My Martrilineal side consists almost solely of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe's Pale of Settlement region. They immigrated to the U.S. between the late 1880s and early 1900s, a time period when the oppression of Jews and the pogroms against them was rising in severity and frequency. Though they may have lived in these various countries and regions for generations, spanning hundreds of years, the Jewish people there were never fully accepted into mainstream society, always being seen as outsiders and as "other." Once in America, most of them landed in New York and New Jersey, and slowly migrated west, making homes in New Orleans and then finally the Bay Area, California. Many of my family continued their Eastern European trades as fur trappers and millers, setting up Haberdasheries and Hatter businesses in New Orleans and San Francisco.
My Patrilineal side includes American immigrants from Northern Germany, England, Scotland, and Costa Ricans of predominantly Spanish origin. I was lucky enough to be able to find more in-depth accounts and details of the lives of some of these ancestors, as some are quite notable on this side of my family: namely, a Costa Rican president, a large landowner in California of which a town was named after, a political cartoonist in the Depression era, and the main horticulturist at Filoli Gardens.
I am still attempting to piece together their stories, however. So much is lost through time. But luckily, more archives and documents are being digitized and more people are using DNA testing. This all allows me to connect with distant relatives in the hopes of trying piece together more stories of immigration and specifically life before coming to America.