Comment on I wanna be a maelstrom in 1714 C.E.
Bluewing@lemmy.world 1 week agoMy ancestors were criminals. One was a horse thief in Norway and the other was a counterfeiter in Germany in the early 1800s. Both skipping their homelands around the 1850s, just ahead of the law. At least that’s what the family histories say that we can actually trace with reasonable accuracy.
I suppose we brought the lutefisk and lefsa from the Norwegian side and beer and sausages on the German side.
Dozzi92@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Hey, mine were criminals too, and they brought some of that classic Italian criminality to Scranton, Pittston, and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, enough to have a lengthy Wikipedia article about it. Funny, because it’s not something you recognize at the family parties as a kid.
Simpler times.
Bluewing@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Not simpler, just a lot more concerned about family dirty laundry. There were a general attitude about the “old country” that they didn’t talk about. It was strong enough that my one Grandfather refused to teach me to speak Norwegian even though he and all the older community spoke it everyday. And you would go to church on Christmas or Easter day and the service was done all in Norwegian and you sang Norwegian hymns.
My family immigrants went farther west. The western prairies and northern forests of Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Canada. We bounced around a lot before the 1900s.
Dozzi92@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Ha, very similar story for me, I don’t speak a lick of Italian. My grandmother wasn’t exactly into the affairs of her brothers and uncles and so I think she chose to insulate the grandkids. Fortunately she didn’t insulate us from fantastic cooking.
We mainly stayed in the NY/NJ/PA area, just like everybody else around here.
Bluewing@lemmy.world 1 week ago
His attitude about teaching me the language was strange. He refused to teach even my mother. He was all “Your 'Murican, so you speak 'Murican.” And not Norwegian.
It wasn’t until I was in my early 20’s that I discovered that the Norge my grandfather spoke was essentially a dead language from the early 1800s. Soon after my family showed up here, the Norwegian language changed. It changed a couple of times. Not that he knew that.
But on the German side, my Great Grandmother was all about teaching me German as a little kid. She always kept a bowl of the cheap cheap pressed pastel sugar mints that little old ladies are fond of. It was a decorative milk glass hen and nest covered bowl. I could have a candy anytime I wanted as long as I asked in German. And it had better be in Low German! Or I got a light whack with a little bamboo cane every time I mispronounced a word. I learned quickly!