When Did Your Ancestors Immigrate to America?

I used to think that an immigrant was someone with dark skin who spoke with a funny accent. That has surely changed! You see, this is one of the ways that genealogy taught me to think in new ways. I learned that two of my grandparents, and two of my husband's grandparents, were immigrants.

Since the one set spoke mainly Finnish and the other set mainly German, they actually did have "funny accents". Except I thought my grandmother's way of speaking was adorable. My husband loved his grandparent's accents, and the way they spoke. Of course, he also loved them. My husband was not a bigot, but I grew up in a cult that literally taught that people with black skin were inferior and that it was God's Will.  It took awhile to wrap my brain around the idea that my own grandmother was an immigrant, just like all the people I thought of in "that category"

One day it hit me -- in America, EVERYONE is either an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants (except of course the indigenous people, vastly outnumbered now by the newcomers). 

Our Ancestors? Of course they were immigrants. My grandmother came here from Finland in 1912 on the Lusitania. My grandfather also came from Finland in 1912, on the Tunesian.  Goldibear's grandparents were Germans born in Odessa, Russia, and came with their parents - his grandmother a ten-year old sailing on the Spaarndam in 1892, and his grandfather a twelve-year old sailing on the Scandia also in 1892. Oh my goodness! I Am the descendant of Immigrants! So is my husband!

Well, that puts a different light on things - I mean, our family is good, so immigrants are good, right?

What about our other ancestors, from long ago? Oh,  they came on the Mayflower in 1620, and on the Mary & John in 1630, and on many other ships from 1620 onward.  They came from England, from Germany, from Wales, from Scotland and Ireland, (and the Netherlands where they had been refugees from persecution in England, because they were Puritans). They were good too, as good as they knew how to be - but that is another story, for Chapter Two.