The condom broke
The condom broke
My family came from "The Descendants of Matthias Hatfield" which is the name of a published book. His exact origin was unknown but likely came as a missionary from Austria or Germany in 1657. His descendants are the feuding Hatfield family of which I'm a direct descendant of.
In reply to BoxheadTim :
Tell me more about this bombastic loud music...
A long time ago some German Catholics came to the new world and started reproducing at an alarming rate. The offspring found other German Catholics and did the same, on in to perpetuity, and so it goes. Many generations of refining this process eventually led to the creation of the wholly unremarkable specimen you see before you.
4th gen American on Mom's side. Her grandfather was born to Swedish immigrants
5th gen on Dad's side. Scandinavian jungle juice on that side.
Needless to say, I'm blonde and I sunburn easily.
I came to GRM for a mix of Kentf's V6 mustang build (googling for V6 performance stuff) and Seth's AMG (MSN front page).
Beng Canadian you are probably well aware of the Home children.
My Grandfather was an orphan from Wales. He came over on the ship and was dispatched to a farm in the Hamilton area where he was basically a child slave living in the dirt basement of a house fighting the rats for food.
Wife's parents came over from Germany looking for work and is actually a pretty interesting story.
I ended up in Canada in 1973 at the age of 14 as a refuge from the climate and moral disaster that infested the beaches of Puerto Rico.
I have yet to forgive my parents.
Pete
My mother's family lived on an estate in Ireland, working as the groundskeepers. They lived in a nice house and had decent jobs, but they left because they would never be able to own their own land or a home. The eldest daughter sailed to the US and got work with a family in the Pittsburgh area who was in the steel industry. Through this connection, they started sending other children, including my grandmother when she was 13. They all worked for rich steel families in the area. Eventually, Mom and Dad came over with all of the sons, to find the American dream yes, but also to get their sons away from troubles in Northern Ireland. They were protestant and were pretty firm in their beliefs and great-grandma was certain they would end up dead.
My father's side probably came from Germany at some point, maybe Ireland as well, that's about all I know.
I drove here in a 1967 Land Rover with a mountain bike and a few other possessions in the back. Not that many, it was an 88".
I work with a significant number of west Africans that came over on their respective countries lottery, and an even larger number of Vietnamese whose families fled with them as children in the 70's. I've had the fortune of being born in the US, family history goes back to 1600's Ireland and Germany. But its very interesting to hear the stories of my coworkers that left the bad behind them and how much they cherish the lives they can now have in the US.
My family? Financial reasons. A bunch of Scots, English and Dutch people came here about 100 years ago.
A friend of mine likes to say "we got stuck here when the ice bridge melted".
Moms mom side has been traced back to the mayflower, we are more OG USA than anyone other than native Americans. Moms father was 1st generation after that family came from Sweden. Dads family is a bit of a mystery, but as far as we can tell it is all British isles based but here since at least 1800, always in New England.
I ended up here on the forum when I started to read the mag after someone showed me the $1500 challenge issue when I was 20.
Sonic must be a LOOOONG lost cousin. I'm descended from five of the original Mayflower settlers. Grandma had always been told she was a daughter of the Mayflower and was a bit holier than thou to grandpa. One of my uncles took umbrage at that and undertook some serious genealogy research and found that grandad was related to four of them. It appears I'm 17th generation 'mericanbut I suppose several of those years are "colonist".
We had a footprint in Plymouth for pretty much the entire run until that uncle moved to Florida around 20 years ago.
Notable ancestor Thomas Nickerson, cabin boy aboard the Whaleship Essixwhich was sunk and provided the basis for the book Moby Dick. He was one of the survivors who relied on cannibalism to survive.
On my mom's side:
My great grandparents on her dad's side met when they were going through immigration. Great grandfather was coming from Sicily, and my great grandmother from Lebanon. Neither one could speak each other's language, but somehow they figured things out. On her mom's side, they were all French Canadian, and although I have no idea when they came here, they ended up in the RI area and later MA. I actually don't know much about how my grandparents met or their upbringing, to be honest.
On my dad's side:
Things are a a lot more interesting. My great grandfathers, at separate times and without knowing each other, were here in the US working, but were from Calabria, Italy. They went back and forth a lot, but ended up back in Italy in the early 1920's after WWI. My grandmother and grandfather were the result of an old-style arranged marriage, but they really loved each other. They had 3 kids: a boy and two girls, before my grandfather was conscripted into Mussolini's army and sent to Ethiopia in the 1930's. After the Italians deposed the government, he was offered a position in the "royal court" to be a cobbler (shoemaker) for the "royal family" (this is what he did before the war). He turned it down, but did stay to serve and I think he did head up a small shoe factory there for a while. He was captured early in WWII by the British forces and ended up in a prison camp until the end of the war. After the war was over, he eventually made his way back home around 1947, but during the time when he was gone, one of his children died of Tuberculosis. Devastated, he decided that it was time for a change, and he set on the path to move the family to America.
He came here first around 1947, working whatever jobs he could to scrape up some money to save for the eventual move. He lived in a basement in a suburb of Boston with 13 other Italian immigrants trying to do the same thing. Around 1949, he went home to check up on the family, and 9 months later my dad was born! After sticking around for a bit, he went back to the US to keep working. By 1958, he finally had enough money to buy a small house south of Boston and sent funds for my grandmother and father to make the trip here via boat. He was just short of 9 years old and didn't know a word of English, but he made the trip and caught on quick. My aunt and uncle decided to move here shortly after as well in the early 60's.
My mom and dad, now a gearhead "shop kid" and fully assimilated into American culture, met in high school in the town he moved to from Italy during a food fight, where he launched some mashed potatoes at her and she ran over to retaliate. 
I ended up HERE during the 2009 Challenge while I had some downtime in the hotel room. People were talking about the forum out in the parking lot, so I ran up to the room to sign up. Been stuck here ever since. 
Dusterbd13-michael said:The condom broke
If ever there was a time for "you get what you pay for"
The family story is that sometime after the revolution and before the civil war my forbears immigrated from England. They were employed in the stables of the King of England. Some of his hoses went missing and we suddenly had the funds to pay for passage to America.
I was born in PA, left in 92 and lived all over the place: briefly; Germany, Indiana, Montana, MIami. Long term; New Orleans, L.A., Austin, Ontario. Then I moved back to PA. I hate winter. What was I thinking?
Mom and Dad are both Murican; Dad from WV, Mom from PA. Going back before that, it was several generations of US-born until you get to the roots, which are German on both sides. Rumor has it there is a wee bit of Welsh mixed in on Mom's side. I'm really torn about getting one of those DNA tests. On the one side, I hear people being astonished by how there is some really odd history, but I have also researched my family tree pretty extensively. I think I would waste my money on a test that says, "you are 93% German and the other 7% is also German."
I came to this world in the usual way... but there were trains to catch, and bills to pay.
I am a mutt, but with pedigree
There are some seriously missing bits from Dad's side, but his father appears to be the illegitimate son of Mexican Generalisimo Arrista and a Miss Hilde Giltzow, who was probably New Amsterdam Dutch, as in the Bronx. On Mom's father's side we can trace back to Coronet George Joyce, who was sentenced to transportation by King Charles II's court. 50% chance he swung the ax to behead Charles 1 on behalf of Cromwell 
. So he wound up in the Massachusetts Colony. Some time later his grandson Richard rode for Paul Revere. Why were the English surprised when we revolted???
On a Pan Am 747 non-stop from Heathrow to Dulles.
My grandmother on my dads side was born on a boat during her parents immigration too America from Ireland. She was a twin but the family didn't know that and when they were born on the water they could only afford passage for one of the kids. Her twin sister was thrown overboard 3 days before the boat arrived in the US. Her mother kept journals all of her life and it's all covered there in detail. My aunt currently owns the journals and it's about the cruelest part of my dads family history.
my dads stepdad was a polish jew who's parents both died in camps. He survived and immigrated after the war when he was a child. He moved here and became a career criminal with long stints in prison for white collar crimes but he was a huge guy and never had his camp number tattoo covered up.
Dad's side, came from the now defunct Yugoslavia or somewhere near that. Came over to the US about 120-130 yrs ago. His father met and married an English woman during WWII and he was born outside of Blackpool uk. That's about all I know of that. Mom's side is more convoluted. Her mom was wild, easiest way to say it. Her father either was born after, or lived through the 1906 earthquake. We don't know much about his parents. We know her mother had a large family.
I had a GRM subscription for a long time but let it lapse after I stopped autocrossing in 2008 or so. I found about the forum from dusterdb13's drivabeater threads, namely El Camino and the truck, mainly because I have a 94 GMC c1500 sierra and was looking for TBI info. That was about 2 yrs ago.
Slavery. Unfortunately my ancestors weren't afforded there privilege to keep their culture and families intact enough to pass down genealogical stories. I do know my last name belonged to a prominent Virginia slave owner who passed his plantations onto his kids in his will. But, most of America didn't keep track of Africans even in the consensus because we weren't yet considered human back then. 
In reply to yupididit :
For what its worth, this white guy, besides a few "Well, your Grandfather was Italian, and your Grandmother is German" doesn't have a real history besides anecdotal we came from here stories. Everyone who might have remembered is long dead. So...berk it, our stories start here and now.
My mother's parent immigrated from Ireland.
More interesting is Felix; he fled Hungary in the 1950s when the Russians invaded. He sold everything he owned and bought a few grams of gold. He machined a slot in a cigarette case and filled the slot with the gold.
Back then, men's jackets had a pocked down low in the front to keep your cigarettes. He cursed a stupid car that got stuck in mud somewhere in France, he must have kicked it out of the pocket pushing the car out.
If you find a cigarette case in France that looks kinda like this, pick it up.
BTW, it took DECADES to retrieve a large 6X8ft. Hungarian wedding scene painting.
yupididit said:Slavery. Unfortunately my ancestors weren't afforded there privilege to keep their culture and families intact enough to pass down genealogical stories. I do know my last name belonged to a prominent Virginia slave owner who passed his plantations onto his kids I'm his will. But, most of America didn't keep track of Africans even in the consensus because we weren't yet considered human back then.
Things you don't anticipate when diving in a genealogy discussion - that one of your friends might not know theirs because my privileged ancestors were asshats.
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