Just having seen the new season of Who Do You Think You Are? (which I always think of as Just Who the Fuck Do You Think You Are?), I got to a-pondering. Do those of you who are descended from immigrants or slaves or other teeming masses have any contact with The Old Country/ies?
Three of my grand- or great-grandparents came from Russia (Kiev, Odessa and Ekaterinoslav) and one grandparent from somewhere in Transylvania (he was so mum about it I suspect a servant named Renfield was involved).
I have never visited any of these places and have no desire to, though the three Russian towns are quite lovely, I understand. My sister once told our grandmother she wanted to visit Russia and see the Old Family Manse in Odessa, and Grandmom said, “are you nuts? We were happy to get the hell out!”
My coworker Audrey once went back to Africa and came back shaken: “Slavery was awful, of course,” she said, “but I am so glad I live here now and not there!” I kind of feel the same way about the Czars.
Eve - Was this the Martin Sheen ep? I found it funny that one ancestor was a hero for rebelling against the legally established government (the Irish one) and the other was a hero for fighting for the legally established government (the Spanish one). Something tells me they’d be heroes no matter what. And the great great grandmother who was described as being so loyal to have hidden the 6 illegitimate kids she had with the GG Grandfather? She was a peasant and he was a judge. In these days that would probably be considered some form of sexual slavery.
Yes–it was very interesting; I love the show, even though so many of the celebs are *so *full of themselves, and regular folks like you and I don’t have production companies flying us all over the world and doing the research groundwork for us.
Nope, no ties here. On my mother’s side, my ancestors immigrated from Ireland much too long ago to have maintained any ties. On my father’s side, my Jewish great-grandparents immigrated from Eastern Europe after World War I. The remaining Jewish population of those areas was almost completely wiped out during the Holocaust.
For example, Kaunas, Lithuania, where one set of great-grandparents immigrated from, had a pre-World War II Jewish population of 35%. It’s now 0%.
I know my paternal grandparents and my maternal great-grandparents came from Poland in the early 1900s, but they never really talked about the old country. I don’t know if anyone living knows specifically where our roots are. I expect I may have some relatives still living there, but I don’t speak the language and I have no idea where to start looking. Oh well…
My mother made contact with one of my father’s ancestors in England, and she met him on a trip there. He took her to visit Chatham Yard, where one of her own ancestors was held prisoner aboard one of the prison hulks in the 1830’s.
As far as I know, both sides of my family have been in America for several generations. I’m also a mongrel with a fourth czech being the most of anything that I am. So, with no real Old Country traditions, no idea where my foreign relatives might be living or any feeling that I’m anything besides an American, I’ve never explored my roots and probably never will. (The only things I know is that one ancestor came from Paris where he was a train conductor, my grandmother has his book with all the prices for tickets in it, and another one emigrated from Luxembourg but he wasn’t from there originally. He had two sons who raised money in America to start a church but the one stole the money and ran off to Pennsylvania while the other came to West Virginia and started my paternal line. I also have a great-great uncle who was legitimately named Pee-Wee, no joke. Hillbillies is weird.)
I think the Mennonite half of my family tree would feel the same way about it - “What do you want to do, re-visit the Religious Persecution Tour of Europe?”
Dad’s side: Anglo-Scots-Irish mining folks, came over 1820something / German-Alsatian Lutheran church folks, came over 1840something.
Mom’s side: Italian and maybe a little Austrian or English hillbillies, came over ca. 1870, didn’t like it much, came back ca. 1890 / Belarusian-Ukrainian-god knows what (my mgm died about 1940 and her family never liked my mgf’s anyway).
Father’s side - 100% Irish. GG’Father from Ireland, we go home once every five years and they come here to visit in between.
Mother’s side - History mostly lost. From Ireland many generations ago, went to Georgia (USA) when it was the only safe place for Catholics. Her GG’Mother was an African slave. Not much more infomation than that is available on her side. The whole oral history was quashed as Catholic heritage became a severe handicap and everybody tried to pass for white. They held on to their land though, and that upheld them throught the ebb and flow of social stigma.
With the right ancestors it could be both interesting and fun. Start with the original family area in Britain, then follow them over to Holland, Switzerland and France for the whole Huguenot thing, then over to the US, Brazil and South Africa.
I have a substantial number of ties on my dad’s side, all in Austria and southern Germany as my paternal grandfather found my paternal grandmother while Patton was visiting his family’s homeland on official business. I’ve been there twice, often enough I still sometimes want cold cuts and hard rolls for breakfast and ice cream in strong espresso as a mid-afternoon pick-me-up. Culturally, my dad’s side was comfortably middle-class going back before the First World War, at least tracing down my paternal grandmother’s side.
My mom’s family is what I like to call North-Western European Mutt; I know we have some ancestral ties to Norway, and almost certainly to Ireland as well, but after that it gets down to “Welsh, maybe” and “Oh, one of your distant ancestors was named Clinkingbeard; we think that’s French-Canadian” or drunk and poor, or, likely, both. We don’t have any ties to anyone on my mom’s side who didn’t have the luck to be born here. Culturally, there’s every evidence my mom’s side was the local equivalent of ‘starving peasant’ back to time immemorial.
So, on the whole, my ancestry is pretty much Average White American: Germanic, Irish, Norwegian, and Unknown Dead Honky. The only interesting part is, parts of my Germanic side came over recently enough I know I had relatives fighting on the wrong side of both world wars.
About 25 years ago, when I was a student in the UK, my sister visited me and we went together on a trip up to the north of Scotland. While in Inverness, we ran across a grocers who had their name painted on a sign over the door in enormous letters–coincidentally, it was our own last name. After we took each others’ photos standing under the sign, we went in and chatted with the couple who ran the place. We worked out that we were something like 4th cousins once or twice removed on our father’s side.
Some time later, my sister and I also visited Ireland, where our mother’s side of the family is from, but we met no distant relatives in the Dublin area.
I do like Scotland and Ireland, but I’m really more of an anglophile (which probably sends many of my ancestors rolling in their graves).
We have maintained contact since immigration (Italy, 1907). First my great-grandfather wrote to his sister, than his children wrote to their cousins, and now I write to my third cousins.
^ This is basically what grandma told us kids when we asked about going to Russia to see the Land of the Ancestors.
When we got older we also learned that, so far as anyone knew, all the villages we were related to had been obliterated in WWII and while we don’t know exactly where everyone wound up… well, someone asked my sister (the family geneologist) once if she had any interest in finding the graves of deceased relatives and visiting and she said something along the lines of we know where the ashpiles are at Auschwitz, and it’s depressing as hell to visit at any time of the year. No thanks.
On the other side - the Irish came over in 1860 or thereabouts, mainly looking for something to eat, and were happy to get the hell out of the old country. I had an aunt who found some distant relations there and corresponded briefly, even visited once, but the fact is that they’re total strangers even if they’re distant cousins and we have little to nothing in common. Don’t know why my German grandfather came here at 14, on his own, and he never discussed it with anyone. I’m not sure we could even trace the family back there, there’s no guarantee he was even using his original name.
Basically, everyone in the family who came from somewhere else was fleeing hunger, war, oppression, or death. They were more than happy to arrive here. Many, if not most, who elected to stay behind died, some of the quite horribly. While I would enjoy traveling abroad, I’m interested in seeing the present and not dredging up some rather horrible history. I would get no joy of it.
Nah, our link to the Old Country basically disappeared when my grandparents passed away. I have one aunt that has gone back to the Ukraine to visit where my grandfather grew up, and she probably has contact info for random people tangentially related to me, but for all intents and purposes I have no links back there.
My family left the Old Country more for better opportunities than persecution, so it wasn’t so hard to go back and visit, but once every couple of decades was enough!
Grandma and Grandpa Bodoni came to the US from Palermo, Sicily. Interestingly, they didn’t know each other in Sicily, but met and married in the US. I almost certainly have some relatives in Sicily today, but I don’t know of them. To complicate matters, Grandpa was adopted, and Bodoni wasn’t his birth name.
Grandma and Grandpa Bodoni came to the US because they thought that they’d have a better life here, and apparently they did.
Bodoni is my maiden name, by the way.
My mother’s family has been in the US for quite a few generations. Mostly they’re a British Isles mix (lots of Anglish, with some Irish and Scots), with a Native American added in four or five generations back. My maternal grandfather also claimed some Germanic heritage.
While it might be interesting to go to Palermo, there’s no way I could go back to the various places where my mother’s ancestor’s came from, because I just don’t know the specific places.
