Both my grandmothers were born in England but paternal came over as a baby. Maternal - who was the biggest influence on me - came over in her 20s ( in 1909 ) and considered herself 'more English than the Queen ... the Queen, you know, is German' <g> Her family came from Malmesbury since before the Normans came.

Grandfathers had the distinction of being from families that had been here since the early 18th century and never really accomplished much <s> Not sure the hard-work ethic was part of the family tradition. You would think one of them would have been smart enough somewhere along the way to buy land in Boston or Manhattan for a couple pennies an acre and just not gamble or drink or whore it away but I have a feeling there is some kind of genetic flaw ...


>My father's mother came to the states from Norway. Her parents disowned her when she left (probably because she and her boyfriend left together) and she took it out on the language. Norwegian was not allowed to be spoken in her presense or in her home. My mother's mother spoke German fluently and refused to have German spoken in her house. Anything that appeared 'foreign' or smacked of 'immigrant' was not allowed. It represented the 'lower classes' in her mind. It was an attitude of the time and shared by most Danes, Swedes, and Poles as well. Funny considering she was dirt poor and her many children suffered malnutrition. Imagine her horror that her husband's mother (my grandmother) was Ojibwa and worse yet, refused to bathe! I will say one thing for both my Norwegian grandmother and my German grandmother: I never met a soul who worked as hard as either of them daybreak to bedtime. Every nook and cranny of their homes were absolutely spotless - literally. It was almost as
>though they worked at making life more difficult than it already was.