Several dozen generations of Irish farmers (on D’Mother’s side) and several dozen Scottish farmers (on dad’s side). My generation were apparently the first to not walk 20 miles to school in 8 foot snow drifts, barefoot…
I’m not sure I follow; I would assume ‘bluebloods’ would denote someone of royal descent. But okay, I be gone.
I’ve always been amazed and amused by the number of people who claim royal ancestry too. I’ve also spoken to numerous unrelated people who claim to be direct descendants of Jesse James. :rolleyes:
Before coming to Australia both sides of the family came from humble beginnings. My father’s ancestors were farmers from England and my mother’s side came to SA to escape religious persecution in Germany. Both families arrived around 1840.
Most of them on both sides of the family came to North America from Scotland. I haven’t got much traced back beyond the 1850’s. One worked in the textile mills in Paisley (which will explain a lot to anyone who knew me in the 1980’s - paisleys were my 'ooh, I’m an attention-seeking teenager" trademark!) before heading to Canada.
Once they got here, it was Little House on the Prairie time - they came from various parts of the East Coast in covered wagons and wound up in Kansas.
One branch of my dad’s family tree came from England to Virginia, but I’m not sure when or from what part of England. I found a census online from 1840’s Bath that had tons of people with my maiden name, but I’ve yet to connect any of them to our branch.
My family tree’s pretty much all tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and knockabout tradesmen of Scotch-Irish and English descent, and all were in eastern Arkansas by the beginning of the twentieth century, having picked up and moved there from Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. Anyone who left the eastern states and settled in Arkansas in the mid-nineteenth century generally had a good, and often not particularly creditable, reason for doing so – Arkansas at that time was the bad end of the earth. The more ambitious types generally took a look around and kept moving, while those who were mainly trying to get away from something back east figured they’d gone far enough to escape notice and plopped down among the swamps and wilderness.
Apparently, my great-great-grandfather was among the more prominent citizens of Tuckerman, Arkansas in the 1870s, but that’s sort of like being the liveliest guy in the cemetary. Among the ancestors I have some personal knowledge of, my paternal grandfather was a sharecropper, tenant farmer, carpenter, and housepainter whose only steady jobs with a regular paycheck as far as I can tell were working on construction crews that built training airbases in Arkansas during WWII, and in a shipyard near Houston for a year or so near the end of the war (he was in his late 30s by the time the war started, with five kids by then, so he avoided military service as long as possible). He was in his late 50s by the time I came along, and I don’t ever remember him going to a regular job. My grandmother mainly raised the five kids and took in sewing, which she still did well into her 70s. I don’t know that I ever asked, but I seriously doubt she stayed in school much past 12 or 13 years old (my grandfather did graduate from high school).
My father was president of his high school Future Farmers of America chapter, and was offered a partial scholarship coming out of high school as a result of that, but neither he nor the family could afford the rest of the costs, so he enlisted in the army (three of his four brothers also entered the military right out of high school, with only the youngest, who graduated high school in 1969, and was in a fair way to get sent to Vietnam like the second oldest, didn’t enlist). After his hitch was up, Dad stayed in the National Guard and went to work, first in a Revere cookware factory, then for the state highway department where he learned surveying, then for the Federal Government in the Department of Agriculture, where he stayed for the next 30 years. In his early 30s, he began taking community college classes with G.I. Bill funds, driving 50 miles each way three or four nights a week after working a full-time job during the day. He eventually got transferred to Fayetteville so that he could work half-time and go to school half-time, and graduated from the University of Arkansas at age 38 – the first person born into either side of my family to graduate from college.
On my mom’s side, my grandfather was a tenant farmer in the summer and a bookkeeper in general stores during the winter for many years, moving the family into and out of town seasonally. During WWII, the family moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he worked on the construction of the nuclear facility there for a year or so. After the war, they moved back to Arkansas, where he eventually bought a country general store in Reydell, Arkansas, which he ran until his early death in 1956, when my mom was still in high school. My grandmother likewise mainly raised the kids until after his death, when she started doing general office work (she had a high school education, with the smarts for a lot more). Her family was the exception to the Scotch-Irish/English makeup of my heritage – she was descended from a community of Italian immigrants who settled around Grays and Patterson, Arkansas in the late 19th century – I know that her mother, who lived until I was six or so, was born in the U.S. to fairly well assimilated parents sometime in the 1880s. My grandmother stopped working after re-marrying in the early 1970s to a prominent local bank vice-president. She’s survived two husbands, two of her grandsons and one of her daughters, breast cancer, a benign brain tumor, and is still thriving in her 94th year.
My mom was able to start college, but after she made a C in Spanish her first semester my grandfather declined to pay her tuition, room and board any longer, so she moved to Memphis, took secretarial courses and went to work. She moved back to Arkansas a couple of years later and met and married Dad, who’d just finished his Army hitch not long before. Neither of my mother’s two older sisters attended college at all, and her younger brother didn’t until after completing several tours of duty in the Air Force; he eventually graduated a few years after my dad, at a similar age.
I was the first person on either side of my family to enter college straight out of high school and earn a degree in four years, the first to attend graduate school, etc. Out of fifteen or so cousins (my parents’ and their siblings’ children), there are only three of us with college degrees – my sister and myself, and one of my Dad’s nieces. At least two have served prison sentences for drug-related offenses (one of whom has since died).
Humble enough?
My best guess is that my dad’s side of the family had something to do with wine production in Germany. Since they settled waaaay up in the hills in Kentucky, they probably weren’t wealthy winery owners. Records date them in America no later than 1720, farmers all. There’s one relative who jumped ship in New York, a few generations back, but I’m not sure how he figures on the family tree. My grandpa worked in the Oklahoma oilfields and never graduated grade school. My grandma was purchased from her unwed mother for the price of one milk cow. Her adoptive family used her to do the heavy work at the laundry they managed once she reached third grade and was deemed educated enough for their purposes.
My aunt was the first person on that side of the family to graduate high school and even went on to become a registered nurse. My dad finished college, of course, but his claim to non-blue-blood fame is that he was the first person in their family to be born in a hospital. He also has a cousin who has lived in a tree for the past thirty years and has no visible means of support other than selling eggs. I think that falls under eccentric, not non-blue blood though.
My mom’s side of the family is good old farmer types from Scotland and Ireland. They’re quite fancy compared to my dad’s side of the family, even sending their girls to college since the 1920’s. There is that one great great whatever uncle who managed to kill himself because he refused to eat anything but pot roast. And the one great great aunt who was a madam in an Arizona mining town, but otherwise…
“I was born a poor German immigrant farmer…”
Okay, I wasn’t. But my ancestors were. And so were quite a few of their descendants, until the mid-to-late 20th century. My folks grew up on farms, no electricity, no running water, no a.c. or heat, walking to school and back, etc.
My great, great,…, great grandfather on my father’s side stowed away on a ship from Germany. Given the lack of documentation when he arrived, we can’t trace things back any farther. My mother’s family came from England and France, but the name is German. Unfortunately, they kept no history going back more then a few generations, so nobody is really sure of our origins there.
Chefguy: Anybody with relatives on the Mayflower has hallowed ancestry on this side of the pond. But I’m just kidding. Come back.
My maternal great-grandfather came over from Ireland through Ellis Island. My paternal great-grandfather was born in a jail in Nova Scotia.
Pretty freaking humble.
Aplogizing in advance if this turns into a threadjack…
“We used to DREAM of living in a corridor!”
Hmmm…well, my mother’s father was an underpaid cop in Maryland and like rackensack’s family was from a long line of tenant farmers and sharecroppers, only in Mississippi instead of Arkansas.
Father’s parents were first-generation immigrant from the Krajina region of old Yugoslavia ( at that time part of Hapsburg Croatia, but largely Serb-populated ) from around WW I. His father was coalminer in Export, Pennsylvania and he grew up on a subsistence farm. Never have traced the genealogy back much in the Old Country, but apparently my grandmother’s most notable known ancestor was a ( de facto mercenary ) captain of “Croatian” calvary with Napoleon, whose apparently favorite war story was about eating a truly superb bowl of soup in some Paris eatery. Given the glorious scope of that oft-repeated tale from my grandmother, I imagine the family never ranked much above the level of peasant/mercenary :D.
- Tamerlane