forearm.

My Dad’s Father:
Was a medic/dentist for the Army during WWII. He was an alcoholic, and he and my dad never got along too well. I’m not sure what he did after the war, etc. He died when I was 10 or 11 (11 or 12 years ago).

My Dad’s Mother:
Died a couple years after my grandfather. I believe she was a Rosie during WWII.

My Dad:
Born in 1947. Graduated East Detroit High School, class of 1966. Drafted by the US Army, serving from 1967-1969. Was never sent to Vietnam, as he is left handed, and there was a job for him to do in Ft. Bliss, Texas as a result of his unique left-handed abilities (he can write backwards on a glass wall). Was a draftsman, garbageman, and various other odd jobs before getting a job with Ford Motor Company in 1971. Was briefly married in the early '70’s. Met my mother in 1978 or 1979. Married her in 1980, I was born in 1981. Nearly got fired from FoMoCo in the early '80s for absenteeism related to alcoholism. Was suspended, UAW got his job back for him. Was given the choice of the bottle or his wife, and thankfully chose my mother. He became one of the most respected technicians at his plant, and was sent to Europe twice to work on new programs. He retired in January, and has been enjoying it since. He still regrets that he never went to college.

Now, my Mom’s side, which is much, much shorter.

My Mom’s Maternal Grandparents:
Irish immigrants who became farmers in Muncie, Indiana. My GGM is still alive and well, my GGF died when I was three.

My Mom’s Dad:
Awarded the Purple Heart in Korea. May have also recieved a Bronze or Silver Star, but I can’t remember and my mom’s cell phone is off. I’m not sure what he did for a living after that, I think he was a farmer though. He died in the mid 1970s of a heart attack.

My Mom’s Mom:
I think she worked in an office in Muncie while married to my mom’s dad. She remarried, to one of his best friends. They own a hunting lodge in eastern Wyoming now, which some of you who are into that kind of thing may have heard of. I don’t know how she does everything that she does, as she pretty much runs the lodge by herself.

My Mom’s Step-Dad:
A racist, sexist, everything-else-ist bastard. Complains all day. Always looking for a quick buck, and always scheming something. His bad business deals have forced them into keeping the lodge even though it’s difficult to run at their age.

My Mom:
Born in 1956. Did not graduate high school, but received a GED shortly after marrying my father. Moved frequently through her youth, and is still a bit afraid of African Americans due to living in Jacksonville, Florida, within a mile of Black Panther’s local HQ. Ran away from home at 16, marrying my brother’s father. He was an abusive sack of shit, and she divorced him in the late 1970s. Was pregnant 6 times, only carried two of us to term (I was the last). My brother was born in 1975, her divorce was probably in 1977 or 1978. She became a certified mechanic after getting her GED. She started working part time when I was 6 or 7, at the local intermediate school district as a lunch aide. She later became a full-time paraprofessional, but quit due to injuries in 2002. She is intensely interested in special education, because she is (undiagnosed) dyslexic. She thinks she would have done much better in school with all of the advancements made in special ed in the last 40 years, as she was (and is) ADD/mildly dyslexic.

Then there’s me. I’m was an underachiever until I started caring about school (2 years ago) and will graduate with my B.A. in Secondary Education next April. I’ll be going immediately to grad school to work on my Ph.D. or Ed.D. I will be the first in my immediate family to attain any post high school degree at all.