Absolutely lovely kids. Anyone who looks at this and experiences fear or hatred needs to see a doctor. https://t.co/lxmUnVb8XV
— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) August 27, 2021
According to my maternal grandmother, her mother arrived in New York as a new (pregnant) widow with eight kids. Nana never stopped delighting in the fact that she, unlike her older siblings, was a ‘real’, native-born American. She married another Irish-American, from a family that arrived here a few generations earlier — in family lore, the first arrival on that branch came over as a replacement conscript for some native-born fortunate son during the Civil War.
My paternal grandfather was an Irish Catholic mustered out of the Royal Irish Constabulary in the late 1910s; given a choice of expatriation to any Commonwealth nation, he chose Canada. There he married another emigrant from his old home town, which wasn’t an uncommon practice. It wasn’t until after their deaths, and that of their only son, that we discovered she was born and raised a Protestant — their separate removals happened because, in their native land, falling in love with a member of the wrong religious clan was a potential death sentence. Even in Montreal, her extended family wasn’t pleased; the newlyweds moved to NYC almost immediately…
The kids in that photo at the top will, Murphy willing, grow up to be American citizens who share stories about arriving in Virginia with their kids and grandkids. Some of them will be more poetry than history. This, too, is America!
very cool thanks for sharing this good news https://t.co/9654MiT7DG
— World Famous Art Thief (@CalmSporting) August 28, 2021
the cognitive dissonance should be obvious: "we must help our afghan friends! also our afghan friends are not welcome in america!"
— Gerry Doyle (@mgerrydoyle) August 28, 2021
What now for Afghans arriving in America? https://t.co/TdzjRGRyVo
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) August 27, 2021
A thin length of yellow tape cordoned off the new arrivals – hundreds of Afghan refugees fresh off the plane from Kabul airport – from the intrusion of their new world, the grounds of an exhibition centre in Chantilly, Virginia.
Masoud, his wife and four children were among them, clutching plastic bags filled with blankets, toothbrushes and the like. Someone had given the girls notebooks, the kind American children will be going back to school with this week.
He had been a driver for US forces and then the Afghan government, he told BBC Persian. “Everyone knew who I was working for,” Masoud said…
When they landed at Dulles Airport, just outside Washington DC, men, women, children and the elderly were shepherded aboard a fleet of buses and taken to the centre that would give them temporary shelter.
Rows of neatly made beds with green covers made the cavernous place resemble the inside of a military barracks. A fleet of 20 or 30 portable toilets had been put in a back lot.
Some 300 people would spend the night there, BBC Persian was told before access to the centre was cut off to journalists.
A translator volunteering at the centre described seeing among the arrivals a young girl who had come with only a sister and cousins, but no parents. “Her mother had to choose between sending her daughter alone or keeping her in Afghanistan,” BBC Persian was told. Her relatives did not know when or if the girl’s mother would make it.
Another woman had just given birth five days earlier, but had kept quiet about her condition, bearing the pain all the way from Kabul to Virginia. The translator discovered that she was bleeding and called an ambulance, she said…
We will not be dissuaded from the task at hand. https://t.co/iMAk1UoX9N
— Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (@SecDef) August 27, 2021
pat
Dusty in here.
smedley the uncertain
One thing that got me is these people have been vetted long before their move out the country. The security checks run on them even before they began to work for us were in depth and validated many times over.
Mike in NC
I had a grandfather who was born in Scotland and emigrated to Canada and then America. Died long before I was born. Never even learned his first name. Other grandfather was born on Prince Edward Island. Never knew anything about him either. Not even a snapshot.
My grandmother grew up in a town in Nova Scotia called Antigonish. So did my wife’s grandmother. Both had the same names.
Baud
I wonder which family will get their first reality show.
Just Chuck
If it upsets Stephen Miller, it must be good.
geg6
This is a beautiful thing. I’m so happy they are here safely.
My paternal grandparents were immigrants from England, having come here, separately, in the 1890s as teenagers (I forget what years they landed). My maternal great-grandparents came from Ireland and Germany, respectively, in the late 1860s. The big scandal in my family was when my mom (Catholic) married my dad (Methodist). And even more scandal when my dad converted. Grandpa Gray was not bothered as much and we loved him. Grandma Gray, however, made it clear that we were the least favored grandchildren being that we were the reason my dad converted. Plus, she was grossed out that there were six of us rather than the respectable two or three that a proper British family should be.
Omnes Omnibus
Aw, the widdle Nazi is mad. Good. Fuck him.
Josie
@Omnes Omnibus: Agree totally.
sab
Our local Humane Society has a thrift store. We donatef urniture and household goods to it, and sometimes buy there. I often see immigrant families there. It’s possible to outfit a basic kitxhen from there for under 50 dollars. Do other cities have such places?
West of the Rockies
Feeling teary at that photo. Such joy, hope, promise…
Baud
It’ll be interesting to see who will be allowed to emigrate after August 31.
Matt McIrvin
I grew up in Chantilly and a couple of my high-school friends were from Afghanistan. Nice guys.
gwangung
@Omnes Omnibus: Quadrupling down.
I am tired of their xenophobic, racist asses. Bring them in. Bring them all in.
(Soon enough the Afghani immigrants’ll give side eye to all the kids who wanna date their sons and daughters, but that”s just the price they’ll have to pay).
Baud
There’s no cognitive dissonance. The point is to hurt Biden by offering different messages to different groups of voters.
Anne Laurie
@Matt McIrvin: Yes, one of the good things is that our government is making an effort to rehome the new immigrants where there’s already an Afghan ‘community’ to help them adapt.
Well-meaning (white) native-born Americans have their limits!
Gin & Tonic
I wish these Afghanis all the best, and do not begrudge them their visas, but I will note that my son is currently in Mexico City visiting his wife, because family reunification visas and/or green card applications are processed at a molasses-in-January pace.
dmsilev
Like so many of us, I see echoes of my ancestors there. Two of my grandparents came through Ellis Island as children in the early 1920’s, escaping the wars that wracked Poland and Russia in the aftermath of WWI. A few years ago, my mom made up a poster that was an enlargement of a photo of her mother and the caption ‘Refugee, 1921’, and brought it to several protests against TFG’s immigration-hatred policy.
(Once the microfilms from that era were digitized, around 2000 or so, I was actually able to find shipping manifests for a few ancestors. That was pretty nifty)
Adam L Silverman
If you’re looking for someone who is up and running to provide necessities to the inbound evacuees, this is a good one. It is being run by Afghan-American attorney Mirriam Seddiq:
You can also contact your local Jewish, Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, etc Family/Social Services to see if they need help either in donations or in bodies in regard to the inbound evacuees. You can also contact your local mosques and waqfs (the Islamic endowments that run the mosques).
Fun fact: seddiq means righteous in the ancient Semitic languages: biblical Hebrew and Aramaic. In modern Semitic languages, or those influence by them, it can range from righteous to friend.
dmsilev
Let’s try to live up to that ideal.
Baud
@Gin & Tonic:
Have you tried writing your Congress critter? Sometimes they can help unclog the bureaucracy.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Yep. If he thinks something is bad, it is clearly good.
dmsilev
@Baud: When my sister-in-law was applying for her green card, the local Rep’s office was a huge help. Many of them have one or more staffers dedicated to just immigration paperwork issues.
NYCMT
I’m sitting on the sofa in the living room of my grandfather’s house which he bought when he retired 50 years ago. 30 years before that he was in Biloxi Mississippi training with the first infantry division, The Big Red One. He landed with the third wave on Omaha Beach on D-Day. Five years before he landed on the beach, he was a prisoner in KZ Dachau, having been arrested on Kristallnacht. His parents, uncle and aunt and first cousin were on the Orinoco, the ship right after the St Louis that never was allowed to land any passengers at all.
They all died in Auschwitz.
I have strong feelings about this country and refugee admissions.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: Yes. It had no effect.
Matt McIrvin
@dmsilev: Remember how Stephen Miller was actively contemptuous of that poem, would go on about how it was a perversion of the meaning of the Statue of Liberty?
Baud
@Gin & Tonic:
I’m sorry. That stinks.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: Yes it does.
Brachiator
@Gin & Tonic:
For decades, Congress has refused to allocate enough funds or to channel the right resources to improve the immigration system.
I hope that things get better for everyone who has to deal with the system.
raven
@Gin & Tonic: My friends were legally married in New York and had to go back to Australia because the Aussie couldn’t get green card because they are gay.
dmsilev
@Matt McIrvin: I had forgotten that particular detail, but it’s very much in character for him.
Another Scott
My father’s father and mother got married during the Depression. The story I heard was that she was tried of being hungry. He was an immigrant from Athens, GR with a very, very Greek name. She divorced him when my dad was young, remarried, and my dad changed his last name (to a much more western European one).
I think a lot of his family records were probably lost in the various 20th Century wars.
I was surprised and amazed when I visited the Acropolis (in Greece for a conference) and there was a bronze statue in some gift shop or something on the hill. I looked down, and his toes were exactly like mine – middle toes longer than big toe, tiny pinky toe! Coincidence? I think not!
Cheers,
Scott.
HRA
@Gin & Tonic: My dad’s cousin went through something you have described getting his wife and daughter from former Yugoslavia. What worked for him was getting an appointment to meet his representative in Washington. His family arrived shortly after his visit.
Gin & Tonic
@raven: I remember that story. But my son and his wife are opposite sex. Married in NY, both currently employed by US-based companies.
debbie
@Matt McIrvin:
I didn’t know until recently that there’s a shackle and broken chain at the Statue’s feet. Seems that would make the poem more relevant than most people realize.
raven
@Gin & Tonic: Well both situations suck.
Gin & Tonic
@raven: True that.
Mary G
I’m sure I’ve the story here before, but I am now officially old enough to begin repeating myself. My dad’s family came with Lord Calvert’s kids in the 1660s to escape persecution for their Catholic religion. My mom’s father came in the 1900s by hitchhiking his way from Sweden to Hamburg, stowing away on a freighter to NYC, then hitchhiking again to Austin, TX, where there was both a Swedish neighborhood and hot weather. They all prospered and turned out hordes of descendents, especially the Catholics.
Kent
I thought one of the benefits of electing Biden was that we would never have to hear from Stephen Miller ever again. Why is he polluting my screen?
frosty
My father’s family immigrated to Long Island in 1655. One of the branches of my mother’s family settled Mississippi when it was a frontier.
However, both my kids are recent immigrants; one from Chile as an infant, the other from Bolivia as a toddler. They’ve grown up to be great young men – I couldn’t have been luckier in building a family.
Narya
I’ve seen the early1900s ship manifest with my (Italian) grandmother’s name on it. My grandfather’s parents were also Italian. Dad’s side is all German, but late 19th century as best I can tell. My parents grew up blocks from each other in a small town, so it’s a very American story in its own way.
BC in Illinois
My grandfather came from a German-speaking village in [Austria-] Hungary, just before WW I. He settled in a German-speaking community in Akron, Ohio. A few years later, he enlisted in the US Army, though he could barely speak English. He was told “it would help his citizenship.” (The war ended before he went overseas.)
His daughter (my mother) was a WW II WAC. All three of his daughters married WW II veterans. In the next generation, my brother and cousin went to Vietnam and I went to Bethesda, MD as a US Navy Hospital Corpsman. In the next generation, there are two West Point grads, one of who made it as far as Qatar. Among his descendants are teachers, preachers, accountants, baristas, a few police, a government mathematician, some engineers, a few computer people, and four g’g’g’kids at a Chinese immersion school.
I see his story in the pictures of the immigrants today.
Kent
My wife and oldest daughter are immigrants from Chile. We married and I brought them up to Juneau Alaska actually where I was living and working at the time. All the initial immigration paperwork we did in Ketchikan (closest INS office) and Anchorage and it was all smooth and professional.
We moved to Texas a year later for my wife’s medical residency training. She go her citizenship approved at the INS office in San Antonio. We had our second daughter along and an enormous stack of paperwork showing joint bank accounts, joint ownership of our house and vehicles, etc. The agent interviewing her chatted for about 5 minutes and then rubber stamped everything. She was like “wait…I studied for this, I want the full test. Ask me who’s on the Supreme Court and about the 14th Amendment.” He laughed and said our daughter playing on the floor was all the proof he needed. Probably didn’t hurt that she has flawless unaccented English after having been an exchange student in Virginia and going to college at Oxford. And was teaching medicine as an attending physician in Waco and Dallas. So she probably wasn’t the typical Latina immigrant they get in San Antonio.
I hear about all the immigration horror stories and was obsessively on different immigration forums figuring everything out. But our experience was smooth and uneventful.
Percysowner
My paternal grandmother’s family went back to the American Revolution. One of her ancestors led a retreat during the Revolution, or so she said. She was HORRIFIED when my dad married my mom a first generation American. Her mother, my granny, and her grandmother, my little grandma (she was maybe 4’8″), came over from Hungary. The only story I was told was that my little grandma was from a town in Hungary. The Russian Army marched in and when they marched out, my little grandma was pregnant with my granny. Somehow they made it over to America, no husband that I ever heard of. My granny married another immigrant had my uncle and my mom. My mom got a Masters Degree in Library Science. My paternal grandmother never forgave her for not being a real American. She also was convinced that my mom might be, horror of horrors, CATHOLIC. My granny told me that they were NOT CATHOLIC. I have no idea what religion they were, but AFAIK she never went to church. Sadly, my mom died when I was 11. My dad remarried and I lost contact with my mom’s family. I will never know much more about what my granny and little grandma went through.
The more things seem to change, the more they stay the same. Prejudice of all kinds remains. Immigrants aren’t “good” enough for “proper” Americans. My only hope is that some day this country starts living up to the ideals we spout and don’t support. I was lucky. As the daughter of white immigrants, no one questions my right to be here, even though I am really only second generation American. I hope we take in as many Afghan refugees as possible.
Josie
@Kent:
It’s sort of pitiful that he thinks anyone cares about his opinion about anything.
Patricia Kayden
Who is listening to Xenophobia Miller in the Year of Our Lord 2021? Take in all the refugees we can and deport Miller and his bigoted ilk to Russia.
Narya
@Percysowner: I hear that. My paternal grandfather didn’t want one of my aunts to marry a Catholic/Italian (he was Presbyterian) because she’d have too many kids; she didn’t marry that guy but ended up with seven kids. My dad went ahead and married an Italian atheist. An ex-boss had Catholic parents—but one was Hispanic and one was Irish. When he told me that (early in me working for him) I said oh I bet your grandparents got along; he said they didn’t talk for years. I firmly believe one of the reasons we got along so well is that I knew enough to say that.
Chetan Murthy
My great-grandfather came from India to Chicago to study engineering, around 1910. He was told in no uncertain terms that he should not plan on settling down, so back he went. My parents came in 1968, thanks in part to the Immigration Act of 1965, for which Dr. King, John Lewis, and so many other civil rights campaigners gave their time, energy, and some their lives. I never learned this, b/c of course “racist Texas schools” until a few years ago. It’s humbling to learn to whom you owe a debt, and somehow fulfilling to try to repay that debt, by supporting the modern civil rights movement.
columbusqueen
@Percysowner: My story is not dissimilar to yours, except both sides of my family go back to before the Revolution-one northern, one southern. Despite this, my mother’s family in particular (the northern one) think immigrants are great & the more, the merrier.
the pollyanna from hell
Of all the stories in my family since we arrived 1690 or so, the one I miss was perhaps covered up. How do whitebread I (or my sister) have genetic traces from Papua or Melanesia? I would pay money to learn that adventure, I’m guessing in the Dutch line.
geg6
@sab:
We have have one for our local humane shelter. Hell, I’ve both donated and shopped there.
Kent
My most distant American ancestor was a Dutch seaman who was on Henry Hudson’s expedition that explored New York Harbor and the Hudson River in 1609. He was apparently left behind with others on the shore of the Hudson River to help establish Dutch claims to the area, or jumped ship. The record is unclear. But he later resurfaced 17 years later in 1626 as Peter Minuit’s guide and translator when he famously bought Manhattan Island on behalf of the Dutch West India Company from the Lenape for trade goods worth 60 guilders. So my American roots pre-date the Pilgrims by 11 years and the snooty Mayflower Society ladies are newcomers. Of course those with Native American roots have me easily beat. 23andMe says I have no native ancestry.
Most of the rest of my family were Swiss/German Mennonite immigrants from the Palatinate who immigrated to Pennsylvania in the 1720s and 1730s and became Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonites. The family farm that my cousin’s son still runs in Central Pennsylvania (Mifflin County) dates back to before the civil war. My great great grandfather ran away from home at age 16 to become a cook for the Union Army and was in Washington when Lincoln was shot. He reportedly visited Ford’s theater the next day and carved a piece of the wall paneling off that was stained with Lincoln’s blood. It was eventually donated to a local museum in Ohio when he died along with a large collection of Indian arrowheads. His son, my great grandfather left Ohio around 1900 and worked his way west shearing sheep and doing odd jobs until he landed in Fresno where he worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad and then eventually made his way up to the Willamette Valley in Oregon where he bought and sold various farms in the Albany and Salem area, lost them in the depression, then bought another where my grandfather and dad grew up.
HumboldtBlue
I just saw on Twitter Stephen Miller called Pee Wee Hermann Goring and that’s just about perfect.
Here’s a clip of humans being bros. Happy birthday, Isaac.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Stephen Miller is a Rodent of Unusual Size and I hope he is unemployed in Greenland.
Redshift
I have plenty of claim to being ‘Murican, since my most recent immigrant ancestor is one great-grandfather, but I had the good fortune to grow up in an area with plenty of immigrants, so I’ve always appreciated all they bring to our country.
My earliest immigrant ancestor on my father’s side came over in the 1740s from what is more part of Germany but may have been French then. I don’t know much more about him. My most recent immigrant ancestor came from Germany and became a prominent architect in Milwaukee. In between, I had an Irish great great grandfather who came over by himself as a young teenager, because apparently life in middle-of-nowhere rural Ireland already sucked before the potato famine.
I’m happy to be living in one of the places we’re welcoming the new refugees. I’m sorry for why they have to come, but I hope they have a great life here.
Redshift
@HumboldtBlue: LOL, awesome!
CaseyL
So many wonderful stories! I wish I knew more about my ancestors. I know my mother’s family came over around the turn of the 20th Century from Russia: my Mom’s mother was first generation. My father’s family may have come over around the same time, but from Austria; I think Dad was first generation, but he was 16 years older than my Mom, and the youngest of his siblings.
That’s about it. I think all branches of my family wanted to assimilate as much as possible as fast as possible, and consigned their past histories to obscurity. About the only interesting ancestor I know about is a great-great-great-grandmother who killed a thief who was terrorizing her village, and won a commendation as a hero from the government.
Dan B
@Kent: Must have been a millionaire. Right? Willamette Valley soil is 8 to 35 feet deep thanks to the Missoula floods. So much soil back washed up valleys where the floods encountered steep bends in the Columbia River Valley. Oregon and the Tri Cities benefitted.
Citizen Alan
On my maternal grandfather’s side, I have traced our history to a guy who emigrated from Germany in 1730! Supposedly, his ship was meant for Canada but got blown off course and landed in South Carolina, where he was offered a free plot of land if he would swear allegiance to the British Crown. He did, presumably in halting English with a thick German accent.
Kent
I’m really hoping we get some Afghan refugees here in the Portland metro because I’d like to try a good Afghan restaurant. Apparently we have some Afghan-run food trucks but no real restaurants. Is that selfish?
Dan B
@Kent: Kabul Afghan Restaurant has been in Wallingfird for decades. It’s a few blocks west of the freeway. Look up the menu as long as you are not, I repeat, not! hungry
I haven’t been but that ought to change soon.
Kent
No, not at all. My great grandfather was a church deacon or minister and spent a lot of time traveling, leaving the management of the farm to his sons who didn’t really want to be there. They lost the good farm during the depression and never managed to accumulate a big enough replacement farm to be prosperous. They bought and sold and rented several of them but never had enough money to really turn the corner. My grandfather’s brothers all split and left him as the son to takeover the farm so my grandfather scratched away and raised a big farm family. They had 14 kids, 7 boys and 7 girls, between maybe 1930 and 1950. My dad was #5, born in 1937, just in time for WW2. A real live Walton’s family. My grandfather was such a hard-headed conservative asshole that none of his kids stuck around to take over the farm. My dad left home at 17, worked as a logger in the Gifford Pinchot near Mt. St. Helens, went to college to become a teacher, and returned to Oregon after I was born where we grew up in Eugene, very middle class. The family farm was sold when my grandfather retired in the 1970s and is now subdivisions on the outskirts of Salem.
Suzanne
So my family heritage is varied, like many. My maternal grandfather has some ancestry that goes back to the mid-1600s in Virginia. But he also has some more recent and more influential heritage that some of my extended family have done an impressive job fleshing out in recent years. His paternal grandfather (my great-great-grandfather) was the first child in his family, and the first in that line born in the US (Boston). He was born to Jewish immigrants from Germany. He appeared to have left New England with his younger brother when he was a teenager, and he joined the Union army, and did some fighting before it was discovered that he was underage and he got kicked out. He met an immigrant woman from Cornwall, they went to California for the Gold Rush, didn’t really make any money, so they went northward (with their kids by now), traveling all over what became Washington, British Columbia, the Yukon, and then settled in Juneau. They became very influential up there and some of the family had early governance positions, as well as business. The family records are archived in the Alaska State Library. My great-grandmother was apparently so loved by a local Alaska Native tribe (she worked as a schoolteacher for them) that she was given a totem pole, which is an incredible family heirloom.
HumboldtBlue
@Redshift:
And I feel bad for Pee Wee, he doesn’t deserve to be associated with that wannabe Nazi.
But it fits here for mocking purposes.
dmsilev
@Kent: When I was living in Baltimore, there was a nice Afghan restaurant downtown. We used to take guests and visitors there; it was definitely different, but quite tasty. Owned by Hamid Karzai’s brother, as it happens. When 9/11 and the subsequent events happened, the owner went back to Afghanistan to do something in his brother’s government (I don’t remember the details).
Edit: apparently, it’s still in business.
Omnes Omnibus
It really doesn’t matter when your family arrived. If you were born here or were naturalized, you are an American. End of story. I find my family’s history interesting and have bored people here with snippets of it on a number of occasions, but it doesn’t matter in this context. There aren’t people who are more American than others. If you are an American, you are an American.
Chetan Murthy
@Kent: They say that so many restos have closed with the pandemic. But I think: “there’ll be a real spring of new hole-in-wall restos with authentic food from The Old Country” once the pandemic really passes. And I am so there for that.
I could make 3-4 restos here in SF that started in holes-in-the-wall in down-and-out neighborhoods, did well, and ended up opening multiple locations, complete with chi-chi bars, bartenders with outrageous mustaches, weird-ass drinks (bruised basil? really? really?), model-beautiful hosts, etc, etc. Did do anything for the food, just raised the prices. Lookin’ forward to some middle-class eateries and joints, come the real reopening.
Kent
In Seattle? Cool! Our middle daughter leaves for UW next month and is on the Husky Marching Band so we have season tix to the football games (I’m an alum too). That is definitely on our list for our next lunch or dinner out in Seattle.
Chetan Murthy
@dmsilev: was it called “Helmand” ? there was one in Cambridge, they used to say it was owned by Karzai’s bro, too.
oldster
Family lore has it that one of my Irish branches took root here in the following way.
Katey was put out at a young age to be a scullery maid and dogsbody for a wealthier family, and Katey desperately wanted to emigrate. It was after the famine by a few decades, but life was still as grim as grim could be.
Katey couldn’t pay the passage. So, when the family asked her to run an errand, bringing the rent to the landlord, Katey took herself and the rent down to the docks, bought her passage, and fled from justice across the ocean.
I wish I could tell you that the family has grown more honest as It’s grown more respectable. I can at least say that I would never do such a thing, and feel genuine sorrow at the plight of the victims of her theft.
Brachiator
@CaseyL:
A great grandmother? Sounds like an interesting woman.
Dan B
@Kent: I kid about the rich farmers of the Willamette, but there are some multimillionaires. I did several nursery trips there and the guide listed more than 150 wholesale nurseries within 50 miles of Portland. There were three in the Seattle area! Terrible soil and much cooler summer, spring, and fall. A friend called Oregon “The land of real summer.”
phdesmond
@Another Scott:
that makes you a hellenopod!
Richard
@dmsilev:
I was thinking about my dad and his family. They came to Canada sometime in the 1920s. He was just a little boy. They came from a city called Panchevo and they never talked about it.
They got settled in Saskatchewan. As soon as they saved enough to survive they split up, some to Toronto and others to B.C.
They wanted to bring everyone, but they said some were sent back.
So looking at that photograph brings up a lot of stories.
leafcolleen
My great-great grandparents immigrated separately from Ireland as young, single adults. i have records of them living in Bordentown, NJ in the 1850s. They almost certainly immmigrated due to The Great Hunger (An Gorta Mór).
This great-great grandmother was from east Galway and her future husband was probably from the same area. Her brother fought for the Union during the Civil War. They were definitely economic refugees in the modern sense – entire families and villages were emptied due to death and severe hardship – and chain migration was the key to survival for many.
Her future daughter in law (and 5 of her 7 siblings) immigrated because of the unrest in Galway due to the land wars. My great-great grandfather was an enforcer for an Irish secret society. He was convicted of arson – according to the newspaper accounts ive been able to find, he burnt farm buildings of a neighboring man suspected of being a police informer. His daughter, my great-great grandmother was the oldest and immigrated soon after – probably to ease the financial burden on the family.
My grandfather immigrated from Donegal because of the fallout from the Irish War of Independence. Family history has muddled it up a bit but he was apparently warned that he was about to be arrested by British forces and he fled the country – going first to Scotland. he was able to immigrate to the US in Nov. 1921 – the same year the quota system was put in place.
The Pennsylvania Railroad was the means by which my paternal ancestors moved into the middle class (but maybe it killed them, too. My male ancestors seemed to die as fairly young men). My great uncle had an 8th grade graduation at most. As a very young teen, he worked in a shirt factory before getting a job as a laborer on the Penn RR. By the time he died in 1921, he was the Assistant Superintendent on the Newark Division of the Penn RR. His brother, my great grandfather was a farmer but the family farm was foreclosed on in the 1890s. he then became a railroad man and was a Track Foreman before he died.
But this family history was almost completely unknown to my Dad. His paternal grandparents died before he was born and his own father died when he was only six. He heard no family history and didn’t even know his grandmother’s maiden name. Researching this history and sharing it with him was a great bond vefore he died. I rediscovered most of his family history in the past 5-10 years.
It has really made me think about immigration, assimilation and racism.
i’ve realized how i have internalized racist narratives about current immigration and the accompanying stereotypes.
The British said my grandfather was a security threat. My great great grandfather was a convict. My first know immigrant ancestor spent about 5 years at the end of his life in the New Jersey State Hospital as an adjudicated insane person. My great grandfather was a farm.failure. Alcoholism was a problem in my family.
But they survived because immigration was not an individual endeavor. They immigrated to known communities in the US. They brought family members over as soon as they could. they identified economic niches and supported each other in them. They created strong community intuitions to provide the safety net they needed. They remained committed to the Catholic Church. My father was a member of the Knights of Columbus as his father, uncle, grandfather and great uncles had been.
All of the things that are identified as deficits for current immigrant families were the traits my ancestors’ community had that are either forgotten (or so ‘normal’ that they are invisible) or romantizied by the passage of time.
My ancestors were seen as superstitious, unlettered, and incapable of conforming to ‘civilized’ ways of life. They were derided as parochial and clannish, unwilling to assimilate. But from my vantage point – they lost their language, their homeland, found ways to survive as individuals, families and larger Irish-American communities.
I am 100% Irish by descent. That is a direct result of the choices my family made to stay tightly bound to their immigrant communities.
No one ever dispaages my history because I am white, college educated, and a professional. I am seen as the norm – and not an immigration success story. But I am. As are my ancestors.
Kent
Yep. Seattle area is all stump farms. Timber companies chopped down the forests and sold off the acreages of stumps to immigrants who busted their balls to dig out all the stumps and convert the land into farming only to find the soils were too thin and crappy to be very productive. You need the broad river valleys like the Willamette, or further north in the Skagit River valley to find good growing conditions.
dmsilev
@Chetan Murthy: Yes, that’s the one.
Heidi Mom
My father’s family (the only one whose history I know) were Swiss-German Mennonites who arrived in Pennsylvania in the 1750s. My father’s sister was able to join the Daughters of the American Revolution because, while her pacifist ancestors didn’t fight in the Revolutionary War, they did supply provisions to the Continental Army. Whether they would have supplied the British Army if offered a higher price is something we’ll never know.
CaseyL
@Brachiator: I wish I knew more about her. I wish I knew more about any of my distance ancestors, but my grandparents just didn’t talk about them (other than Grandma Thiefkiller). And my father’s parents died soon after I was born, and neither he nor his siblings talked about the Old Country.
I don’t know whether this kind of reticence was/is typical for Jewish immigrants.
Dan B
@Kent: Topsoil forms at one inch per 10,000 years in cool conifer forests – no burrowing critters and most of the leaf litter becomes duff. 10,000 years since the glaciers carved the Puget Sound basin bare. 1″ is Seattle’s average topsoil depth. 35 feet in Portland boggles
A garden writer friend asked a nurseryman in Eugene why his garden looked so lush. He took an iron bar and pushed it into the ground with very little effort. 8 feet of rock free topsoil there.
Kent
My wife has much more interesting roots. Her Chilean ancestry dates back to the Spanish conquest and one of her ancestors is Gonzalo de los Ríos y Ávila, one of the conquistadors of Chile. In her family line is Catalina de los Ríos y Lísperguer who is known as La Quintrala, the most famous female assassin and serial killer in Chilean history. She even was a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintrala
So we have lots of Gonzalos in our family tree including my wife’s father and brother, and lots of Catalinas including our second daughter.
Richard
@Baud:
That’s kinda cynical, don’t you think?
Chetan Murthy
@Dan B:
I’m reminded of recent discoveries of what the Amazonians did with terra preta.
RaflW
@Matt McIrvin: Maddeningly, that Miller creep knows far too much about perverting things. Perversions of the course of justice, I mean.
Really one of the most awful of TGF’s henchmen. That he came from Jeffy Sessions’ stable speaks so poorly of all involved.
Kent
@Dan B: Yep, we live in the hills of Camas 500 ft. up overlooking the Columbia so our soil is more like Seattle. I have to put in raised beds and bring in bags of soil to get much of anything to grow besides ferns and moss and blackberries which grow everywhere.
Lyrebird
@Chetan Murthy: Ooh ooh I have eaten there too! Took some people who had not had Afg. cuisine before, and they loved it.
Kent
@Richard: But probably not far from the truth. Don’t we have the Shaw’s of Sunset reality show about Iranian refugees? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahs_of_Sunset
Mai Naem mobile
I hope one of these older kids becomes a physician treating Stephen Miller – some kind of serious life threatening medical issue. I don’t want anything bad to happen to him but I want the doctor to know who Stephen Miller is and I want Stephen Miller to know this doctors background story. Oh, and not when Miller’s some demented old fart – he needs to be young enough to comprehend everything.
Chetan Murthy
@Mai Naem mobile: Every day, everywhere in the UGTR, immigrant doctors and nurses treat Deplorables with care and decency, saving their lives and ameliorating their pain and debilities. I grew up the child of one of them, and 2yr ago I visited the area I grew up in, went to a hospital with a relative, and saw just how many immigrants there were there. And Black and Hispanic Americans, too. A. Ton.
Even if it’s not one of the kids that Pee Wee Hermann Goring tried to keep out of our country, there are so many others, already here and soon-to-arrive (b/c we’re a global vacuum cleaner for medical and STEM talent) who will have that dubious honor: “treating and saving the lives of these Deporable Nazis”.
Mai Naem mobile
We used to have an Afghan restaurant in the Phoenix area. We went there a couple of times. I vaguely remember the food seemed like a cross between Persian and Indian food. The only thing I remember was they used little Afghan rugs as placemats which was a cute idea.
Almost Retired
Absolutely fascinating to read these ancestry threads – especially since my family’s story is basically generations of “he (or she) was born, he farmed, he died,” whether it was in Europe, New England or the Midwest.
Nelle
My cousins and I all thought it normal to have a father or mother who screamed in his/her sleep. My father grew up in the Molotchna colony, a Mennonite colony in Russia (now Ukraine). He had first hand experience with the German invasion of WWI, the Russian Civil War, which lasted a lot longer there than most places and involved quartering troops in houses, and then the famine that killed my cousin. My grandfather, a writer/journalist, escaped ahead of the rest (about 1921) and the rest got out in 1924. My grandfather came into the US by way of Ellis Island, but by ’24, the rest of the family was refused entry and went to Canada. My grandfather was allowed to bring the teenagers and my grandmother into the US (Minnesota) while all the older siblings stayed in Canada. I envy them.
I’m surely repeating myself but my father paid back his gratitude. Even as a pacifist, he accepted the draft of WWII. He told me that this country gave him his life and that he could not walk away from the request for his service (he went as a noncombatant medic and translator and served on a hospital ship between North Africa and Italy and the US).
He also accepted the draft because, he said, he had seen what war did to women and children in war (alluding to what had happened to my grandmother and his sisters when soldiers were quartered in their house; I don’t know details, but in some houses, children were made to watch. Hence the life-long nightmares) and if he were ever able to stop that, he would. When coming around a corner in newly liberated Rome, he came upon a group of American soldiers beating up an elderly Italian man. He roared “Stop that or I’ll take on every one of you.” They looked at him and scattered. He was 6 feet of muscle. Ever afterwards, though, he was haunted about whether or not he was really a pacifist, because he knew he would have used violence to save the man if the soldiers hadn’t run away.
After Vietnam fell, my parents took two families, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian, into their home and shepherded them through the first months of living in the States. Dad said it was the least that he could do, remembering all that had been done for our family.
My mom’s family also came from a Russian Mennonite colony (also now Ukraine) but in earlier, more peaceful times, in the 1870’s.
Nelle
@Kent: We still miss the Washington blackberries.
Chetan Murthy
When I was in college (Rice ’86) there were a ton of Vietnamese-American kids. All of them had come over on the boats with their families. And except for one (an EE) they were all pre-med. Driven kids, all driven, wow. I remember one guy, he had facial disfiguration (from, one presumes some sort of traumatic event on his journey) and he was in there, working for a better life. His younger brother, too. All of them, I’m sure, had families working themselves to the *bone* to put their kids thru college, and these kids were Not. Going. To. Disappoint.
I know that one of the things that American kids should have as their birthright, is that they shouldn’t have to be driven like these kids were. Even so, it was impressive, and reminds me today of how hard immigrants work: for themselves, and for their families.
cmorenc
My paternal grandfather was a German national who became a WW1 war refugee immigrant to the US. He was a seaman aboard a German civilian merchant ship a bit over halfway on its way across the Atlantic destined for Hamburg with materials from the US at the very moment war was declared between England and Germany. The ship’s captain realized that within a few hours they would be likely be within reach of British warships and risk being sunk, and he immediately turned around and went back to Boston harbor, where the boat’s crew remained effectively marooned for the duration of the war. When WW1 ended, my grandfather decided to stay in the US. And so, I feel a bit of kinship with the Afghans newly arrived here as war refugees.
Mai Naem mobile
@Chetan Murthy: a lot of immigrant doctors get Visas to get into the US by working in underserved areas – exactly where there are plenty of Trumpers but Trumpers can never put two and two together.
Dan B
@CaseyL: I wonder if memories about ‘The Old Country’ are too filled with pain. I have a visceral reaction to talking about friends and lovers I lost to AIDS. And the tight-lipped side of my family didn’t talk about their background. I believe they believed it was egotistical to talk about the family and didn’t reflect humility, but that’s a tightly wound Presbyterian sentiment. It would be interesting to know if Jews from different regions show much variation. I’ve worked with Jewish families who seemed very different in their demeanor from the Jews I knew in Chicago and the Bay Area. But it’s likely that everyone from every background gets molded into different shapes by the variety of the American culture, especially the urban culture.
Chetan Murthy
@Dan B: I have a close Jewish friend. Early in TFG’s Reign of Error, I asked him about how Jewish people processed these things — if somehow their religious training helped them. He told me that shul, children were taught early-on that “we’re all refugees, and we should be prepared to drop everything and flee if necessary.”
Before 2016, I would have scoffed at that. Not. Anymore.
I remember Mary Trump wrote about how TFG traumatized all of us, and esp. in a moral way, showing us the possibility of violence and deracination that we’d all thought was impossible in our country. Not. In. Our. Country. Not. Here. No. And TFG showed us “yes, it can happen here, it can happen to you.”
Betsy
@Kent: Yes, but the Jamestown, Virginia settlers also predate the pilgrims by a number of years!
Plymouth Rock isn’t the start of permanent anglo-American settlement. much as New Englanders would like it to be
Dan B
@Chetan Murthy: Terra preta! The Amazon rainforest has similarities with the PNW rainforest. Nitrogen gets washed away by the rain and the rigid tropical leaves – true of most every leaf that survives multiple, and stormy weather – don’t break down due to inadequate nitrogen. We used a byproduct of strip mining coal that comes from parts of the coal seam that hasn’t been compressed enough to be burnable. Wherever we applied it the foliage developed a beautiful sheen and got darker. It stopped being produced. It would last as long as Terra Preta, basically centuries.
Dan B
@Kent: Ah Camas, the burg that equalled the aroma of Tacoma!
My partner has a cousin, who visited us a few weeks ago, who has a big hangar or two at the Camas Municipal Airport. His father collected, and flew, planes. Nice guy who had a tough upbringing in a conservative religious extended family.
James E Powell
My mother began researching and documenting our family’s history in the 80s. My grandparents’ come from at least four different places in Europe. My grandfathers’ families were both in the US prior to the Civil War, one on each side. My grandmother’s came as children from Aberdeen, Scotland (paternal) and Pisek, in what is now the Czech Republic (maternal). She and her family always referred to themselves as Bohemian.
Some time after my mother’s passing, my sister uploaded all my mother’s collection of documents & photos onto ancestry.com so the whole family can see it and add whatever. It’s interesting to see some of the facial feature resemblances four generations back.
I read the US immigration book where my Scottish ancestors checked into the US from Quebec. It was the large extended family including cousins. I have no idea why they took that route, but I found a photo of the ship they came in on. It was on a regular Glasgow to Montreal run at the time. My Bohemian grandmother’s family came through Baltimore.
Why Cleveland? I’m pretty sure it was steel mills, but no idea why.
My paternal grandfather’s family is from Sanford FL. His father & grandfather fought for the treasonous slavers during the Civil War. We discovered that my grandfather either had a wife & child that we didn’t know about before he married my grandmother or he lied about that to get out of the draft during World War I. He died in 1931 when my father was nine, so we don’t know anything more about him. Efforts to contact his family’s descendants have gone unanswered.
My sister & I took the ancestry.com DNA tests and my results are what was expected except I got Irish and nothing from Wales. My surname is Welsh (Ap Howell) so it was a bit of a surprise to find the Irish. This may impact my attitude during the Six Nations.
My sister’s results came back nearly the same as mine, but she’s got Welsh and no Irish. The surprise was she also has a bit of Bantu. I want to be there when she tells my Trumpster brothers.
Is there anything about these tests that makes them more than like astrology or tarot?
Matt McIrvin
I think I’ve told this story before–my grandfather was born a US citizen in South Dakota, the child of immigrants, and his native language was Norwegian. That was a minority language in town… because 3/4 of the people there spoke Danish instead.
In 1921, his parents got the flu, his mother died and he and his siblings were all adopted out to different families. He was adopted by the town’s Baptist preacher, an immigrant from Denmark, so he had to switch to speaking Danish.
I think about all that whenever people complain about how today’s immigrants won’t assimilate–“they don’t speak English, they keep to themselves in their ghettos”, etc. etc. My grandfather became enough of a patriot that when his family moved to Alberta for a while, he chafed at being made to state allegiance to the Crown in school. Couldn’t do that, he was an American citizen. And, yes, he was in the infantry in Europe in World War II.
Uncle Cosmo
@HumboldtBlue: Stephen Miller = Reinhard Heydrich’s Mini-Me. There’s even a t-shirt.
NutmegAgain
Each of my grandfathers was born in the USA, in old states (MA, and PA) from Anglo families with tendrils lost in the mists of time. (Couple of historians (professional ones) in the family…retirement is good!) but yeah as far back as there have been white folk of Scottish, English and Welsh ancestry, we’ve been hanging around stealing land, etc. Never really at the top of the social pile, but never at the bottom. Each of my grans was born in another country–one in the Canadian Maritimes. (And, I found out her folks there preceded the Am Rev, so thank God they weren’t runaway Tories!) But even by the first decade of the 20th c. there was very little work, and she was a nursing-school trained nurse–and a serious badass. My other gran married my grandfather in Europe in 1910–they were both PhD students in Theoretical Chemistry at Leipzig Uni. So my gran was, if not the first, certainly among the first women with that ambition. GR-Pa graduated and did a post-doc in Cambridge, then they married in 1910. They moved to the US well ahead of both World Wars, but had been very much shaped in the cultures of Europeans of a high social class, minus most of the moolah for the lifestyle. My grandmother had to learn to cook! shock!! Horror!! She had not ever been IN a kitchen before … not allowed. So my profoundly educated grandmother ended up in a 2d rate city with very little cultural life. They made it work– And continued to visit family in German every year, until about 1931 or so. After that, as we all know, the toxic shit broke loose. As those G-M, and G-P were virulently anti-Nazi, it was very very hard.
All of this is to say, I thought it was a very, very American story. And the kids of the next generations have made cross-religious marriages; interracial marriages, cross national pairings and all kind of wonderful things..
James E Powell
I’ve included immigration in many different ways in my teaching over the years. This poem is a favorite and one I use a lot.
The Emigrant Irish
by Eavan Boland
Like oil lamps, we put them out the back —
of our houses, of our minds. We had lights
better than, newer than and then
a time came, this time and now
we need them. Their dread, makeshift example:
they would have thrived on our necessities.
What they survived we could not even live.
By their lights now it is time to
imagine how they stood there, what they stood with,
that their possessions may become our power:
Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parceled in them.
Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering
in the bruise-colored dusk of the New World.
And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.
CaseyL
@Dan B: Things were uniformly awful in my families’ Old Countries, so I do suspect that had a lot to do with it. Though it would be interesting to see if there are differences among Jews who came from different countries.
One thing about “my people” I did not know about was the “Latin” branch of Diaspora Jews, the Sephardics. These were the ones who came over to the New World from Spain and around the Mediterranean, and settled in South America. Their patois is Ladino, a mix of Hebrew and Spanish. (Yiddish being a mix of Hebrew, German, Russian, and Polish). Their culture is very, very different from Ashkenazi. I prefer it, to tell the truth; more colorful, more outgoing, less despairing. (Though I still don’t know a lot about it.)
PS: Many Sephardic Jews are in Israel. I don’t know how many never left the area, and how many made aliyah. I do know they’re discriminated against there, in favor of Ashkenazis. Some places they’re not treated much better than Arabs.
Another Scott
@James E Powell: When I first did the 23 and Me test, it showed that I was my father’s son (as expected) – he did it a few years earlier. But the European country breakdown didn’t make much sense. He was 1/2 Greek yet it showed little southern European stuff. They revised the results a few years later, and it was better, but it still didn’t seem quite right.
So, I don’t know how far to trust that kind of stuff.
It seemed highly UK/western Europe-centric back then – maybe the records they had access to were weighted that way.
Similarly, the “3.5% Neandertal DNA!!”. :-/
I assume that it will only get better over time. Especially the “you have the gene associated with CF” kinda stuff…
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
James E Powell
@CaseyL:
Not the least, you also get Maimonides.
NutmegAgain
@Uncle Cosmo: I always saw a clear resemblance between Stephen Miller and Joseph Goebbels.
eww. Rat-looking people who commit and provoke heinous acts.
CaseyL
@James E Powell: That, too!
HumboldtBlue
@James E Powell:
A-yup. That made me chuckle.
Yutsano
Also kidnapping for a possible (fully vaccinated) meet up in November. I keep changing when I’ll be there but I should be there from Saturday through Wednesday.
That reminds me…need to change the hotel reservation again.
CaseyL
@James E Powell:
@HumboldtBlue:
I’d also get Spinoza – I wasn’t sure if he was Sephardic, since he lived in Amsterdam, but turns out his family was Portugese and, therefore, Sephardic.
Spinoza and Maimonides! Sephardics rock!
CaseyL
@Kent: That reminds me – will you daughter want to look me up? (We chatted a bit about this many many months ago, when she was still deciding which colleges to apply for.)
If so, I can give WaterGirl my email and phone number, with permission to give them to you.
Origuy
Most of my family were here before the Revolution. One came over on the Fortune, the ship that came after the Mayflower. Another was a Hessian mercenary who was captured during the Revolution and refused repatriation, making him a deserter. He married a girl in Pennsylvania and settled down. The one that carried my family name came here indentured; I’m not sure whether it was entirely voluntary or if it was as part of a punishment. He did his time, acquired property (which may have included slaves for all I know), and was recorded as being a respected member of the community.
HumboldtBlue
@CaseyL:
Let us dance!
Omnes Omnibus
@HumboldtBlue: Weirdest Bowie cover ever.
Kent
I honestly forgot the context of our discussion. I’m trying to give her space and not be a helicopter dad. What did we talk about?
CaseyL
@Kent: Just whether she might want a trusted Seattleite to ask questions of about the city and how to navigate it.
I’m way too old to know where the best music venues are for her age group, but I know where she can find some lovely parks in the city, groceries/farmers markets, that sort of thing. Will she have wheels?
Gretchen
My daughter married a wonderful man who is the son of immigrants from India. They visited a couple of weeks ago. I talked to her today and she says he has been asking her if she’s talked to her mom and talked about how the visit went. The visit went great, although too short. I’m distressed think that he is still worried that a visit with us might have gone badly or that we were judging him. He’s a beloved integral part of the family. I was distressed that he doesn’t seem sure of that.
Gretchen
My great grandmother said that she came to America with the Queen’s money in her petticoat. Her husband came over first, and sent money for the passage of his family. By that time, somebody else was paying passage for those who agreed to leave. Landowners? The Crown? Grandma collected passage money from some entity and bought her ticket with her husband’s savings, and started life in America with a little nest egg.
CaseyL
@Gretchen: Hopefully, you were able to reassure him via your daughter.
Timurid
My mother’s ancestors came to what would become the United States in the 18th century after ‘Le Grand Dérangement,’ the ethnic cleansing of the French in Nova Scotia by the British.
My father’s ancestors were among the first to settle in and around the city of San Antonio. They were expelled from Texas for being Unionists during the Civil War and ended up back in Mexico. My grandparents fled back to Texas during the Mexican Revolution. As with the Jewish examples above, for the rest of their lives they were prepared to flee or hide for the rest of their lives. A later generation would have referred to them as ‘preppers.’
Gretchen
@CaseyL: yes, I hope I can reassure him that he is a beloved valued member of the family. It hadn’t occurred to me that he didn’t know that already. We had a long conversation about the man my older daughter divorced and how I still love him as my second son, so I hoped he would get that as a SIL in good standing he would be on equally firm ground. I hope daughter can convince him.
bjacques
@Chetan Murthy: I remember the guy you mentioned upthread. We were in the same residential college (along with another Texan whose Thanksgivings must be pretty rough these few years). He went on to graduate from Baylor College of Medicine and has a successful plastic surgery practice at Texas Methodist.
Geminid
@CaseyL: My understanding is that 700,000+ Sephardic Jews immigrated to Israel after the 1947-48 War of Independence, when Arab countries from Iraq to Morocco expelled most of their Jewish citizens. There was certainly discrimination against the darker Sephardim for decades, but not so much now as that community has achieved political power and advancement in Israeli institutions.
There is a joke that Israel’s political elite are WASPs- White Ashkenazi Sabra Paratroopers. Yitzhak Rabin was one, and current Defense Secretary Benny Gantz is another. Both men were former IDF Chiefs of Staff. Now Sephardi Gadi Eikot has passed the statutory waiting period after his service as IDF chief, and will be recruited by Israel’s many political parties as a candidate in the next Knesset election. This could be four months or four years from now, more likely some time in between.
The IDF Chief of Staff holds a prestigious position, and they commonly enter political life. I think three or four of them were MKs in the last Knesset. But the post does not earn its holder any special deference. In a 2019 session, an MK from the liberal Meretz party shouted at Gantz, “You are a Trojan Horse who spits in our faces!” She was angry at him for bringing his Blue and White party into coalition with Likud. Now her Meretz and Gantz’s Blue and White are in the current governing coalition together, and she and Gantz may laugh about this.
bjacques
@Geminid: In Amsterdam, the Sephardic Jews arrived first, after the Spanish annexation of Portugal, to which Jews had fled the Reconquista, and likely even before, after Antwerp’s attempt to escape Spanish rule failed. The Ashkenazis arriving from the mid-1600s onward were considered the country cousins.
evodevo
@Narya: Story about the town I spent my teenage years in….the local Catholics were all either Irish or German…the church was divided up, with German saints/statues on one side, where all the German-descent families sat, and Irish on the other side, where all the Irish sat. The Irish won out on the church name, however…it was St. Patrick’s….
sab
@evodevo: My grandmother in Wisconsin grew up in a mixed religion household. Her father’s family was Catholic fresh off the boat from Ireland just before the Famine. Her mother’s family was Calvinists from Scotland and Switzerland, loyalists who fled into Canada or sensibly didn’t ever go that far south.
For some reason my great-grandparents decided to marry.
My grandmother’s oldest sister started school a year late because they couldn’t decide on which school. Grandfather thought Catholic schools would be great since taught all in German. Easy way to pick up a language. Great-grandmother’s side was adamant that they be raised Protestant.
leeleeFL
@Mike in NC: We have a lot in common! My Dad’s people come from PEI, and my parents loved Antigonish!
leeleeFL
@debbie: Wow, they made us draw her in Catholic school. No art classes, but lots of tracing and such. I always loved her crushing the chain and shackles.
Fit so many liberation stories. That poem has been my mantra forever. I love it more than the Constitution or the Declaration! It is the embodiment of all I believe is good about this Country.
Bokonon
The ancestor from whom I get my last name was a sailor in the Royal Navy. He was captured by the during the War of 1812 … and after spending time as a prisoner of war, decided that he liked this new country and wanted to become an American citizen. So he did.
So despite some really unfortunate beginnings in war and conflict, an enemy became a citizen.