My dad grew up dirt poor in the coal camps of West Virginia during the Depression. One of my uncles actually died from a lack of indoor plumbing (he got dysentery from contaminated well water). A couple of weeks ago on the Simpsons, Monty Burns remarked that his mother had died from a lack of indoor plumbing - I guess it was supposed to be a humorous way of exaggerating his age - but people in America really did die from contaminated water until fairly recently.
The most remote paternal ancestor I have been able to discover is found in the 1850 census as an inmate in the Cabell County, Virginia jail. No idea what he was in for.
I managed to get a Ph.D. in engineering. On the other hand, it was from a state school.
Two brothers, sheep-thieves in England (a hanging offense)
A Mayflower passenger or two, I think
Irish peasants, came through Ellis Island and eventually went to N. Dakota. In pictures, you can tell the Irish people from the ones who grew up in America because they’re so tiny, while their children are average-sized. Better nutrition, I guess.
Okies! Lots of Okies!
Two of my great-grandmothers divorced their no-good husbands
My grandmother’s mother couldn’t afford to keep her (single divorced mom in 1919), so left her with relatives. When she could finally afford to feed her daughter, she came back, only to find that the family had adopted her and didn’t want to let her go. My grandmother was kidnapped by her own mother, and they took off for California! They worked at an orange-juice stand for awhile.
My grandfather’s family would camp out next to rivers, not always having a house; his mother ran a chuckwagon. He worked his way through college by saving up his pay as an oil-rig worker until he could live on it for a year or so. It took him a long time to graduate.
My only middle-class ancestor was a printer in Toronto and New York.
My paternal grandfather was forced to leave home at the age of 13 during the Dust Bowl era of the '30’s because his family couldn’t afford to feed him anymore. He worked as a migrant worker through his teens. He worked in Alaska for several years, and went on to fight in both theaters during WWII. He later settled in Boston and became an electrician and rode his motorcycle cross country several times. Interesting fella.
My paternal grandmother was a doctor from a family of Boston doctors, so she doesn’t count.
My maternal grandparents were both the children of Polish immigrants who came here around the turn of the century. Both had small farms in Massachusetts, and they were poor but respectable. I do remember the story of TB sweeping through the whole herd of my grandmother’s father’s cattle during the Depression, leaving only one cow uninfected.
My maternal grandfather was disabled and was kicked out of his parents’ house during the Depression because he was unable to work. Growing up, my mother was so poor that she and her brothers would wear the same pair of shoes for years until they literally fell apart.
My mother is an incredibly smart person and won a full scholarship to Harvard - “full” except they wouldn’t pay the bus fare for her to get there (from northern New Jersey) - so she ended up going to Berkeley instead, because they agreed to cover her plane fare as well. She was the first person in her family to go to college, where she lost the Sopranos-like accent that every single living blood relative she knows (apart from her kids!) still has.
Mom’s grandfathers were a grocer and a tailor; her father started out as a tailor as well, and then parlayed that into a small but busy custom-drapery business. Dad’s grandfathers were a winemaker and an orchestra leader; his father was a dentist. Mom went to business college for a year, Dad completed his degree in psychology (and then became a bookie, go figure.) The rest of my family is firefighters and cops (with a few junkies just to keep things interesting.)
On the WryGuy’s side of the family, there’s nothing but lawyers on his dad’s side as far back as we can see. His maternal grandfather was a piano-maker.
My father’s family used to be landed Hungarian gentry - we even had our own coat of arms. WWII changed that. My grandmother and father were in a displaced persons camp in Austria. They were able to flee to America in 1951. My father has been pretty poor to lower middle class since. That side of the family is a little screwy. We might not have much but we act like we’re landed Hungarian gentry still.
My mom’s family though descended from the royal Stewart line have been poor/working class for generations. From sailors to preachers to farmers to construction workers and phone company employees.
My maternal grandfather is the interesting one in our family. He grew up in the Appalachian foothills and started work in the coal mines when he was fourteen. As a coal miner he was paid 24c per ton of coal he brought out. At the time he was 5’4 and 120 pounds. His father, who also worked in the mines finally advised him that he could never feed a family that way, he just wasn’t big enough to bring a living wage out of the mines.
He left in his late teens and hopped a train to Michigan. After a couple of years picking crops he came back and married my grandmother. Among his later business ventures were: Owner of a Ford Dealership as the Edsel was introduced, owner of the Red Dot Diner, which featured service on roller skates, appliance salesman, and watermelon salesman.
He last saw a doctor before the war, when he was excused for lack of a thumb (lawnmower accident). He has had at least two strokes, which meant he went to bed for a couple hours. My grandparents are quite old now (mid-nineties) and he is starting to slow down. They celebrate their 72nd wedding anniversary this summer, and my grandfather has finally decided that driving long distances and moving his acre of land are probably not things he should do anymore. On the plus side he has a full head of hair and went gray in his mid-eighties so I did get the good genes.
My mother’s family was what might be called “the landed gentry.” We’ll leave her ancestors out of the discussion.
My father’s family has much more humble beginnings.
In the 1810 Personal Property tax rolls for Stafford County, VA, my gg grandfather is listed as having “absolutely nothing of value.” Poor guy - literally.
And having no plumbing or electricity isn’t that far removed from present day - when my parents got married in 1954 they moved into a house that had no indoor plumbing. My mother got pregnant with my oldest brother the first year of their marriage, and indoor plumbing was high on her list of demands.
My mom’s mom was the daughter of Spanish immigrants (*her * father fought in the Spanish-American War on the Spanish side) but I think they were relatively well-off. She was well-educated for a woman of her time, so it was not unusual that my mom not only went to college, but grad school, as well. (This was in the early 60s so it was still not a common thing.)
My mom’s father always claimed he was the son of an English and Austrian immigrant, an only child who was orphaned at 13 in Georgia, but we’ve since discovered his birth certificate was a total fake, so we have no idea. He was pretty well-educated and made a nice living, though (during WWII, anyway, when my mom was born) so I am not sure that his beginnings were all that humble.
My dad’s side of the family, OTOH, was pretty immigrant poor. His mom came here from Sicily as a 5 year old, was the oldest of 8 surviving children and had to quit school when her mom died to help raise the family. She got her high school GED at 65. Didn’t go to college, obviously. Her father (well, step father, as her dad died in an Austrian prison camp) was one of the few literate people in his town so he would write letters for all of the neighbors. (Not sure if he was literate in Italian or English or both.)
Nana married my grandpa at 18; he was the son of illiterate Sicilian immigrants. He himself has about a 6th grade education and spent most of his life working as a mechanic, a coal deliverer and working in an ice house (a job he finally retired from 3 years ago, when he turned 90).
My father was not the first of his family to go to college (a couple of my Nana’s brothers went on sports scholarships) but he was the first to have a Masters Degree and wound up being a teacher himself. His children all have college degrees; I also have a Masters and my sister is an optometrist. So on my paternal side, we did well in 2 generations, I think. (Of course, my father’s sister and her kids all became teen parents and some didn’t even finish high school, let alone go to college, so figure that out.) My mom’s side we were right on par, I guess. Her brother has a PhD.
Grandmother: Her family has a large history, going back to colonial times. I believe a few ancestors were with Roger Williams, and my research found a couple of ancestors that were killed by Native Americans while they traveled with Daniel Boone. It is believed that the family came over from England as indentured servents. As to close relatives of my grandmother, they were basically “trailer trash” from the Southern United States. I’m not too sure about my grandmother’s immediate family, though. I do know that when her brother died in January, people mostly wore t-shirts and jeans to his funeral. Yee-haw.
Grandfather: His family is made up of farmers that went to Iowa from Stavanger, Norway between the 1890s and the early 1900s. Although I did find one record of a relative of mine arriving to Iowa as late as 1921. While my great-grandmother and her brothers were born in Iowa, I believe her parents came from Norway. My great-great-grandfather and a few friends-turned-in-laws came from Norway to farm in Iowa and even founded a town there but the town is no longer there.
Mother’s Side
I know that my mother’s maternal grandmother was dirt poor and a single mother. My maternal grandfather’s family came from Scotland and took up residence in the Southern United States. Eventually they too moved to Iowa. My grandfather and his many siblings were born in Iowa.
I probably missed something, but that’s the gist of it. Mostly farmers in Iowa.
My father and uncle, and my paternal grandfather…all doctors. But my
great-grandfather was a Civil War vet who settled in Kansas after the war to become a farmer. He had about twelve kids, of whom most ended up becoming professional people. In addition to my grandfather, there was at least one other doctor, and, I think, an engineer. From the looks of things, my grandfather’s family was reasonably well off from farming, but evidently several of the kids wanted nothing to do with it. Before my great grandfather’s time, they were mostly typical farmer-pioneers, until we get all the way back to New Amsterdam where they didn’t have the forsight to hold on to a block in Manhattan.
My other grandfather had to drop out of school after the eighth grade. It’s strange to think that for many, an eighth grade education was considered to be a completed endeavor. You went to one school, for eight grades, then you graduated from “school”, and you were done. But he did well in sales, and they took in some poorer relatives during the Depression.
So you could say in my family, it is two or three generations back that they made the change from rural life to urban middle-class life.
Apparently, my German grandfather murdered one of his children in a fit of rage. (Kicking her in the head. She never recovered, and had to be kept in a continuous cast so that she could not move her head. She eventually died and my grandfather fled East Germany to escape prosecution. This differs greatly from the lies I was fed)
I found this out on my last trip home (from my uncle) and I was only trying to track my family tree. Apparently, it’s going to stop with this murderous child-killer. My uncle (and his siblings) apparently never got over this, and it seems to be a stopping point for all of them as far as family history goes…
Suddenly I hate having part of that sonofabitches’ blood running through me.
None of my grandparents finished high school. In fact, my paternal grandmother went to the fourth grade before quitting to work in a mill. Not sure about my great-grandparents, all of whom came to the US from Italy, but I don’t think any of them were high school grads, either. I’ve been to the town in Italy where my maternal grandfather was born, and it has a population of less than 100.
My maternal grandparents had six daughters, and all six of them graduated from college. This is somewhat remarkable, given their social status and the mores of the time. Several, including my mother, have postgraduate degrees, as well.
Slough pronounced to rhym with cow. The corner of 16th St and Mission in San Francisco is quite like Slough (Grubby, dangerous feeling, tramps and ho’s mixing with people just getting from A to B, near good places but not good itself).
I learnt some time back that my Great Grandfather was a Ring Master at Blackpool Circus (how cool is that), so I don’t feel like I have humble origins.
One of my great-grandmothers (my father’s grandmother) was a foundling, left in a basket in a railroad station. All of the men in that side of the family were railroad workers and that’s how she ended up in our family.
My grandparents on my mother’s side were from northern New Mexico, their family were Hispanos or descendants of Spanish colonists who lived in the mountains around Santa Fe and Albuquerque for generations. Until the New Deal, they were pretty much isolated there in small farms, and most people still spoke only Spanish even though the area had been “American” for almost 100 years by then. They basically raised all their own food in the communities, and depended on mules and horses for transportation.
They weren’t necessarily poor or downtrodden, but to go from that life in the 1930’s to “mainstream” America by the 1950s and 1960s was pretty incredible I imagine. A lot of the men from that area served in WWII, and that brought them rather suddenly into the wider world.
Lessee: Dad’s got a Ph.D. in Sociology, earned at 50 while working full-time (plus teaching night school); he took a Master’s in history before that. He was a scout in the U.S. Army in WWII, and is one of five children. His parents were Irish Catholics, and I believe that at least one of them was born in Ireland (the other one may have been born in the U.S. to recent immigrants). His father was a senior NCO in the U.S. Navy (and apparently a hell of a boxer, and not a very nice man).
Mom was from Amsterdam. Her mother died during WWII, and her 3 brothers did also (or shortly thereafter). Her dad survived Buchenwald; he had been a longshoreman, a labor organizer, a prominent Communist, a city councilman, and eventually sat in the legislature of the province of North Holland. If you can read Dutch, you can read about him youself: http://www.iisg.nl/bwsa/bios/seegers.html .
Somewhere in Mom’s background is a dispossessed Polish countess, but that’s abut it for “blue blood.”
I come from a long line of intermittently employed Liverpool dockers. Seriously. Downtrodden proletariat for as far back as we can be bothered to trace them.
All the great-grandparents I know anything about came over from Germany. At least one did it to escape debts, but they were mostly farmers. My father’s grandparents and uncles worked as farm hands and saved up enough to buy a dairy farm. Then they all worked it together until only my great-grandfather was left (the rest died - one in the flu epidemic, and the rest of various kinds of disease and accident).
My father’s father drove a truck until the company went bankrupt. Then he became a furniture salesman. My father’s mother never made it past eighth grade either - her father died and she had to go to work. A friend of the family helped her thru secretarial school, and she was a secretary for forty-some years.
My mother’s mother was the closest to blue blood. Her family thought very highly of themselves, and it was a major scandal when she married my grandfather, who was a carpenter after the Great War.
They met when her high school asked their female students to write to the soldiers serving in France - to keep them on the straight and narrow and away from the mademoiselles in the fleshpots of Paris. (If you ever knew my grandmother, you would realize how funny that is. ) Then my grandfather wrote back asking to meet in person, and they got married. He died when my mom was pregnant with me. My grandmother died fourteen years after that. Her last words were calling his name.
My mom put my dad thru college and veterinary school. He was the first in the family to go to college. My grandfather thought it was a total waste of time, and wouldn’t support it. My maternal grandfather also thought my dad was a loser because he wanted to get married without a steady job, and absolutely forbid the match. My father left the house crushed, my mother ran to her room in tears. Then my grandmother went to work on my grandfather. Two hours later, he reluctantly consented to allow this obvious fiasco to occur, and even loaned them money for a down payment on their first house. My father once mentioned that one of the most satisfying moments of his life was paying the loan back to his father-in-law, in full and with interest.
) Then my grandfather wrote back asking to meet in person, and they got married. He died when my mom was pregnant with me. My grandmother died fourteen years after that. Her last words were calling his name.
mixed blood is light blue blood I suppose ?