immigration: what generation american are you?

[Texarkandy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Khan Stripes (1981) - Memorable quotes John Winger: We're all very different people. We're not Watusi, we're not Spartans, we're Americans. With a capital "A", huh? And you know what that means? Do you? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We're the underdog. We're mutts.

I saw the movie & see the humor, but factually I disagree -

In my view, most of us Americans pretty much got here by being smart & bold enough to flee a bunch of really sucky countries in Europe, Asia, & elsewhere.

(With the exception, of course, of most of our African-American fellow citizens - who probably also would have been quick to voluntarily jump on the ships to flee their sucky countries, if not for the slavery thing when they got here)

Acutally, it's the Aussies who were the rejects so I've heard

[Leonidas]

I started doing genealogy at my uncle's request. He died shortly before I retired and I have made a lot of progress since then, if in fits and bits here and there, mostly to complete his work in his honor.

Five generations - one of the 10th great grandfathers actually made it here before the Mayflower (1618). But he was just part of a Dutch East India Company trading group and he didn't stay on that occasion. He did make it back around 1624 and ran a company farm for the company for a few years before he went back and got his family. Good thing for him - while he was gone his farming partner and son were killed in an Indian raid. He eventually was one of the "Twelve Men", one of our earlier forms of self-government. In this case, on what to do about Indians who were warring against the settlers/invaders. All of the rest showed up here, mostly from Ireland (Scots-Irish) within the next few decades.

With the exception of the Dutch, all of my ancestors came here to escape a sucky situation in the old world. Scots escaping continual war and political/religious oppression in Northern Ireland, Germans and Swiss escaping political/religious oppression in the Palatinate, etc.

[Zoocat]

Apparently I have ancestors on my maternal side who actually did arrive here on the Mayflower. They settled in Massachusetts. On my paternal side, my ancestors came from Ireland during the potato famine. They ended up settling in Ohio and were clerks, teachers, and trolley car drivers. I have lots of pictures, names, and information from the paternal side but not much except names from my maternal side.

[OldGuy]

Johannes der Alte (1663-1715) on the paternal side is as far back as we can go, in Dierdorf, Westerwald, Germany. His son Johannes Wilhelmus (1694-1760?) emigrated to NJ ~1700, so that makes me the 8th generation in the New World. Have discovered the usual sea captains, local judges, Revolutionary War privates, Dairymen's League carpenters and dairy farmers (NE Pennsylvania), one distiller-turned-teetotaler () and the like, but no cattle thieves or seditionists, in succeeding generations. Solid German ancestry; stuck in PA until my generation, when everyone left. Much less luck tracking down the maternal side of the family...