My heritage
With my references to my Italian-immigrant forebears, I've been fielding a lot of questions lately on my ancestry. Here's the long version (you've been warned).
My father's family, the Conaways and kin, were part of the colonial wave of Irish immigration into the US. Oral history says we fought in the Revolution, and circumstantial evidence regarding place and family names indicates we came over in the 1750s from County Donegal. We settled in southwestern Pennsylvania, and I like to tease southerners that when my people rebelled against "Washington tyranny" they meant George, unlike those Jonny-Come-Lately Confederates. Whether we picked up Protestantism here or were Scotch-Irish is hard to tell, but there are references to Coneways in Donegal predating the Ulster Plantation (the spelling is interesting: on legal documents my last name was spelled "Conneway" until suddenly changing two generations back).
The distinction between "Conway" and "Conaway" goes much further back, and is a regional variation of Gaelic (and Welsh) pronunciation of the same name, but that's a bit of a tangent.
That's the easy half.
My mother's grandfather emigrated from Italy to Argentina, at the turn of the 19/20th centuries. He married a woman from Barcelona, Isabel Gonzales, and their son, my grandfather, was born in Buenos Aires in 1910. In 1912 the family moved back to Italy, to the tiny village of Filetto in the Province of Chieti in the Region of Abruzzi (now Abruzzo, after it was split from Molise in the 1950s).
In 1928, my grandfather emigrated to the United States, fleeing the military draft into Mussolini's army: he was a die-hard socialist, in an era before that was considered a problem in the US. After the Immigration Act of 1924 such immigration was much harder to do than previously, but his cousin had already immigrated under the more tolerant rules and served as a sponsor.
Also predating the 1924 immigration law was Quinto M, from the Province of Perugia in the region of Umbria, whose daughter Antonietta would meet and marry my grandfather. Family lore says there's a German ancestor in there as well, but I've never been clear where.
As a postscript, after his children all moved to the US, my great-grandfather went back to retire and eventually die in Buenos Aires. I feel a certain attachment with an ancestor who emigrated three times in his life.
My father's family, the Conaways and kin, were part of the colonial wave of Irish immigration into the US. Oral history says we fought in the Revolution, and circumstantial evidence regarding place and family names indicates we came over in the 1750s from County Donegal. We settled in southwestern Pennsylvania, and I like to tease southerners that when my people rebelled against "Washington tyranny" they meant George, unlike those Jonny-Come-Lately Confederates. Whether we picked up Protestantism here or were Scotch-Irish is hard to tell, but there are references to Coneways in Donegal predating the Ulster Plantation (the spelling is interesting: on legal documents my last name was spelled "Conneway" until suddenly changing two generations back).
The distinction between "Conway" and "Conaway" goes much further back, and is a regional variation of Gaelic (and Welsh) pronunciation of the same name, but that's a bit of a tangent.
That's the easy half.
My mother's grandfather emigrated from Italy to Argentina, at the turn of the 19/20th centuries. He married a woman from Barcelona, Isabel Gonzales, and their son, my grandfather, was born in Buenos Aires in 1910. In 1912 the family moved back to Italy, to the tiny village of Filetto in the Province of Chieti in the Region of Abruzzi (now Abruzzo, after it was split from Molise in the 1950s).
In 1928, my grandfather emigrated to the United States, fleeing the military draft into Mussolini's army: he was a die-hard socialist, in an era before that was considered a problem in the US. After the Immigration Act of 1924 such immigration was much harder to do than previously, but his cousin had already immigrated under the more tolerant rules and served as a sponsor.
Also predating the 1924 immigration law was Quinto M, from the Province of Perugia in the region of Umbria, whose daughter Antonietta would meet and marry my grandfather. Family lore says there's a German ancestor in there as well, but I've never been clear where.
As a postscript, after his children all moved to the US, my great-grandfather went back to retire and eventually die in Buenos Aires. I feel a certain attachment with an ancestor who emigrated three times in his life.