Maternal great-grandparents (Larson and Jensen), born in the 1850’s in Ringsted, Denmark, and came to the US in the 1880’s. Bred for awhile in Pennsylvania and then moved west to Iowa.
Maternal-maternal great-grandfather from Switzerland in 1878. He went back four or five years later to work in a bank in Romania for a year and then went into the cheese business (what else?) in Green County, Wisconsin. The fraternal side came to Penn’s Colony from the German-Dutch border country in 1683.
Dad’s family, Welsh, 1790s, to Baltimore, Maryland. They started a masonry business, with quarries in the county, which supplied the stone for the structure that became the first Washington Monument on Mount Vernon Square in the city. (The guy that designed that monument also designed the one in Washington, D.C.)
Mom’s family, English, to New Freedom, Pennsylvania, around the same time. They eventually ended up with most of the farmland that became Parkton, Maryland. All of them are there to this day, except for one crazy cousin who lives in Timonium and me. The live ones are in the houses, the dead ones are in the ground nearby.
My mom immigrated from the US to Canada, arriving here in the 1970s and becoming a citizen I believe in 1995. (She didn’t necessarily mean to settle here - she came to study - but then she met my dad while here.)
If you mean immigrant to North America, the most recent I’m sure of is that both of my grandmother’s parents were immigrants to the U.S. - my great-grandfather from Korea, my great-grandmother from Bohemia. Which is pretty amazing, as I’m told that there were very few Koreans in the U.S. at that time, and that neither of those communities were known for marrying outside their community and certainly not with people of other races.
My most recent ancestor was my paternal grandmother who (cough, cough) snuck over the US-Mexico border in 1946. Her husband was second generation American, while my mom’s ancestors either were Native American or came here before the Civil War.
My husband’s parents, from Germany, 1964.
Paternal Grandparents: Grandmother came over in '56 from Bosnia, preceded by my grandfather from Serbia. Dad was born and grew up in Kew, Melbourne. Didn’t learn English until he was 7 and still has a slight accent.
My mother: Born in Kent, grew up in Nigeria and Wellington before coming to Australia in '82.
My father’s mother’s mother was born in Bohemia in 1882, came to the USA, and married (I’m not sure which of the latter two events happened first). She then went back to Europe (I believe she was accompanied by her husband on the voyage, but am not sure of the fact). At any rate, she had a daughter Frances and son Frank, whose names both commemorated the fact that Great-Grandma spent some time in France during her period of trans-Atlantic travel. She finally returned to Ohio for good shortly before daughter Elizabeth, who would become Dad’s mother, was born in 1909.
So it’s been about 100 years since any of my ancestors resided outside this country. However, an aunt and my sister did each live in (West) Germany for about a year – Aunt Sharon went to Munich for the Summer Olympics in '72, found work, and bummed around Europe for a while after she quit her job. About fifteen years later, my sister’s career took her to Bad Homburg shortly before the German reunification.
My maternal grandmother was born in Hamburg, Germany in about 1902, while her Ukrainian family was in transit to Connecticut. She married my granddad, a first-generation Italian American born in Bridgeport in 1899, bore two daughters, and died in 1940.
How should it be pronounced? Or is that none of our cotton pickin bidness? :dubious:
1840s or thereabouts - Great great grandfather, an O’Malley, brought his whole family over from Connaught, Ireland to the Maritimes, Canada. Something to do with potatoes, if the family stories are right.
Nobody has moved from there until recently: my uncle (still bearing the O’Malley name) headed west to Alberta in '88, but none of us have ever immigrated from Canada until me, who moved to west coast US a couple years ago, and I just got my Green Card in July of this year. 
Both my parents from Czechoslovakia, via a stint in Germany, in 1957.
I was my family’s first US citizen by birth.
Most recent is my paternal grandfather, who left the Ukraine with most of his family in 1919, and arrived in the US (by way of Rumania, Palestine, and Marseilles) with his younger brother in 1926.
I don’t think cotton is grown there. 
“Daviess” is pronounced “Davis.” People are always trying to fancy it up, or something, by saying “Dave-eeze” or “Davey-ess.”
Glad you cleared that up. I’ve come across “Daviess” in my research and pronounced it at it appears. (There’s a germ for another MPSIMS thread: place names that aren’t pronounced at they look.)
A maternal great-grandmother came over from Yorkshire in 1851 at the age of 14 months. Being a practical toddler, she brought her parents with her.
My earliest ancestors came over in the early 1630s. They included the Rev. Stephen Batchelder who, having been born in 1557 or 1559 (I forget which), is surely in the running for the title Oldest (i.e., earliest born) American Immigrant. (Course, he blew it by returning to England about 1654).
I actually have at least six great-grandparents who emigrated to the U.S. around the same time, all but one of whom came from Québec to New England (all eventually to Maine) around the turn of the century. The other came from Ireland. Her future husband, a 1st gen. American of Irish ancestry, was already here. There’s another great grandmother who was reportedly a resident of a village in Aroostook County that no longer exists in a distinct sense. She died before the earilest recollection or testimony of any relative my father was able to query about her (she was on his side), and we know nothing for certain about her ancestry. Based on some photographic evidence, it’s thought she may have been at least significantly of Native American ancestry, but whether she came from Canada (New Brunswick or Québec would seem to be most likely) or Maine is completely unknown.
I think the most recent ancestor by date to reach the U.S. would be the Irish woman, my father’s mother’s mother.
As for me, my grandmother, Mary McKenna, fleeing Depression-era Cape Breton (I know, but sometimes your CAN tell the difference) to follow her sisters as a maid in Detroit, Boston, and eventually NY, where she met my (3rd generation Irish-American) grandpa and settled in Brooklyn. She came and went back and forth a lot in the early days but seems to have first arrived around 1932. She never got to finish high school but all five of her kids went to college (not fancy sleepaway ones, but still). Ah, the Merkun dream!
According to family lore my one of my maternal great-great-grandmothers came from Ireland during the Potato Famine and her family had a horse and mule farm in Alabama in the decade before the Civil War. Supposedly her son (my great-grandfather, who lived from 1866-1939) spoke with a slight Irish brogue because his mother’s was so thick. However, since her first name was Mary and her surname was both common and spelled several different ways in different sources (Robison, Robeson, Robinson and even sometimes Robertson) and entries in the Census for her son actually contradict this (they list Alabama as his mother’s place of birth, but otoh I’ve known census records to be wrong or inconsistent several times) I haven’t been able to verify or refute this (though I’m guessing she wasn’t).
Anyway, if she was Irish it was my great-great-grandmother in the late 1840s/1850s. Of the remaining family lines there are two I can’t definitively trace (including my own surname) before 1800 but of those I can the most recent arrival would have been a German wheeler who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1745 (and was in Virginia by 1752). All of the rest came to Virginia or Charleston from Great Britain or German speaking lands (especially Switzerland) between 1610 and 1735 save for a native and possibly for a black slave (the other "can’t absolutely search but lots and lots of circumstantial evidence for an ancestor who crossed the color line ca. 1800).
You mean that isn’t just everything in English? :dubious:
(Couldn’t resist, couldn’t resiiiiiiist! I’ll take myself to the corner with a book held on each stretched hand now, ok?)
One of my great-grandfather’s was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States to avoid being drafted into the military, while Bismarck wasin power.