How did you get here?

I'm interested by people immigration stories.  One morning at breakfast, I was sitting with an Indian from Uganda whose father would have been missing, surely murdered, if not for his staff who didn't let the military take him away. They came as a refugees when Amin threw the Asians out in 1974ish.  Beside him was a Bulgarian who had done his military time, then saved up enough cash to buy a vacation in Cuba (1983ish) and presented himself to the Canadian authorities in Gander when they stopped for fuel in the plane.  Next was an Aussie who was loaded onto an evacuation plane in Rhodesia (I think) when the locals started killing all the settlers.

Last week, an Indian whose great Grandfather had come to B.C. for a few years in 1926, and then his parents came for good in 1966.  Not many India Indians around here until the 80's.

Then, I run into an 81 year old friend, Greek, who came here with his brothers in the 70's.  The four of them have sold many tons of steaks and ribs in this town.

Last summer, I got a copy of a letter my great Grandfather wrote home to his siblings in England in 1886, telling of the two week steamship voyage that took six weeks after they knocked the prop off on an iceberg...

Any interesting stories?

Actually there were LOTS of Indians north of BC up to 80-100 years ago. My best friend in San Diego, is a third generation Indian. Due to the British rule, they were allowed to go to any British Colony with paperwork. His great grand father came to BC and worked in lumber industry.  There were (I don't know exact), 5000+ Indians who were up in BC at that time. 

What I found very interesting (as I am often interested and have done some papers on migration), was in Fiji 6 generations ago, Indians were brought in to work in Sugar plantatations. They all still speak Hindi and English. But they have not gone back. Our cab driver, was asking me India was, since I went two years ago. I was surprised to hear he had never been to India. 

The British passed a rule, that if you worked in Fiji 10 years, and you coud afford to, you can then go back to India. Very little actually did. 

I read that title and thought it meant get to grm forum. So I'll tell that story.
 

My friend Brian Dimetres "M030", who I met at a volvo dealership that I worked at as a tech (then service advisor) was hired on as a salesman.  He was as into cars as anyone I'd ever seen and we hit it off famously. He was a very very big fan of this forum and turned me on to it, (I never looked back, love this place and these people). He was diagnosed with brain cancer that year. We lost him a couple years ago after maybe 13 years and I am forever thankful for having had him as a friend amd am equally thankful that the last couple of years we were able to teach auto together at a tech school where I still work. If you're somewhere up there reading this, we love you man.

Berkley, now I'm crying and this is badly written  

Berkley. 

I found myself with a beutiful house. 

And a beautiful wife 

I asked myself,  "Well...how did I'd get here?"

I got there by finding out where that highway goes to.

Well, one day my mommy and my daddy loved each other very much .....

my mom's cho cha.  

I feel like this could have been a deep and meaningful thread but things have already devolved rapidly. Lets see where this goes.

https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/off-topic-discussion/how-did-you-get-here/162064/page1/

I don't know, I'll let you know when I get there.

OK, to answer the question...well, I don't know that much either.  To my knowledge, I'm 4th generation Russian (and a few other former communist countries) American.  I know my maternal great grandfather abandoned the Russian army around the turn of the 20th century to be able to come to America. 

As for GRM, I used to just look at the $20xx classifieds trying to find cheap cars before I started posting in the forum.

My ancestors came to NY city in mid 1600's (Maybe it was New Amsterdam) from Holland. 

They gradually migrated to upstate.

The most interesting story is my great great grandfather who came over from Ireland with the boys. Ma didn't want to leave what she knew until she knew it was better so she stayed behind with the girls. This was when they were limiting Irish immigration through Ellis Island so they hopped a boat to Canada and came over the border into Michigan where they started farming. They did well, gramps met someone new and they never did send for the girls. My great grandfather was the youngest son and was told at 14 that he was too far down the line to have a future on the farm so he walked into town and got a job at the foundry. My entire ancestry is that whole "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" unlanded laborers from all over northern Europe. 

Appleseed said:

I found myself with a beutiful house. 

And a beautiful wife 

I asked myself,  "Well...how did I'd get here?"

 

I got there by finding out where that highway goes to.

Bless you; you made my day!

The real question is "where do you get off??"

mr2s2000elise said:

Actually there were LOTS of Indians north of BC up to 80-100 years ago. My best friend in San Diego, is a third generation Indian. Due to the British rule, they were allowed to go to any British Colony with paperwork. His great grand father came to BC and worked in lumber industry.  There were (I don't know exact), 5000+ Indians who were up in BC at that time. 

 

That is very likely the story.  I figured the British rule would have made it fairly simple to come..  Still, you would have to have a pretty well developed sense of adventure to climb on a boat to head for the other end of the planet.  That, or life where you were sucked donkey balls really hard.  The first India Indian family I met in rural Saskatchewan was pretty deep into the 70s.

In reply to Streetwiseguy :

I come from some pretty impressive stock. Direct descendant of Capt. Cooks navigator who discovered and explored Australia's Great Barrier Reef. First man to circumnavigate the globe.  ( Cook was killed on the island)
My great grandfather came here during the civil war and rather than becoming Cannon fodder for the army went to Canada. Became a logger and chased logs into Wisconsin 

My Paternal grandmother was a cousin of Kiaser Wilhelm. She lived in the big house, Grandpa worked for her father••••• 

Post WW2 My Father and mother were in Vegas where dad tried to make a living as a professional gambler. After a little more than a week they sent a collect telegraph to his parents asking for a loan so they could come home. Meantime with nothing else to do they created me.  

We have some civil war documents for my great great... great grandpa. He came from  Ireland and was in the New Jersey volunteers (IIRC).  He got a busted hand but made it through the war. He moved to a little farming town in Wisconsin where his brother already made it as home. He joined the Grand Amy of the Republic (similar to the VFW) and we found the placard still on his grave site.

His previously mentioned brother apparently was in the SS Monitor and at some point went AWOL.

As for how I got here to GRM, I saw nocones MG Midget's tube frame sticking out of his garage a few houses down from me. He talked me into joining.

I came to America from Canada through a tunnel under the border .

I'm not sure of the sequence of events that I went through to ending up as a regular on GRM. 

I was just a lurker for some years, began to post a bit, and got more interested over time. Last year I bought my first miata and started autocross. 

My first paternal ancestor to come over from Scotland was a sailing captain. He was master of the last wooden hulled commercial sailing ship launched on the Great Lakes, at the end of the 19th century. 

Father's side male ancestor of the family immigrated from England as an indentured servant around 1820. I actually used to have his indenture paper framed somewhere, but unfortunately I no longer know where. 
 

There's a bunch of Pennsylvania-German in there too. 
 

Mom's side immigrated from Wales a little before 1900. There's some French on that side too. 

Dad is very American. Not sure when his half of the family got to this country.

Mom is English. She was schooled to be a nanny, and was hired by the Crane family of Dalton, Mass. to help raise their children. The Cranes were fairly prominent in town. Crane Paper, in addition to producing nice stationery and the like, also produces all the paper used in making American currency.

Mom & dad met in a bowing alley in Pittsfield. The rest is history.

Appleseed said:

I got there by finding out where that highway goes to.

Where is that large automobile?

Sadly most of my oral family history never went much beyond my grandparents, and the genealogy work some of my cousins did decades ago never went outside the US. My DNA results came back 100% Cracker though. 

Here? A former boss turned me onto autocross, and at my first event I learned about GRM. That was August of 1998.

Well, I waited for a volcanic eruption on Iceland to subside and then jumped on a plane to San Francisco (OK, there was some paperwork before that). By European standards I'm a bit of a mongrel ancestry-wise - Welsh, some French aristocracy mixed in with some Germans who liked to compose bombastic loud music on my biological dad's side, and an odd mix of Northern German wanna-be upper middle class mixed with ex-Polish aristocracy so poor you couldn't tell them from their alleged subjects. So we got all that American-style mingling out of the way before I moved over here .

My wife can trace her ancestry in the US back to the early 1700s when one of her Welsh ancestors settled not far from the area we now live in. Oddly enough a lot of her ancestry is also either Welsh or German.

As to how I ended up on this forum, well, about fifteen years ago I found this magazine called Classic Motorsports and its companion publication, Grassroots something or other. I noticed that they had a forum, decided to check it out and forgot to leave.

Through total accident, both sets of my great grandparents came over from Italy in the 1920s and settled into western PA. Nothing really of note on my dad's side, but my moms side split in New York, with her grandfather changing his last name coming here and his brother staying in New Jersey with the family name. To my knowledge the portion of my moms family that stayed in Jersey died off in the 70s when Crazy Joey Gallo was killed. 

Fast forward to the 80s and my dad won a trip to Hawaii at work, 9 months later, here I am.

I was pointed at this forum when I bought my second miata and wanted to make a rally fighter style build out of it. Miata.net was nice enough to recommend this place where they "did dumb E36 M3 like that for fun" and I've been here 20 hours a day ever since.

My uncle did a lot of work tracing the Cramer family's ancestry in the US. He believes the first of our branch of the Cramer family to come to the United States was a Hessian mercenary by the name of Peter Cramer, who George Washington's forces took prisoner during the Battle of Trenton. After the war, Peter chose not to go back to Hesse, and instead settled in the German speaking community in Pennsylvania. A lot of the "mercenaries" at that time hadn't signed up voluntarily; the prince of Hesse had taken to hiring out conscripts for foreign wars.

One other ancestor story we had known about before my uncle started his research was my great-great-grandfather Philip Cramer (possibly another great in there; I can't quite remember) who was an officer in the Union army during the Civil War. Somebody put a barrel of nitroglycerin next to a railroad line and let it sit. That's not good for nitroglycerin's stability. After the war, the railroad company was terrified this barrel would explode, and put up a substantial reward for anyone who could remove it. So, my great-great-grandfather and his sons decided they would take on this bomb disposal task and collect the reward. It didn't go very well; the crater is still there to this day. Only one of the sons survived; I can't recall if this was because he was there and was lucky, or was smart enough to stay at home.

My wife's family is Serbian and came over from the Austia-Hungarian Empire in the middle of World War I. One of the wedding gifts they sent us was a framed drawing of the boat they had arrived on.