... In the middle half of the nineteenth century, more than one-half of the population of Ireland emigrated to the United States. So did an equal number of Germans. Most of them came because of civil unrest, severe unemployment or almost inconceivable hardships at home. This wave of immigration affected almost every city and almost every person in America.

From 1820 to 1870, over seven and a half million immigrants came to the United States " more than the entire population of the country in 1810. Nearly all of them came from northern and western Europe " about a third from Ireland and almost a third from Germany.

#2 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-06-05 01:16 AM

On my father's side, the first immigrants arrived in the US from Germany in 1850. They were tailors by trade and eventually opened two stores, one in Toledo and one in Cleveland, specializing in men's & boy's fine clothing. The company was sold to the Botany Brands in 1961. During the Franco-Prussian War, in the early 1870's, they were forced to change the family name as it was hurting their business due to all of the anti-German propaganda (German soldiers bayoneting babies and raping Nuns). So they Anglo-Saxonized it, changing it from Becker to Baker. However, when I was a kid, we used to go to my uncle Frank's farm (actually my great uncle) in Maumee, Ohio for family reunions every 10-years to celebrate Uncle Frank's birthday (he lived to be 98-year old) and everyone was still speaking German, when the family got together (we never learned German at home, so we were fish out of water). Frank was the last Baker to work at the B R Baker Company, retiring as Chief Operating Officer shortly before the sale to Botany. My grandfather, and two his brothers, worked for the railroad.

On my mother's side, her family came from Belgium, her maternal grandparents arriving first in the late 19th century, and then her father, a few years prior to WWI.

The first immigrant ancestor of my wife's, at least on her mother's side, was here almost before anyone else, arriving from Wales in 1654. Her father's side is a bit more complicated since she didn't even know her father's name until she was 17 years old (her mother never told her that her 'father' wasn't and claimed that she had lost her birth certificate). She's since used Ancestry.com to verify that at least his name was real and that she was his daughter, but she's never tried to contact any relatives on her father's side, but it did show that his family was mostly Polish, and had been in the country for at least two or three generations.

OCU

What a truly American story! I have enjoyed your comments.

Thanks for sharing that with us!

She's since used Ancestry.com to verify that at least his name was real and that she was his daughter

Oops!

#9 | Posted by donnerboy at 2025-06-05 12:25 PM

Well, two of our sons have taken it a step further.

Our oldest son married a gal who's mother was Korean/Japanese and who's father was German-American. They have four daughters, the oldest of which is married to a guy from Central America who can trace HIS ancestry on his mother's side back to Eastern Europe, including a branch of Ashkenazi Jews, and they have two children, a girl and a boy.

Our middle son, he has a daughter who's mother is from Mexico.

Our youngest son had a daughter, but we lost her at eight-weeks from a rare but incurable genetic disorder (she would've been 14 years old this month). It destroyed his marriage and while he's remarried, they've agreed not to risk another throw of the genetic dice.

So you can see, our two oldest sons have thickened up our family's gene pool a bit.

OCU

Speaking of DNA and Ancestry.com, while my wife had a purpose in mind, finding out who her father really was, I thought I knew everything on my side of the ledger. Boy was I wrong.

Anyone getting their DNA done needs to be aware that you may learn more about your 'family' than you bargained for. About six month after we had our DNA run by Ancestry, and my wife had pretty much confirmed what she had been told about the missing side of her family, I get a note from a FIRST cousin that I had never heard of before. We communicated for a couple of weeks where he explained that, like my wife, he had been lied to about who his parents were and it wasn't until he was in his late 50's before he finally learned that he was adopted, but no one would tell him anything, not even his 'mother'. When Ancestry.com finally came around he decided to take matters into his own hand. While his 'father' had died years before his 'mother' was still alive but in a nursing home and so he took a sample from both her and himself and sent it in, which proved that they were not related (his 'mother' passed away before he could confront her with the test results).

That's' when his DNA crossed mine and we got these notices about being first cousins. I sent a note out to all my first cousins on my father's side (that's what the DNA showed, a fraternal match) and all but one claimed to have no knowledge of anything. However, the one cousin called me and said that I was to never speak of this again to anyone. When I mentioned this to her younger half-sister she suddenly realized that this might explain a few things. Now their mother and their respective fathers were already gone, so there was no one to ask (only one aunt, by marriage was still alive, and I wanted to avoid asking her about it as she was quite old). Anyway, the younger sister of the cousin who warned me to drop the subject, decided to do something on her own and had her DNA checked and sure enough, it confirmed that this mystery man was her half-brother. Well, looking at their respective ages and that of her older half-sister, my cousins, the one I had known all my life and the new one, figured out that the only explanation that made any sense was that he was born out of wedlock between my aunt's first and second marriage. I all fit because he was born in a hospital in Chicago (my aunt lived in Michigan) which was known for caring for unwed mothers. Also, my new cousin's mother' had been a nurse at that hospital. Once all the chess pieces were on the board, it became pretty obvious what had happened.

At this point I dropped out of the conversation and just let my cousin handle it as she was really interested in meeting him. Her new sibling was retired, living in Florida and she lived in Virginia, so she drove down there to meet him face to face and they became close. Unfortunately, he had some serious medical conditions and died before we all got a chance to meet. But my cousin said he looked like the rest of us and that he was very nice, just that he had been living a lie all his life and it had played on his mind once it became clear what had probably happened. Note that to this day, the older half-sister, who we're still close to, has never accepted what me and her sister learned, or at least she refuses to talk about it and I've never brought it up as I respect her too much and would not want to ruin our relationship.

But this does act as a tale that if one does have their DNA run, be prepared for what you might learn. It may not always conform with what you thought was the history of your family.

OCU