re: #330 ckkatz

Pretty good guess!

I will need to check out Robert Evans.

One side of my family is Swiss-German. They came over in the Great German migration after the (18)’48. And settled along the Missouri-Kansas line. In many ways the Civil War in that area was an ethnic war of the earlier English settlers (who mostly came from the South) versus the newly arrived ethnic Germans. And in these kinds of brutal, crude, backwoods fracas, numbers mattered. And there were a lot more German ethnics.

The other side came from Eastern Europe.

One part came from a small market town in the Ukraine. When those who could left, (just before World War 1) there were about 8000 Jews in the town’s 10,000 people. By 1945, there were reportedly 12 Jews left in town. At least 4 members of my immediate family are in the mounds at the forest behind the town. Along with 6000 others. We don’t know where the others are buried.

Another part fled from Moldava to Odessa in 1905 after the Kishinev Pogrom. When the pogrom made it to Odessa, and my grandmother saw Cossacks pulling people off the trams and murdering them because they looked Jewish, the family moved to New York. (Apparently my grandmother didn’t look Jewish to street thugs.)

Kinderjohren - Bente Kahan

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I wrote about Kishinev in college. My big history paper (I was a history major) was on the pogroms in Russia from the assassination of Alexander II to the start of WWI. Terrible terrible stuff. My family background on my moms side was impacted by the war too. Her mom’s father’s home village was nearly destroyed in Slovakia and her dad’s cousins were partisans in Slovenia. I really feel knowing my family’s experiences impacts my views. My dads family is German Irish. German side weren’t really impacted by the wars of the 19th century but the Irish especially my family in Western Ireland was. I understand why people are proud of their countries and cultures but I despise nationalism as we saw it in the 30’s and now.