My ancestors weren't particularly interesting people, but how they got here is a reasonably interesting story.
My fathers' fathers' side came to Canada by landing in Prince Edward Island in the early 1800s with a big wave of Scottish settlers. They made there way over to British Columbia, where most of them still are.
My fathers' mother came over from Germany after WWII. My great-grandfather had been in the army, of course, everyone was, but he hadn't done anything more nefarious than fly a wooden glider behind enemy lines to spy without being caught on radar, while my great-grandmother
somehow found enough bananas and other nutritious foods that were hard to come by to keep a very sick baby, my great-aunt, alive. They came to Toronto, living in the area called Hogtown. Wikipedia will tell you it was because of the pork processing plants that used to be there, but my grandmother swears that the German immigrants around there were called "hogs". Maybe that name came from the place.
My mother's father grew up in communist Czechoslovakia. His people had used to be Hungarian nobility, but at that point were farmers, and when the farms were
collectivized, everything went badly. His father became a member of the Communist party but got arrested, and his family nearly starved. Eventually he was released. My grandfather was not a fan of the Communists because of that, but he doesn't talk about it much, so things are vague. At some point he was in the army; at some other point he was in jail for some kind of dissent. That's why he's covered with prison tattoos to this day. Eventually, he and his little brother escaped into Austria, literally pursued by soldiers and dogs. The only time I've ever heard him actually talk about that was to a Vietnamese priest who had done basically the same thing, which was a bit surreal ("When the spotlights shine on you, you have to lie down, yeah." "Yeah, that way they can't see you. Pass the milk?"). He came to Canada and worked as a miner, first in the Northwest Territories and later in Northern Ontario, but when my mother was born, he switched to being a construction worker because that was less dangerous.
My mother's mother was born in Bosnia; probably a Bosnian Croat but some things she's said haven't quite added up; she might have had Bosniak ancestry. Originally her family was doing fairly well; she mentioned having the first electric light in the village. When the war came, her pacifist father was conscripted and fled to what is now Croatia. Her mother tried to follow with my grandmother and her younger sister (the only surviving ones of six), but kept being turned away at the border by the Serbian authorities. However, she eventually got lucky enough to find a Serbian border officer that her husband had done some favour for in the past. That guy recognized her and let the family through, where they were reunited with her father. My grandmother grew up and fared reasonably well under the system; she became a nurse and married a minor party official. He was corrupt, of course, and an alcoholic, but the last straw came when he cheated on her. The order of events is
very vague, but one of my cousins told me she turned him in for corruption (!), then felt bad and came to visit him in jail, where she found yet more women also visiting him. He got out of jail almost as fast as he got in, and she fled the country with her young son, my mother's half-brother. I hear her first husband died as a bum on the streets of Osijek several years ago. Sadly, his son took after him and is now some kind of cult leader in Mexico.
That's how I got here. Any of that, except the very basics, might not be accurate. That generation was all about assimilation (though all of them still speak their native languages), and it's pieced together from vague stories told by different people. I like to think of it as a very Canadian story.
Then the LORD said to me, "Go again, love a woman who is loved by her husband, yet an adulteress, even as the LORD loves the sons of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love raisin cakes."
Hosea 3:1