So, your people were probably Palatine Germans forced out by the French Catholic armies moving into the area [based on the time frame]?
]]>Michael, if the Hawkins played pinochle, they would have gotten along fine with the Emhofs.
]]>And it sounds like your great-grandfather Emhof would have gotten along very well with my great-grandfather Hawkins. He didn’t bootleg during Prohibition (that I know of, anyway), but he did make a mean bathtub gin. Everybody in the surrounding area knew when he had a batch brewing (the scent wafted on the breeze through the woods, apparently), and they’d all gather at his place to drink and smoke and play pinochle all night or until the booze ran out, whichever came first. And his wife would be sitting at the table with him, in her green eyeshade, rolling her own cigarettes and swilling gin while she played cards, even though she didn’t normally drink or smoke at other times. Quite the characters, they were, God love ’em.
]]>But likewise – not being a Native American – and like most folks – we are from immigrant origins. But there are always those who feel free to “cast the first stones” anyway.
This one is a toughie with no easy answers and made worse by the border security and employment issues too.
But the “it’s not about race” comment is the more accurate portrayal – it’s not about crafting a workable, fair or real solution…but whining about *Them Fur-In-Ers*!
]]>If he was a Magyar, that covers you linguistically for the Finns.
Steve, other than the Chinese, everyone was legal until after the First World War and the resurgence of the Klan which is the source of our current “immigration policy”.
My great grandfather Emhof [Imhof] was a bootlegger during Prohibition, which didn’t exactly please the Methodists in the family.
The Imhofs were also mercenaries during the religious wars, Swiss pike men, not exactly nice people.
You can’t control what people did before you were born, nor can you really judge them except by the contemporary standards of their times.
What you can do is learn by their lives and the mistakes they made.
I remember when they started looking into the genealogy and people were wondering if there were going to be famous people involved. Having read a lot of history, I certainly hoped not, as most of them were such losers it would take generations to get rid of the genetic defects.
]]>I have to make do with scruples; my ancestry is rather vague. I have an old sepia photo of one maternal great-(great?)-grandfather; his name was Jefferson Davis Hurley, and that tells you more than I, at least, wanted to know about him. A little web research showed me that he or his family kept slaves in central Texas; that discovery, though unsurprising, hit me harder than I would have imagined. My father’s maternal grandfather was a Methodist minister who wrote bad poetry. (It’s a family tradition, except that he, unlike me, didn’t intend his poetry to be bad.) My ancestors are French, Dutch, Irish (protestant) and British, that I know of. A lot of immigrants made me, and I have no idea if they were legal immigrants or not… hence my instinctive sympathy with any immigrants willing to do their part, whatever their legal status.
]]>I started out trying to figure out which flag would have flown over Poland at the (unknown) time her parents emigrated. That was a headache in and of itself: could be the red-white-blue tricolor that Russia uses now, might be the Romanov black-gold-white tricolor, or it might have been the older yet ‘Congressional Kingdom’ flag, with a blue saltire (St. Andrew’s cross) on a white background, with a red canton and the emblem of Poland on it in white.
So I thought I might try to poke around online and see if I could narrow down when they emigrated. Had no luck with her mother, but I did hit an Andras Kozel of approximately the right age, who came through Ellis Island ex Vienna (and prior to that some unpronounceable place in Hungary) in 1896–or about three years before his daughter was born. Gonna have to see if I can find a microfilm of the 1900 census and track him further.
As for background, throw a dart at a map of northern Europe. Chances are, wherever it hits, I’ve got relatives in some degree. English, German, Norwegian, Scotch, and Irish I’m sure of. Polish and possibly Hungarian by marriage, though not in the direct bloodline. Almost sure to be some French in there. Dutch or Belgian wouldn’t surprise me. Maybe some Czech/Bohemian. Don’t think there are any Finnish connections, but I seem to recall some Danes and Swedes. Oh, and one distant female-type cousin abducted by and married into the Cherokee, I believe. Not in my bloodline, unfortunately. But I was shocked to discover that my great-grandfather’s story about being descended from an Indian princess, which I’d always taken to be another of his tall tales, had some basis in fact.
]]>The Prussian search is nearly impossible because much of what I have uses the Prussian names for places, rather than the official German names and records are nearly nonexistent after all of the armies that have marched over the territory.
The maternal lines go back to New Holland and the Mohawk Valley, and western Massachusetts before they converge in upstate New York after the Revolution.
There were infusions of new blood from Scotland and Ireland along the way.
]]>His first wife, from whom I am descended, was a second-generation Norwegian-American. Both of her maternal grandparents emigrated just after the Civil War. And through my mom’s dad’s parents, though I haven’t yet nailed down the relationship beyond all possible doubt (it’s about 95% certain), I can claim membership in the Sons of the American Revolution. One branch of the family came over about a generation after the Mayflower landed and settled in Maryland. After the Revolution, some of the younger sons headed west and settled in western Pennsylvania and what eventually became eastern Ohio.
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