Editor’s Note: Many African-Americans trace their roots back to slavery, but often the specific family’s early history in America as well as their country of origin has been erased. The story of these families are an integral part of the American story and slavery was a form of forced immigration. We pick up the family story as far back ... Read More »
Neither of my parents were of the type that shared much about their growing up in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Both were born shortly before the Great Depression. Pictures of both appear to reflect that they each led hard-scrabble lives. Because they didn’t volunteer much, I wasn’t too curious as we later led ... Read More »
Henry Schreiber emigrated from Vienna, Austria with his family in 1939 to flee Nazi persecution. They moved to Brooklyn, New York. Here he is interviewed by his granddaughter. Austrian flag from 1934-1938, the time when my grandpa was growing up there. Q: What was life like for you in Austria before you left? How did ... Read More »
Panayotis Kalogerakos lived in Langadia, a mountainside village in Arkadia, in Peloponnesos, Greece. While it was beautiful there, Panayotis wanted to leave Greece as a young man in order to escape the fighting that was going on in the Balkans at that time. In addition, there were attractive job opportunities in the industrialized ... Read More »
Vita was a young Italian woman who was born in 1934 and grew up in a small village outside Palermo, Sicily during the second world war. As a young child, she did not understand the severity of the war as the children of the neighborhood joked around with the German soldiers. One time, three Italian ... Read More »
Rissa Rasnovsky was born in the late 1800s in Borzna, Russia (now Ukraine) in the Pale of Settlement. The Pale was an eastern section of Russia where the Russian Czars and government ordered Jewish people to live in. Places other than the Pale of Settlement were mostly forbidden for Jewish people to reside in, limiting the opportunities and freedom Jews ... Read More »
Stan Ng recalls that in his 1960s and 70s Los Angeles childhood, one of the main activities his family enjoyed was to simply get out on the open road and drive. His dad would go up and down the 101, or make his way towards Santa Monica and drive past the Hollywood landmarks ... Read More »
My grandmother, Fruma Dushnitzer, did not intend to become a US immigrant when she came to visit in July of 1939. She and her 3 year old daughter Fagie, came on a ship, “The New Amsterdam”, to visit her parents in Chicago, as they had never met their granddaughter. They had emigrated from Lithuania to Chicago in the late 1920’s. ... Read More »
Lena Solomon, née Hurwitz, was Russian and Jewish, and was born in 1902 in the Russian city of Pskov. Although age was rarely discussed and remained mysterious within their family, it is speculated that she must have been the third youngest sister of eight sisters who survived through infancy. Various circumstances led ... Read More »
This is my grandfather Judge Dennis Cantrell II. I was born on June 3rd, 1919 in Gainesville Georgia. I was born into a family of 9 and poverty. Not long after I was born, my family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, the things I saw were different than what I had saw in Georgia, or at least what I had remembered. ... Read More »