![Surprised :o](./images/smilies/surprised.gif)
So I wonder, what is your native background?
I know they're some haters in my mom's family. The whole family, even on my real dad's side, knows us as the "Rich Family".Black Shuck wrote:My mom's family hates us too, mainly because we're better off than they are.
vrikasatma wrote:I got some pretty illustrious ancestors, so my family's heavily into its history and genealogy. Hold onto your stripes, here we go:
I was adopted at birth so I grew up not knowing what I was. I didn't know until my biological sister found me (at age 36) and then came the info-dump.
On biological mother's side: German, Irish, Basque and Iroquois. Know more about my grandmother Doris than I do about my grandfather Jack. All I know about him is he was German, Basque and Iroquois, Grandma was the youngest daughter of a major rich family from Alameda County, CA (Oakland/Berkeley). She was an alcoholic so she was the one they hid in the closet when the relatives came over. Anyway, Grampa Jack was a volunteer fireman and he went off to WWII, died in the Battle of the Bulge and never came back. My mother never knew him and Grandma spent the next fourteen years on the couch, listening to the radio and getting plastered on gin before she re-married. My mother grew up wild, took up with one guy, got pregnant, gave that kid up; then took up with my father, wash rinse repeat, away I go and I never knew my father. Which turned out to be kind of a good thing...he was bad, and not in the cool way either...
So my father was half German and one-quarter Irish, one quarter Shawnee. And on the German side he went back to the Rittenhouses — yeah, the Philly RittenhousesThere's a whole dynasty right there, first Mennonite minister on American soil, first paper mill on American soil, the company's still going and the mill is preserved in the Park Service, and my ancestor David Rittenhouse, Sr. calligraphed the Declaration of Independence. He was the only founding father that didn't sign it, but he did the most important part: everything else!
In the old country, Old Papa Wilhelm goes back to a whole line of horse breeders, scholars, scribes, even Vikings. The family came down from Norway originally, settled in das Rheinland, and Papa Wilhelm went from there to Arnhem, Die Nederlands to learn his trade before hopping the ship to the colonies. He was part of the Germantown Compact which was the first anti-slavery protest on this continent. The signatories decried the practice as barbaric and swore they did not then and never would keep slaves. Can you imagine? This is in the late 1600s, today that would be like the Kill Your Television movement or ripping down the Teamster's Union. So anyway, if someone says "Don't knock slavery, your ancestors had them" I can say, "Most of them didn't and I can prove it!"
I'm also related to some of th Zeigfield Girls on my father's side of the family. One of them married, moved down to Anaheim, and — yeah, you guessed it, she and her husband owned one of the orange groves that Walt Disney bought
On my mother's side of the family we have a couple bigwigs in the Alameda County Democratic Party and two California Supreme Court judges. Heh. Rather ironic that I registered Libertarian, neh?