MAKING OF THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

I mainly know where my mother’s side is from. My great grandfather was from Croatia. At the age of either 14 or 16, his oldest brother died in a war for Hungary. His mother decided she was not going to lose another son so she gave my great grandfather and his younger brother money and told them to leave the country. My great uncle went to Argentina and my great grandfather came to Cleveland where he joined a Croatian Club and met my great grandmother who was also Croatian. It is crazy to thing how at such a young age he moved across the world to a country he knew nothing about nor could he speak the language. He started working in a mill in Cleveland but as the depression hit he stopped working there and became a farmer. This is where he raised his eleven children, my grandmother being the youngest. Since my great grandfather was now the oldest child, after his parents died, he was eire to his families land in Croatia which sparked conflict with his younger brother who wanted it all for himself. My great grandfather had to go back to Croatia and properly divide up the land amongst his younger siblings.

My family and I have had the opportunity to stay in touch with our family in Croatia. We have visited them a few times and hope to see them come to the United States for a time. My family still owns the land where my great grandfather started his life and for my grandmother it was satisfying to finally see the place her father had always talked about when she was a child. It’s crazy to think about the amount of opportunities my cousins and I have here is the U.S. compared to my family in Croatia where still today their economy and education system are far from the United States. It gives me a lot of respect for my great grandfather and his parents who overcome difficulties to find a better life for themselves and now for me and my future.

My great grandfather’s story of immigration is rooted in a pushing force of war that was brewing in Europe but also a pulling force from a growing United States. As the growth of empires in Europe was coming to a head, war began to define Europe. This forced him to flee the divided continent in homes for a more peaceful life.

There is nothing much about my parent. As I know from my grandfather, when he were borned, he already close to the city where we are living now. So I guess my parent is 99% Vietnamese, and moreover we are Hanoian (Hanoi is our capital and it is very rare people who was born in here). But back in the day, when our country was in war, I been told that our my dad of my grandfather actually move to here. There was a migration of nearly one million Vietnamese from North Vietnam (a military gathering area controlled by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam) to South Vietnam (a military gathering area managed by the French Union) in the years 1954–1955. But after the South revolution, my great grandfather comeback to the North and started a new life here. I suppose that people moved to the South because they scared of hunger such as hunger in 1945 that estimate about 400,000 to 2 million people starved to death in the North. There was a lot of difficult in Vietnam in the 19th century so it is reasonable for many people to move to the South and then comeback to their home in the North like my great grandfather did

My great great grandfather on my father’s father’s side had an extremely eventful life. Eugene Wasserzug was born in Warsaw, Poland around 1831. After attending multiple universities to train as a doctor, he was imprisoned and sentenced to death by Russian authorities for participating in an unsuccessful Polish uprising against Czarist Russian in 1863 (probably the January Uprising of that year). He was able to escape in the guise of a beggar and fled to Prussia before settling, with his wife and three children, in Switzerland, where he became a citizen and a licensed physician. By 1870, Eugene and his eldest son, Etienne, had abandoned the rest of the family in Switzerland to move to France, where Eugene was appointed Inspector General of Ambulances for the French army during the Franco-Prussian War. Eugene quickly remarried and moved to Argentina to become a professor of medicine at the University of Buenos Aires; he never mentioned another family in Europe, and the connection was only discovered several generations later. Etienne was left behind in France under the custody of one of Eugene’s patients, where he managed to succeed and become a valued assistant and researcher for Louis Pasteur before dying of scarlet fever at a young age. Euegene had more children in Argentina and never taught at the University. Instead, he became a well respected physician and a founding member of the Argentine Medical Association before dying in 1911.

Eugene Wasserzug’s grandson, mi abuelo Germán Wasserzug, married mi abuela, Coca, whose mother immigrated to Argentina from Spain. My grandparents had three children in Argentina before coming to the United States in 1961 where my father was the first of four more children. Mi abuelo was always vague about why he insisted on uprooting the family and moving the States, especially given that he had a stable job and didn’t speak English well (and his wife not at all). Argentina, which was one of the richest countries in the world before the outbreak of WWI, had endured the post WWI recession better than most economies of the region. When the Great Depression hit, the country with a history of high economic highs and low economic lows began a transition from the former to the later with a slug-like determination. Mi abuelo was born in 1928, the perfect time to see the economic and social struggles of his country grow to national problems. His decision to make the move to the US was probably motivated by the opportunity he saw abroad and the dangers he saw at home. Indeed, this branch of the Wasserzug family avoided the fate of those that stayed in Argentina. My father’s cousin, like many others, was abducted by the in the middle of the night by the military junta in control and never seen again, but that is a story I have already told in one of these posts.

My maternal grandfather’s family has far better record keeping. We can trace multiple branches of our family tree, generation to generation, all the way back for literally millennia. The family moved to Texas sometime between 1817 and 1844, before Texas was a state in the US. Before that, we had been in what became the states since long before independence. In fact, tracing the recorded family tree through England and Belgium, we are direct descendants of Emperor Charles the Bald (823-877), grandson of Charlemagne. Although this is interesting, Charles the Bald had over 30 children and lived over 1000 years ago, so it probably isn’t too uncommon.

For the most part, we do not know why my ancestors migrated when and where they did. Eugene Wasserzug’s flight to Switzerland was understandable given that he has been sentenced to death in Russia, but we did not discover that until over 100 years after it happened. The Polish uprising against Russia was nationalistic and was a precursor to years of resistance. We do not know why Eugene moved to France or Argentina. He may have been simply following the economic opportunities he was offered, or he may have had other motivations. The descendants of his family in Switzerland suggest that he simply left and they never heard from him again. Then he migrated across the Atlantic to a country that spoke a language he did not, leaving his son in the custody of a client, to take a job he never ended up working. Our move to the United States was also probably about opportunity to find a better life; the Great Depression was catastrophic for an uncountable number of people across the world. My mother’s side of the family has not really migrated anywhere that we have sufficient records of for a long time. Although my grandmothers’ families were from Spain (paternal side) and Sweden (maternal side), we do not know what prompted them to migrate to Argentina and the US respectively. In some ways, my family knows a lot about our history. In others, we know nothing. Even if we know when and where we migrated, we often cannot say why. In those histories we do know, our migrations do not reflect world trends or developments other than a possible connection to Economic misfortune. Perhaps Charlemagne is the exception to that, but I would argue that he does not count.

My family’s migration story isn’t very unique or special. From what I know, my mother’s side of the family came from Sweden. They moved to Andersonville in Chicago, the Swedish area. My father’s side came from Ireland. I’m not exactly sure the reason for moving to America, but it very well could have been due to the potato famine as I believe they immigrated in the 19^th century. For both sides of the family, I don’t know the exact reason for immigrating, besides the overarching idea of looking for new opportunities. Both sides immigrated in the 19^th century though. I do know more about my mother’s side when they first lived in America.

That side of the family moved to Andersonville in Chicago. Andersonville is the Swedish area of Chicago, so they lived around other Swedes who had moved to Chicago. My family opened a hardware store called Lind Hardware (Lind is my mother’s maiden name). It was called a hardware store, it was more of a general store, people could buy groceries and toys there too. Eventually, that store was closed and became the home to the Swedish American Museum. The building is still the Swedish American Museum today, after 40 years.

I don’t know much of the difficulties my family faced when immigrating from Ireland or Sweden, but I’d imagine that both sides had to deal with the cultural differences of America.

The migration of my family has been wildly different on my paternal and maternal sides. I’ll begin with my mother’s side as I know less about it. My great-grandparents on her side were from India, part of the Marajh caste. At some unknown point to me, they moved to Trinidad and Tobago and had my grandmother. She then married some higher-up in Texaco Oil and had my mother. She lived in Trinidad for her early years, going to a vocational school for the end of high school for an electricians certificate. She moved to Canada under a work visa, living with one of her friends and working at a Tim Hortons, making a resumé for herself. She then was hired to KFC in Canada as a shift manager, then a general manager, before moving back to Trinidad for an arranged marriage which she did not go through with. Some years passed and then she met my dad, then later moving back to the States with him.

I know more about my dad’s side’s history, which the earliest I know of begins in Europe. My grandfather was born in 1895 in Yugoslavia, and for reasons that I can only assume to be finding a job during the Industrial Revolution in Cleveland, immigrated to the United States via the Lusitania. He worked in Cleveland and at age thirty-four, with his wife Olga being twenty-one, had my dad in Cleveland. Born in 1929, the Great Depression had just begun to strike the United States. They then moved to the land where my house sits today and farmed fifty acres of land and cared for livestock to make a living, scraping by as the Great Depression left them without coins to rub together.

My mom, after meeting my dad and sailing back to the U.S. on his boat, went through the last immigration my family experienced, coming on a green card, then a marriage visa, then the long and expensive process to become a citizen of the United States of America. All of these migrations by my mother and my grandfather showed an attempt to find some economic solace in a foreign place, trying to make a life for themselves and other people in their lives, which seeing as I am now attending college as a first-generation student, seems to have worked wonderfully.

My family’s migration is extraordinarily common amongst people today. Aside from one very distant relation from early America most of us came from industrial revolution immigrates looking for opportunity. My family’s many decedents came from Germany, Ireland, and apparently Switzerland. During this time, 19th century, America was the worlds industrial power house and the focal point of all migration in the world at the time, especially those coming out of Europe. So this makes it absolutely no shock that when they came here, they came for money.

Many of them ended up in Cleveland and surrounding areas but despite that none of them worked in the Steel industry which at the time was one of the sole reason s to come to the area at all. Its my understanding that many of them worked in the education system and one for sure worked in the Akron chemical plants later on.

Its hard for me to describe struggle when it comes to migration since other than the cookie cutter description of how one manages life in the new American world since there were language barriers, and there were small communities of migrant ethnic groups that are still extraordinarily prominent today in Cleveland.

As far as I’m concerned my family has almost never left the Cleveland area despite all the separate peoples coming here and having zero connection to this place as a whole. I’m sure this template is applicable to many other major industrial cities as well such as Chicago, Cincinnati, and New York.