This homework assignment says a lot about how America treats its history

[kpete]

When a sixth-grade teacher asked a black student to explain her family origins, the answers delved into a likely unexpected topic: slavery:



"The general assumption is made that everyone has some grand success story of families leaving their home country and coming to America in search of better opportunities. But the simple and plain truth is that not all of us have this story to tell and the ability to trace one's ancestry is a privilege within itself — one that most if not all black Americans do not have."

So while the responses in the assignment are witty, they're also revealing: They show the incredibly dark moments of America's past — and the policies that followed, such as segregation, the war on drugs, and mass incarceration — that still weigh on many black kids and adults today.

http://www.vox.com/2015/10/30/9640302/homework-family-origin-slavery

[luvspeas]

1. An Native American could also have some interesting answers...

Or a kid whose family were "illegal" immigrants. This teacher is not nearly as smart as the students they teach.

Edit: I should not blame the teacher because this is obviously a manufactured worksheet and it is likely they were forced to use it.

[hunter]

2. My ancestors manufactured their family pedigree.

They came to the Americas to escape troubles in Europe.

Another smaller wave of them were dodging the U.S. Civil War.

Our family motto ought to be "Fuck this shit. I'm outta here."

That is of course how all the world came to be populated with humans, all but Antarctica. Running away from trouble is a very human trait.

One of my few documented ancestors was a mail order bride to Salt Lake City.

She didn't like sharing a husband so she ran off with a handsome surveyor. He became her third husband. The Mormons hadn't known about her first husband in Europe. Her second marriage, as a Mormon junior wife, wasn't recognized by anyone but the Mormons. Her third marriage stuck, and the couple established a wilderness homestead, a cattle ranch my mom's cousin still owns. It's very likely the pedigree the Mormons have of her is a fabrication. She just wanted to get the hell out Europe and the Mormons were paying passage for sturdy young Scandinavian women. A bright young woman might tell the Mormons what they wanted to hear, she may have even believed it herself for a time, and they paid her passage to America.

I have a couple more disreputable family stories, but beyond kin I've questioned personally, genealogical research in my family rapidly dissolves into the fog. It all starts to get very murky starting with my grandparents. One of my grandfathers had different birthdays on his California Drivers License, his Military records, and his Social Security, which complicated the paperwork immensely when he died. This grandfather's father, my great grandfather, is still a complete mystery. Superficially his story checks out, but I'm not convinced my family surname is legitimate. It seems more likely to me some incorrigible ancestor impressed sailor jumped ship, swam to shore, and ran just as fast as he could into the wilderness, fuck this shit, no more floggings for me.

Children in our family are taught that it's important to know how to swim, and also that we are free to choose our own name if the name our family gives us is not to our liking. If a four year old wants to be a named after some superhero, princess, or prince, that's fine. One of my kids was Spiderman and Peter Parker as a toddler. By high school the names might become even more affected. I myself was never brave enough to demand a three or four letter name and nothing else. Heck, even here on DU "Hunter" is my name, just as it is in many other places, a name my parents gave me and I'm okay with that. Much better than "queerbait" which middle and high school bullies called me as a highly reactive skinny, squeaky youth.

Them that believe all the genealogical fabrications in our family history seem very much to want to believe them, the most sad because they identify with "traditional" white Protestant (or in some cases Mormon) racist, bigoted, U.S.A. culture. Nope, no, radical Catholics or Jews or Pacifist Christians here. And Irish Catholic? God No! Certainly not!!!

Before the rooster crows, you will disown them three times.

I'm okay with the mess. History is a dirty business.

There's actually a great deal of freedom in my family tradition. Anyone can be whoever they want to be, although it's much more difficult these days with computers and more sophisticated record keeping to actually reboot one's own identity entirely.

My wife's family are largely Native Americans and British Isle and Brittany Catholics. They escaped persecution in this glorious U.S.A. by fleeing to Canada and Mexico, returning later as "immigrants" to the U.S.A. in the first half of the twentieth century, some as farm workers, some by military service. One of my wife's uncles was killed by the Nazi war machine just as World War II was ending. His body was later relocated from a field in France to Arlington National Cemetery. His family celebrated Victory Europe before they found out he'd been killed. My wife's grandma never recovered that. The war was over, she'd thought he'd be coming home alive.

My grandpa was a U.S. retired Army Air Force officer, but he never talked about it. His proudest achievement was work he did landing men on the moon for the Apollo Project. He'd always talk about that.

But pride, especially "white U.S.A. pride" is a very disturbing thing.

This same rocket engineer grandpa was very upset that I was marrying, in his words, "A Mexican Girl." Men in HIS White Western Protestant U.S.A. fantasy family simply didn't do that. (Oh sure, they had married the occasional Irish Catholic girl...)

In protest, my grandfather didn't attend our Big Catholic Wedding, but to his credit he eventually got past that.

Yet in no way does my own family history compare to what African Americans have experienced here in the U.S.A.

[kpete]

3. That was just fascinating

Thank you SO MUCH for sharing

especially this rang true for me:

I'm okay with the mess. History is a dirty business.



and you should know,
mr pete married "A Mexican Girl"
I believe after 42 years he has no regrets.

thanks again,
kpete

[Retrograde]

4. and a lot of data, even on official records, is suspect

I've found one great-grandfather (as far back as I can go) with several different spellings of his name, which could just be the Anglophone tendency to spell Polish names any which way; another never listed the same place of origin twice. Another emigrated with his cousin of the same name, and the two are frequently confused (which may be why my grandfather is listed in one city directory as a 'laborer' at age 4 (or whoever was collecting data got paid by the line)); my grandmother went by different first names at different times.

Assignments like the one in the OP seem to assume that everyone's ancestors came from western Europe where data is relatively easy to find,or that all the information is recorded in one of the one-line genealogy sites (don't get me started about ancestry.com). For many Americans it's not as straight-forward.

[1939]

5. Ellis Island

A lot of the folks who came through Ellis island were illiterate and those that were didn't want to make waves. The clerk asked your name and wrote it down as he heard it.

Schmidt became Smith

Nilsson became Nelson

Terriault became Terrio

Taliaferro became Tolliver

Geoffrey became Jeffrey

In Slavic names, the "wicz" ending often became "vitch"

[kpete]

6. mr pete's family

went from Pederson to Peterson

[ProfessorGAC]

7. Our Name Has A Misspelling

It's still sicilian as heck, but my grandfather gave his name, the guy spelled it on paper and put a "i" on the end instead of an "e". My grandfather just figured that is how it was spelled in America.

Other family members came over earlier, and their name still ends in an "e"

[Snobblevitch]

8. My mother's side of the family

became Smith from Schmidt.

My father's family kept their surname which I have. It's a unique name and if searching for the name on the internet, every single person is related to me and the lineage goes directly back to my grandfather.

[Retrograde]

10. Ellis Island was only one of several ports of entry on the East Coast

It gets all the press, but Baltimore was also a big destination for people from Eastern Europe, as well as other port cities. Angel Island in San Francisco Bay was sorta the West Coast equivalent, mainly for immigrants from China (who often came in with false names - the "paper sons" - to get around US anti-Asian restrictions: if you could show you were related to someone already in the US, you were OK, if not, you weren't permitted.)

[csziggy]

14. Researching my brother in law's family was interesting

His great great grandfather listed his village in Austria-Hungary on the ship's manifest when he immigrated to the US. In the following censuses over several decades the country of origin changed, depending on where the borders had been drawn after the latest war - Prussia, Hungary, Czechaslavakia, Slovakia, etc.

I eventually located the village on Google Maps - it's also changed names several times over the last hundred + years. It's right on the current Hungary southern border, explaining how the name changed so often.

There was another branch of the family that came over at the same time but they moved to Connecticut while BIL's branch moved to northern Alabama and continued mining - which is what the village was known for back in the old country.

Then his grandmother came along - she had BIL's father before she got married. No one knows the father's name. It was never listed on the birth certificate and apparently her story changed over the years as to who he was. Later she married a Slovakian man - further antagonizing her family since they did not approve of Slovaks. He was kind enough to raise her son along with the children they had - apparently BIL's father was not told he was not her husband's son until he was old enough to join the Army and they had to give him his birth certificate with his mother's name on it. He never had the money or the need to change his real birth name so that is what he uses to this day.


At least that BIL's family had a reason for their origins to change - and had some roots in reality. BIL(2)'s family seems to have been prone to the same congenital lying we caught him at. From census to census their birth states changed. Sometimes no one in the household admitted to being able to read or write, sometimes they all could and had graduated from high school. They lied about relationships, occupation, and marital status. It made it really hard to verify I had the correct people - but BIL(2)'s mother's obituary detailed her life's story and gave me the information to verify the census records as her and her parents' His father's family was worse - and I haven't been able to take that family back very far at all. I can only assume that both sides of BIL(2)'s family were paranoid or psychotic since the lying went back generations.

[a la izquierda]

9. My mom's grandpa came over in 1908...

because his entire family had just died in an earthquake (the Messina earthquake). Seven siblings and his parents. He had nowhere to go, so an uncle living in NYC went to get him. Otherwise, maybe he'd have never left Italy.

My dad's grandfather came as a kid with his younger brother. They traveled alone. Their mother stayed in Ireland. I guess they were dirt poor.

[LittleBlue]

11. We came over in the 1840s fleeing starvation in Ireland

We still have photos of them in their Civil War uniforms, the sons of Irish country bumpkins in Northern colors.

My other ancestors came afterward, probably looking for freedom of worship or jobs.

[HereSince1628]

12. It's not at all uncommon for Americans to not know their roots past grand parents

Getting to great-grandparents is a pretty good accomplishment, and, imo getting to the 4th generation (great grandparents) is nearly within the realm of possibility for many former slaves as it is for Europeans.

Along one line of my history I'm unusual...I can go back into the 1500s. The reasons I can do that is because England kept records for probate of estates, my maternal lineage connects to that, and the working out of that lineage was of interest because relatives a time or two removed "made the big show". I've got a shoestring relative who was an Ambassador for the US while Jackson was president.

More fortuitously, or perhaps less, I also have a connection as a cousin to one of the most famous 'crazy' Americans...Zelda Sayer. That in combination with Edward Stalker Sayer's accomplished life have caused people to take note and make records.

Even where people have bits and pieces of ancestral records the bits and pieces are hard to get beyond 3 generation.

On my paternal lineage I'm lucky, sort of, and I can get back to my great-grandfather...but it seems he was purposefully deceptive to immigration authorities about his life and his relationships to his predecessors. This isn't really terribly uncommon. Many Europeans were escaping fuedal and semi-feudal communities. Escape for serfs to America was in some ways not dissimilar to connecting with the underground railroad and escaping slavery. Of course once in America a European serf had a better chance of 'passing'. But by no means was that certain.

I'd love to know where my great grandfather actually was born. I;d love to know the truth of his relationship with a women 8 years his senior. It's pretty clear he obscured his record (we've got him changing his name, and we've got records of him as a sailor on the clipper ship Rattler -returning- to Europe where he passed on his genes to my grandfather thus insuring -ME-. I don't think we'll ever figure out his deception. He claims protestant origins in what was East Germany, but his son, supposedly born in Lusatia was baptized as a catholic at age 8 weeks about 3 miles from Holland...hundreds of miles away from his 'birthplace'.

[Snobblevitch]

13. My grandfather deserted the tsar's army

and wandered around Europe for a couple of years before buying some guy's passport and boarded a ship to the U.S. He gave them his real name at Ellis Island. All of his family were starved to death by Stalin. My dad does not even know his grandfather's name. His dad did not wish to speak of his dead family. My dad did find 11 first cousins in the old country and even visited them a couple of years after the fall of the USSR. He used to get translated letters asking for him to send 'medicine' because a family member was sick. They have dismal health care. (When my dad visited, he brought 6,000 doses of various antibiotics and donated them to their local hospial. The doctor/administrator sold them on the black market and kept the money for himself.)

[HeiressofBickworth]

15. And, of course, the top unsolved question

is "who was really under the sheets when grandma was conceived?"

My mother's birth certificate indicates she was the daughter of her mother's 2nd husband, but it is well known in the family that she is in fact, the biological daughter of her mother's 1st husband's cousin. Grandma, naughty girl, was 5 months gone when she married #2. There is no legal record supporting this, but my mother and relatives of her generation knew this, relatives of my generation knew this and now my grandchild knows this. I've done my genealogical research based on who we know is the biological father. The family country of origin of the 1st husband and the country of origin of the 2nd husband are quite different. Without knowing the actual father, the family would give a misleading answer to question #1 of this worksheet.

[me b zola]

16. "..the ability to trace one's ancestry is a privilege within itself.."

I have been saying this for years.

[KG]

17. there may be a point behind this exercise, but this also seems to be a rather intrusive question.

call me crazy, but my family's history is something I've just never been concerned about.