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A BOOMER’S JOURNAL: We All Come From Somewhere Else
By Tom Anselm
Chances are pretty good you are a product of immigration. I know I am. My mom and dad’s families came to the good old US of A from the lands of Austria and Hungary. We know most about my dad’s side, thanks to some research done by my cousin, John, who put together a great story of Grandpa Joe and Grandma Kate, and their siblings. We even have a chart of genealogy that goes back to 1590 on the Anselmi side.
Yeah, I said Anselmi. Good old Guiseppe dropped the ‘i’ when he came to the New World, ostensibly to fit in better, but in effect making my brothers and me, not to mention our kids, ‘suffer the slings and arrows’ of having our last name misspelled and mispronounced constantly. Oh, the agony, right? I looked into getting the ‘i’ stuck back on a while ago, but it was lots of bucks, so that didn’t happen.
Speaking of heritage, there seems to be a great deal of interest these days in finding out from whence we came, what is in our DNA. A cursory search of the ‘Interwebs’ show no less than nine such websites offering that service, and I understand that public libraries also are now in that game. Jill’s sister Mary Beth and husband Rich went for it with a method where you spit into a tube, send it in for analysis and, voila, you get a report of your heritage. Turns out, MB is about 61% Irish. So it’s a pretty safe bet that my dear wife Jill is about the same. Which is of little surprise, since they have Quinns from County Cork and Costellos from Dublin in their grandparental history.
We are all immigrants, it seems. Unless you’re from the tribes of the original settlers of this nation, your ancestors came from somewhere else. People have been coming here for centuries. Call it the diaspora, where small locations dispersed many. Like during the potato famine in the 1840’s. Or the greater immigration of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Or, sadly, the forced migration of Africans. Or now, as people still come from all over Europe and Asia and Africa and South and Central America, trying to do the best thing for themselves and their families.
The word ‘chain migration’ conjures up a bad connotation. It could be defined as ‘the social process by which migrants from a particular town follow others from that town to a particular destination.’ I think you can include members of families following their brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, as well. I know without ‘chain migration,’ the Bruck branch of my family would have had a hard time in this new world. They supported each other when they came from southern Europe. Ditto so many others of Italian, Asian, Irish, Polish, German, Hungarian descent. And many, many more.
So, I thank my grandparents for taking the risk…and Jill’s forebearers, as well. Without them, this coming March 17 would not be as big a celebration to me. For that was when this Austro-Hungarian kinder met a lovely Irish lass (61%, at least!) some 46 years ago.
So Slainte and Zum Wohl, to us all!
