When did your family immigrate to the United States"

Parent Cafe
21

I’m a first generation American. My parents are/were both Holocaust survivors.

My mother’s family came from Vienna in 1939, and were fortunate that they already had family in the US to sponsor them. My GF was politically active, and likely wouldn’t have survived if they’d stayed in Austria. My GGF died in a concentration camp. My mother had twin cousins who were subjected to Mengele’s experiments and killed.

My father’s family lived in Poland. His mother, sister and 3yo nephew were killed by the Nazis. He escaped from a labor camp and was hidden by a farmer. He came to the US in 1949.

22

All of my great grandparents came over from Alsace Lorraine (France/Germany back and forth) in the 1860s.

All of DH’s grandparents came here from Russia at the beginning of the 20th century.

23

I was told that most of one side of the family was Irish famine immigrants, and the other side poor French/German immigrants. After getting the genealogy bug, I figured out that most of that side of the family actually arrived pre-famine, though my g-g-grandmother did a dipsy-doodle and came to the US around 1842, went back to Ireland in the latter part of the famine, and then came back to the US in 1855.

And the poor French/German immigrants turned out to be prosperous farmers who were pretty early settlers in Pennsylvania.

And one of the lines goes back to the Mayflower.

Pretty funny that the oral history was all about being Ellis Island immigrants, when it turned out that everywhere I looked the immigration had happened a lot earlier.

My step-grandfather was Ruthenian, and that’s a lineage that would be fun to trace. Some records list his dad (the immigrant) as Russian, some as Belorussian, some a Ruthenian, some as Carpathian, one as a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and still another as Polish. If the census taker was of Czech background, the spelling of his name looks Czech. Polish? I’ve seen variants of that, too.

24

My mother came in 1960 at the age of 30 and she’s still not fluent. My cousin came at 18 about 25 years ago and she’s fluent but speaks with an accent. I came at age of 4. I’m fluent in both. No accent with either.

25

The traceable part of my heritage came here in the middle 1800s. That would be my great, great maternal grandparents who left Scotland and landed in Nova Scotia. They did not come through Ellis Island , but right from Canada.
My paternal side is the mystery , but I don’t think they were here much before that time period. The all settled in Mass ( Boston area )
My husband immigrated to the US from Sweden in 1985 , alone at the age of 18 and started a business.

26

DH’s family were immigrants the last year before Ellis Island opened for that purpose. Scotch-Irish, and Austrian, all with Americanized names. Lived in the NYC area for decades, served with valor in the Civil War. They ran cigar stores and markets and served in the Navy. We know very little because they gave up their names to become American.

most of my family – both mom and dad’s sides – came to New England on the Mayflower. Some of those descendants were Tories who fled to what would become Acadia, and were among those that eluded deportation to Louisiana and then returned to Northern Maine. A grandfather was a French Canadian who gave up his citizenship in the 40’s to become a US citizen, something he treasured. A grandmother was captured and taken to Montreal by Indians for ransom, and when her father arrived to pay it, found she was too happy in her new life to leave it.

And in one of life’s truly odd moments, one of my grandfathers worked in a Navy yard on a ship that (wait for it) one of my husbands relatives served on. You can’t make this stuff up!

27

1969, from Warsaw, Poland. I was almost 12. Had a cushy, very unusual immigrant experience.

We moved to just outside of Philadelphia, and lived in a fairly posh area (Main Line.) I was the only foreign student in the little public school I attended. I was most of my teachers’ first foreign student ever. Yet they did everything right to make me feel welcomed. My English was everyone’s pet project. I was encouraged to write for the little “magazine” the school put out, to play sports (the rules of baseball had to be explained. Many times) and join the choir (I’m, ahem, tone deaf.) All to help with my acculturation. A speech therapist that came to the school a couple of times a month worked on my accent and helped perfect my use of articles (I decided to boycott “the” and “a”, deeming them unnecessary.) A top student picked by the principal would help me with reading and writing: we’d be allowed to leave class, go to the library and work together. It was as if the school wrapped its arms around me and helped me along. It was an extraordinarily supportive environment, one in which I quickly thrived. To this day I’m grateful.

28

This indicates that, unless you are particularly talented in the language department, HOW OLD you are first exposed to a new language matters. We came to this country around your mother’s age (30.)

29

1911 was the first group. The last was the last teens. From what is now Belarus and the Ukraine.

30

My Dad’s family began coming from France to Canada in the late 1500’s and early 1600’s. Eventually all the descendants of those people were forced out when Canada changed hands in 1755. They resettled in the Louisiana colony which was Spanish at the time, but at least not the dreaded British!

On his Mom’s side, people came from islands just south of Trieste that were part of the AustroHungarian Empire in the 1870’s. They show up on later censuses as being sometimes Austrian, sometimes Italian. They were great rum runners during prohibition but before that they had to work in ways that violated the child labor laws. I can easily find them in Lewis Hines’ photographs from that era.

My Mom’s grandparents came they Ellis Island in the early part of the 20th century. On her Dad’s side, his mother arrived, met his father and my grandfather was born 9 months and 4 days later! The man had come several months earlier, touring with an opera company.

31

Most of my mom’s side immigrated to Massachusetts from 1620-1640.

Much of my dad’s side is harder to trace, but several of them were in New York by the mid 1700s.

32

Please note: I only met one grandparent, my mother’s father. Everyone died prior to my birthday. I do know that they were quite a group. All were secular Jews and Communists (the radical side) and the rest were Socialists. The quote about my mother in her high school year book was Her hero is Marx (and no, not Groucho). Whether or not I like their politics they were truly part of the American dream. They made businesses, helped to fund the Histadrut and the free loan society. My mother told me that in summer the family rented small cottages in the country. In the evenings they would discuss social issues…and argue politics. They truly believed that they, as Americans, could change the world for the better.

My mother (born here) spoke Yiddish and German. She started kindergarten and couldn’t speak English. Six weeks later she spoke excellent English.

33

My Dad’s mother was a DAR, but I’ve never actually seen that family tree - her last name is Scottish though. His father came through Ellis Island when he was 13. Had to quit school to work because his Dad died young. He met my mother somehow through a German gym. (She was a gym teacher.) His father came from the part of Germany that is now Poland. My mother’s father’s family is old New England - we’re in something called the Paine Ancestry (and are related to the one who signed the Constitution not the “rabble rouser” as my great-grandmama told my mother when they named my brother after the rabble rouser. These roots go back to the 1600s. (Too lazy to look it up on line.) My mother’s mother family came from the midwest, but I don’t know much about them. She met my mother’s father at MIT where they were both studying architecture.

We have some good family stories - especially from my mother’s Back Bay family. Two of my Paine relatives were in the first Olympics. When one got a Gold in the first of two events, he didn’t participate in the second so his brother could get a gold. http://www.olympic.org/news/shooting-john-and-sumner-paine/242677

DH’s family is eastern European Jews on his Dad’s side and midwest British originally on mothers.

34

@greenbutton

Ellis Island opened in 1892, so the year before it opened was 1891. The Civil War ended in 1865. Maybe you mean Castle Garden?

My family is basically Irish Catholic Both parents born in the US. 3 of 4 grandparents born in the US. The exception came from Ireland as a child with parents in the mid 1880s. Seven of my 8 great-grandparents were Irish born or the US born children of Irish immigrants. Earliest date of immigration was about 1840 or so. So, seven out of the eight branches of my family tree originate in Ireland with US arrivals ranging from about 1840 to about 1885.

And then there’s the other one. I didn’t know a heck of a lot about my other great grandmother when I got interested in genealogy about a decade ago. I knew she was Protestant and a “Yankee” --in the New England usage of that word–and according to family lore was thrown out on the street with the clothes on her back when she got pregnant at the age of 17 by an Irish Catholic immigrant.

Well…much to my surprise, she was related to a lot of famous peole in early American history. None of the published genealogies included my family because none of them knew she did marry and have children.

She had an ancestor who came over on the Mayflower. She links us to FDR, Winston Churchill, Mark Twain and other famous people. She ALSO links us to a woman executed for witchcraft long before the Salem witch trials; to a man who tried to start the American Revolution about 80 years before anyone else was interested and was imprisoned in the Tower of London; to the best shot in the Colorado territory; to a young sailor who jumped ship in New Zealand and married a half-Maori woman leaving descendants who are Maori activists in New Zealand today;to the oldest person convicted of murder in Rhode Island history and to the infamous Lizzie Borden…

In short, she’s been a heck of a lot of fun to research!

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Yup, @jonri – the “black sheep” are by far the most interesting ones. My black sheep was a gambler, seller of gambling cheating devices, and sent up the river for placing pornography into the US Mail. He’s on the Mayflower line, and I’m quite sure he scandalized the rest of the family.

36

One of the reasons my grandfather’s mom (and thus my grandfather and his sister) went back to Hungary is because she was a Communist and feared for her safety in the US. My grandmother was a Communist in England and was very active in various Communist causes both there and once she got to the US.

I’m quite proud of my family’s radical roots :slight_smile:

37

My answer probably falls in the “more information than anyone could possible want to know” category. Nonetheless:

On my mother’s side: my mother’s parents arrived in NYC in June 1941 from their home in Berlin (although my grandmother was originally from a village in the Schwarzwald in Baden), via Lisbon. They were among the last Jews to get out before the borders were entirely closed to Jewish emigration a few months later, and the deportations “to the East” from Berlin began. They had been trying to leave for many years, and were finally able to come to the USA because my grandfather had a first cousin who had already come here with her husband in 1936, and was able to provide the necessary affidavits to vouch for them; the delay was still a number of years. Of course most of what they owned was confiscated, so they arrived with only a few possessions and no money, not speaking the language, and had to start over again in their late 40s/early 50s, working as orderlies at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. (When they first arrived, my grandparents stayed with my grandfather’s cousin in an apartment on the same street and block in Washington Heights where I live now, coincidentally.)

My mother left Berlin on Nov. 30, 1938 at the age of 15, a few weeks after Kristallnacht, to go to England on the first Kindertransport. She spent nearly five years there (I posted excerpts from some of her letters to her parents a few years ago), and finally was able to join her parents in NYC in September 1943. She lost two grandparents, seven of her 10 uncles and aunts, and two first cousins (along with innumerable more distant relatives) in the Holocaust. She already spoke English rather well when she arrived in England, and of course was fluent by the time she came to the USA, so she was able soon thereafter to get a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence and then Columbia Law School, where she met my father.

On my father’s mother’s side: my father’s maternal grandparents arrived in NYC in late 1883 with the first six of their nine children; they were from the town of Szczuczyn in northeast Poland, in the Lomza district. They moved upstate to Syracuse, where there was a Jewish community and one of my great-grandmother’s brothers already lived; my great-grandfather had a grocery store/bakery there for the next 40 years or so until his death. My maternal grandmother was born in Syracuse in 1888, and moved to NYC with one of her sisters soon after graduating from Syracuse High School in 1905. (After my father died last year, one of the things I found was my grandmother’s high school diploma.) One of my grandmother’s brothers was actually rather famous in his day as the first Jewish American to win an Olympic gold medal – he won four of them in total, along with a couple of silver medals, in track and field.

On my father’s father’s side: my paternal grandfather arrived in NYC at the age of 15 months with his parents and older sister in July 1888. Their first home was in a tenement building on Suffolk Street that still exists (I’ve taken photos of it). They lived in various other buildings on the Lower East Side until about 1908, when they moved uptown to the Bronx after the IRT was extended up there. My grandfather’s father was a capmaker from the town of Jurbarkas (Yurburg) in the Kaunas district of Lithuania (then part of Russia), and worked in factories on the Lower East Side, dying in his fifties from various maladies probably related to his occupation, forcing my grandfather to leave school at 13 to go to work in the garment industry himself. According to my father, my grandfather’s family stayed in touch with their numerous remaining family members in Jurbarkas until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in late June 1941, but the Germans arrived in Jurbarkas within a day or two, and almost all the Jews in that town (including about 30 or 40 people who were cousins of my grandfather or their children) were murdered.

My grandfather’s mother came from the famous town of Tykocin in northeast Poland (the 17th-century synagogue survives and is now a major tourist attraction – one of my first cousins visited there earlier this year). My grandfather’s parents both emigrated separately to Paris in the early 1880s, and lived in the Marais (then the Jewish slum), where they met. They were married in 1885 and my grandfather was born in 1887. (The very first members of my family to come to the USA were a sister and uncle of my great-grandmother, also from Tykocin, who arrived here in 1879. The uncle is somewhat known in Poland for having been one of the Jews involved in the “January Uprising” of Poles and Lithuanians against Russian rule in 1861; he was probably exiled for some period of time afterwards.)

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hey Donna - my family is from Lomza, too. My paternal grandfather was born there. His father was a twin - the twin (meaning my grandfather’s uncle) emigrated here at the age of 15 by himself (can you imagine??), became a successful businessman in PA, and sponsored numerous nieces and nephews. My grandfather came over in 1920 but I have numerous records from Lomza from the 1840s through 1920, including the 1895 census. My Lomza family was surprisingly pretty educated and one owned the largest sugar refinery in Poland.

My paternal grandmother was from Riga, Latvia. She lost boy/girl twin siblings in the Phila flu epidemic of around 1918.

My maternal side is a mix of German Catholuc and Irish Catholic, much poorer / more humble backgrounds. I’ve traces my maternal grandmother back to the late 1500s in Bavaria. Those Germans keep awesome records. My Irish side came to Philly as domestic help. However, the Irish names are so common i got stymied and haven’t been able to make much progress - kind of like researching John Smith.

39

Pizzagirl, my Tykocin great-grandmother’s family (who had lived there at least as far back as the late 18th century) had several uncles, cousins, etc. who ended up living and having children in Lomza (going to “the big city,” I suppose). So I’ve also been through most of the available 19th century Lomza records looking for relatives (including the 1897 census, which unfortunately doesn’t survive for Tykocin or for Szczuczyn, so far as I know). My family in Tykocin and Lomza weren’t anywhere near as refined as yours – some were watchmakers, but the greatest number (including both of my great-grandmother’s parents) seem to have been tavern keepers, a common occupation for Polish Jews, both male and female, in the 18th century, but less so in the 19th. (My great-grandmother’s older brother followed the family tradition and became a saloon-keeper in Chicago for many years until Prohibition.)

So it’s likely that we’re related somehow, sometime in the last few hundred years, if one could go back that far.

40

This is fun. It’s interesting to hear people’s stories.

My father’s side is Ulster Scots (“Scotch Irish”). They were Presbyterian and immigrated from Ulster to South Carolina in the 1740s. That branch of the family moved steadily west with each generation (SC–TN–KS). i was told that we are related to President James Polk. Most of them were farmers until the early 20th century, when they started entering the professions and business. My grandfather was a doctor, his brother was a pastor, and two other brothers had their own department store in a small town.

My mother’s side is Danish. Her father immigrated to the US from Svendborg in 1920 and her mother’s parents immigrated from Aarhus in the 1890s. My great-grandfather was a bricklayer and contractor. My grandparents on that side met at an immigrant Lutheran church in Kansas City. My grandfather was in the grain business.

We went to Ellis Island a few years ago and found my great grandfather’s entrance records. His name was anglicized (Guldbaek to Goldbeck). He filled out an entry questionnaire asserting that he was not an anarchist (I guess that was what they worried about in 1895). He lived in Philadelphia for a while before making his way out to Kansas City.