Thank you for sharing this with us. A bit of info about some records of Jewish people being destroyed during WWII: sometimes this was done to keep people safe. My Roman Catholic great-uncle was involved with the destruction of government records that would have identified non-practicing Jews of having Jewish heritage. This was in the occupied southeast Dutch town of Roermond. My mother remembered her uncle and his son hiding in my mother’s family’s house to evade the German soldiers looking for them. I’m fortunate that my mother shared many family stories with me before she passed away.
I am not jewish or part of any minority where I live, but seeing you with your uncle in the living room holding the picture made me sob because I know exactly how it feels to talk with the last person to have all those memories (my dad) and try to match it with my own research with the pictures we have - and the joy when it comes together and we fill the gaps. It's amazing, although a hard work. Thank you for sharing such a personal moment.
NGL this was my journey too. I only had my paternal grandparents names and not my paternal grandmother's first name. Traced that side back to 1495 through a free person. I was SHOOK! Great video!
Your ancestors might have bought their first “new” clothes used and (anachronistic term) up cycled them. Tailoring was a tough way to make a sometimes meager living. I think a lot of families tried to get their children upwardly-mobile by deliberately not passing on these jobs and the result was the Origen of “my son, the doctor” and similar tropes. My great-grandmother was a seamstress, but she didn’t even teach her daughters to sew. I imagine she might have resented the profession. My grandmother was a waitress, though-so not really upwardly mobile! This was a great video!
Quote possibly, yes! I'm going to have to do a reconstruction from scratch, but it'll be interesting to take a look into the secondhand trade in NYC. Most of the research I've done on historical thrifting used material from the UK.
This was so great!! Yes yes connection to our ancestors! Connections to the works and joys and ordinary details of their lives and the lives of their neighbors and communities. I especially like what you said about finding a way to connect.that is about more than tragedy and trauma and connects to resilience and ordinary joys. .
Your story reminds me of my mom. She fought so hard to discover our heritage, and even got to visit some relatives she discovered in Ireland before she passed. She was fascinated by her Polish heritage, because her own mother had been horribly racist in general, but towards Polish people in particular. We will never know why my family left Poland, but we know they buried their culture because they felt they needed to to survive in America. I feel like diving into Polish folk art helps me connect to my mother even though she's gone now.
This whole video resonates so much with me. I was born in Germany as a child to serbian immigrants and I relate a lot to feeling alienated during the christmas season. And not being able to ask one's own family about their history. I know which regions my family grew up in but I barely speak serbian so I literally can't ask them. There are a few garments from the early 20th century from my family that my mom managed to uncover for me but I honestly wish I could sit down with my great grandma and ask her about living in rural yugoslavia in world war ii. I want to hear how my grandpa grew up and what stories he was told. Maybe some day I'll have the time to travel back to serbia and ask them, but who knows how much will be left once I get the chance
This was awesome! I think there is a fascinating awakening happening among millenial and Gen Z folk where we are trying to reach back beyond the forced or coerced assimilation of the early to mid 20th century to actually find our roots. We live in a world where what makes you distinct-your background, your traditions, your story, is part of what you bring to the table. For many of us, we inherited scraps, if we were lucky. I did not find out about my grandmother's Rusyn heritage until I was 29. When I asked her why she never told me, she replied "You never asked. Plus we are American. I was raised American." She then went on to list a bunch of traditions that she claimed were American but were very much not known outside of her small Rusyn community in Upstate New York. I am so glad that I pressed and asked the right questions because I might never have known. My Italian American paternal grandfather and Appalachian maternal grandparents passed away before I was aware enough to ask their stories. I wish I knew as a teenager what I know now and had asked. I am lucky to have photos and documents to start my research and technology to continue the journey but I know those stories would have been just as illuminating. My particular interest is in language and holidays so I am learning Italian and trying to integrate certain traditions and recipes from my ancestral cultures into my own celebrations. Thank you for bringing this up!
Love your words and so excited about this project! I'm an archaeologist working on a series of projects that use creative making to help people discover themselves in the past, tell stories about that past, and challenge interpretations that have always marginalised and ignored people outside of the very limited, very white, very male story. This resonates so strongly with my research and work so I am really looking forward to how your narrative unfolds! My father, after retiring from academia, became a professional genealogist so I know a great deal of the names and dates and things of his side of the family, but much less about the small, intimate details of their lives as it's all done through records. My mother's side of the family, on the other hand, is absolutely crackling with stories, but the 'truth' of those is always questionable. Hers also comes heavily laden with a twisted and troubling American Christian heritage rooted in the 2nd Great Awakening. It is hard to want to physically connect with a family past that I understand, but very thoroughly reject.
I know my family history back to my great great grandparents. It's nice to know who these people were, and why and how we ended up in this country. It's nice to practice your traditions and remember your ancestors. I feel really happy for you that you're able to make this connection to your past.
Love love love love love this video! Would love to do this kind of research for my own family. I’m still close with my ashkenazi family, but we rarely ever talk about it and don’t know much. No photos (we were too poor when first immigrating) or anything. I know we come from somewhere that was “sometimes Russia sometimes Poland” and that our last name got changed into something Scottish by immigration officers when we arrived in Boston rather than whatever Polish name we used to have. I’d like to work up the nerve to ask to interview my family members that are still alive now, even though they don’t really think it’s worth researching or talking about. I’m excited to see your explorations continue!
I was lucky enough to know three of my great-grandmothers when I was small (one very shortly, but still). And as I now learn about fashion history, I've also been revisiting my memories of them and it dawned on me that "omg, they definitely wore corsets for a substantial part of their lives or at least their youth!" (my grandma confirmed one of them kept wearing them in old age, which explains her ever dignified posture). Just to realize that not only I've actually known authentic corset wearers, but they were my relatives, they bottle fed me, I sat on their laps... wow!
I find it fascinating how far people would go all those years ago. My family has been in the same place for as long as we can trace, literally a 15 mile radius for every one of my direct ancestor's place of birth (they travelled alright, but never really moved). The difference in perspective is stark.
You have shared a heartwarming and inspirational reflection, thank you. Sometimes I wonder what my Irish immigrant ancestors would have worn in 1850s outback Australia, running around with the likes of Ned Kelly, infamous bush ranger!
Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. I'm so excited to see where this project takes you! I don't know much of my family's history. However, my paternal grandmother was a seamstress in New York's Spanish Harlem, working from home. She would send my father out to fetch materials from the Garment District and elsewhere around the city. Since he was always running errands so my grandmother had more time to sew and make money, my father actually doesn't know much about sewing. He likes to sit by my sewing table and ask questions while I work, sometimes telling me a story or two about what life was like back when the Bronx was in flames and his mother did piecework. That's how sewing brings me closer to my family, past and present.
Wow. what a great intro. Looking forward to your future vlogs. The pandemic (and working at home) gave me more time to work on my family history. Like you, I have very little in terms of family stories. Conflicts in their home countries (Ireland and Poland) meant that 19th and early 20th-century government documents were destroyed. My family settled in Chicago, and reaching out to the local historical/genealogical organizations has been very helpful. I am building my family tree on a US site, but I have a membership in an Irish ancestry group - their professionals know what to use as good substitutes for missing documents. Academic articles describe events my family faced; an article in Demography suggested the motivation for my family to leave Poland. Historical books from Ireland and Western European publishers also filled in details. Finally, having a newspaper subscription has been really useful. Back in their day, major newspapers like the Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune were seriously into local gossip. My family members were working-class people, yet the papers include stories about them. I only wish that more was written about women at that time.
I'm really looking into filling in the historical blanks! It'll be interesting to try to find out if there were larger historical events that affected them, or if it was something more simple like losing their parents. There's someone on my mother's side who either ran away with or traveled to the US with her eventual husband-- we're not sure, they were from the same region but didn't marry until they'd been in the US for 3 years!
@@captnflint V is correct. Not sure if other companies do this, but Ancestry uses the information from members' trees to offer hints (you can restrict Ancestry from doing this if you wish). It is good to validate the hints, but they have been very useful.
@@nidomhnail2849 i was asking about the specifically irish site you mentioned! we have enough to go off of there with the one irish great grandda i have to get further if we take it to the right people :3 but yeah, i'll look more into ancestry
I love this, V! I am fortunate that I knew my great grandparents (some of them) and grandparents (all of them). A few years before my Poppy died, I recorded an oral history interview about his memories of “the old country”. It’s uploaded here on UA-cam! I love the photos I have, and it is interesting to think about the prospect of recreating some of the clothing. It is harder to get this information for my father’s side of the family since he was the sole immigrant to America - everything else is left behind in Spain!
Thank you so much for making this. One of the things that motivates me to watch your videos is how you share yourself. Your heart is on display. I appreciate that so much. The feeling of otherness during major Holidays. The disconnect from a person's roots. There are so many who have lost that connection to their ancestors. My family is so mixed. My family is also rife with trauma. American History favors colonialism so bad. Sharing honest history with my daughters helps. It has a lot of tragedy and also hope. Working from scraps and being a historian can be rough. There is such a yearning. Thank you for making this. This message is vital. It speaks to me so deeply.
This really touched me. I'm in a similar process with reconnecting to estranged but more recently immigrated history. Different backgrounds and different areas of interest. It can be a difficult and painful process to wade through. Anyway I found a little snippet about my great grandma that loved to weave and knit everyone slippers. I am an avid knitter and also weave. This without any knowledge of the connection. Though I certainly understood that my family likely did these things in the past. I have chosen to dig into the region that they are from and see what traditions they might have participated in. Perhaps I should also look at those weaving and knitting traditions. Eventually I want to travel to these places and walk those places though.
My great great grandfather ran a draper's shop during the Gaelic Revival and Irish War of Independence. He was very involved in teaching the Irish language, though tragically he was the last of my ancestors to use it as a primary language. I like to think his shop would have been popular amongst those who wore the Gaelic Revival style - a really beautiful blend of Art Nouveau and Iron Age! I've dreamed of recreating some of these dresses for a while. Super excited to follow your journey!
Sending you light this season! My mother has a jacket/ bodice from ~1900-1910 that belonged to my great-great-grandmother; it's a black wool tweed with narrow sleeves and a slight pigeon front, plus black ribbon trim. I have a strong connection to my bio family/ ancestry, and I'm so glad you are able to connect with yours!
I totally get that idea of being disconnected from your ancestors because of modern family issues. I haven't spoke to my ex dad's side of the family since I was 18, so while i know a lot about my english and Irish ancestors, i know next to nothing about my french and german ones
Thank you for sharing! I really appreciate it and I understand. 1:45 As an ADOS and a Louisianan of Creole heritage….it does get pretty dark when I’m faced with the reality of knowing my actual identity and lineage can’t be traced back to what country/area/tribe I came from in Africa. It only goes back to slavery and I know I am more than just that. I know that’s not everyone’s experience but it’s been mine due to my family history. I’ve been a fan of historical fashion but I’ve watched from a distance. If I’m honest….it’s for that very reason. I have absolutely no way of knowing what my historical or traditional dress would’ve been. I envy those of you who can trace your histories back to the countries your ancestors migrated from. Doing the work and learning what your culture was before America is amazing! This is not me saying that no one else’s past is riddled with violence and wrongdoings….not at all! I wish more records existed where everyone could figure out where they come from!
Snappy Dragon, I enjoyed your video “Why do we Dress UP” very much. I was brought up Catholic and I celebrate Christmas and I agree with you that Christmas is very much in the public sphere. Each year around this time I have looked more and more for Hanukkah songs and tried to find out more about the holiday. I also liked your video 1000 Years of Hanukkah in Jewish historical costume. I was lucky, an older cousin on my father’s side lived with our grandparents and he gave me a lot of information on our ancestry going back four generations and my mother’s sister provided me with information on her side. Tom,
I’m a member of the Seventh Day Adventist church. Some of my relatives were early church pioneers, and along about 1860 they became interested in the dress reform movement (not to be confused with the aesthetic dress movement, these clothes were ugly 😂). I don’t have any photographs of my ancestors wearing reform dress but I’d love to make a complete outfit because I’m pretty sure it’s plausible that at least one grandmother might have worn reform dress.
i don't know exactly what they would have worn, but my moms family is from greece, and my grandma told me that when she was a little girl in the village she learned to sew and weave, and she remembers people spinning wool. i want to talk to her about it and see if she has any photos. i asked once and she mentioned embroidery on vests and skirts made from lots of different fabrics sewn together in stripes
I’m very fortunate to be extremely close with my first (and second) generation grandmother and was also with her late husband (again, one American parent one Italian). Her and her sister are in their mid-nineties so they don’t always remember things (and disagree on EVERYTHING) They have a lot of clothes and pictures and letters from Relatives still in Italy. My great-gma also worked during the depression and worked extra jobs, so they could all have nice and fashionable clothes, and go shopping in Youngstown (now small Ohio city that used to be a somewhat big steel town, my great-gpa worked there during wwii) every Saturday. Sewing, needlework, and crochet was a HUGE part of their lives. They worked in a furniture factory sewing and often made their own clothes. I am also fortunate enough to be studying abroad in Italy soon, so I can actually see three towns my maternal side is from. My paternal side… is there. I like one great uncle and aunt but I don’t see them because they are in Chicago and I live in Ohio. (Sorry for the book)
I loved this video. I'm Ashkenazi on my mother's side. Im lucky enough to know that my great grandparents fled the Russian and Prussia from the pogroms. I also know that one of my great grandmothers had her name changed to Catherine (she was about 5 so it wasn't her choice) when she arrived at Ellis Island... because her true name, Chava, was too Jewish and her parents didn't want to stick out too much. They were afraid that it would ruin her future.
Thank you so much for this! I’d never ever thought of making clothes that my ancestors would have worn when they came over. But that’s a great idea. I had an ancestor come over straight from whitechapel during the time when Jack the rippers was active. Like, one child born before and one born in America right after. I have some ancestors that came over earlier. I’m so interested in this, thank you so much for this idea!
This is so interesting! Recently I searched my moms attic where she has some old clothes stored from her youth and from some older relatives. I tried on several things and she told me what she remembered about them, which wasnt much but it was still a strange kinda emotional experience. Especially the garments from her parents and grandma. I never knew them so there was something very real about their clothes, giving a hint of the size and shape of their bodies, and when i tried the clothes, how their bodies were similar and different from mine. I asked mom how tall they were and she said grandpa was exactly the same height as me, and i could wear his waistcoat though it was a little more masculine shaped than me, it was still pretty close to my shape. I never knew much about him but it seems my unusually long body comes from him more than anyone.
What to let you know that I know how you feel on not being able to find your own family history. I’m adopted and have a block in my history. I’m so happy that you are looking into your history.
I'm honestly into costuming because I also love history. I can't sew like I used to but I understand what you mean when you say we find a connection to our past that way. Crazy thing is, I sorta did mine backwards! As a hippie teenager in the seventies, we all wore leather but I was into making Native American things. And I wanted to get it right too,about the way to make it, the beading, everything! Colonial clothing, how the Natives meshed European fabrics with their own traditional wardrobe, all of it! Then, I found out in my twenties that I had a secret Cherokee background from my mother! It was secret because after The Removal, Native people weren't allowed to live, own land or work in my state! (Georgia) So, I knew my family had to come back in secret, change their name, leave all of their native heritage and religious items behind and then they bought back their land from their white neighbors in Georgia and continued to live on their land! The community was interracial by choice until The Removal. The white folks were of Scottish and Breton (Huguenot) ancestry and appreciated that the Cherokee thought they should have their own churches. Many practiced Cherokee and Methodist (Scots) religion at the same time! Everybody got along! Until... My ancestors were welcomed back with open arms by the community. They buried any paper that said the family was Native in the town courthouse along with the few others that returned slowly. Nobody spoke about it. Ever. Until I dug this all up in my forties! The courthouse burned in 1964 so I had no proof and couldn't find my family anywhere (or prove my cousin's stories) until the roles taken by the US Army for Indian tribes in Oklahoma were released in paperback. What a feeling to turn the pages and see your family's names at long last! I hope you get to do that one day too Snappy! It is so cool! Just be aware, most hide their identities for a reason! There are always two sides to every coin!
I would truly enjoy seeing you embrace your family history in remaking clothes they would have worn I'm so happy to watch your channel even when your videos make me tear up its because your a good historian passing on your knowledge we love your content.
This is such a powerful video! I have only a vague idea of my family history as well, and I yearn for some sort of connection to the past especially when it comes to historical fashion. As a half-black American, I can only assume a good bit of my genealogy was lost to the horrors of slavery. I am lucky, however, to have one picture of a great-great-grandmother from that side of the family that may one day lead me to some answers. Thank you so much for sharing your story! It gives me hope that someday I’ll find the connections and stories I seek as well.
That's so wonderful, I wish you all the best luck. On a personal note, I always took it for granted that my family kept a detailed account of our history. I love hearing stories about my ancestors, and although I'm not terribly interested in historical clothing, I love jewelry. I'm half Ashkenazi and half Yemenite, and I've been collecting Yemenite jewelry since I've had an income. I'm lucky that my ethnic background also has one of the most sophisticated jewelry traditions. The Jews dominated the Jewelry market in Yemen, much like they dominated the garment district in NY. I think that part of the reason I focused on my Yemenite side is because I look much more white than I do middle eastern, unlike my sisters, who don't feel the need to emphasize that side of their heritage as much. It's one of my ways to feel that I belong to my ancestors. That they would have worn something similar, and that we share our appreciation for their beauty. I'm sure your great great grandma Carolina would be touched and supportive of your search. You carry her with you, physically, in your gens. The way your shoulders will fit in the sleeves might be exactly the way hers had fit in them. It's more than an aesthetic experience, it's a corporeal one. And happy Hanukah!
I'm so pleased for you that you were able to trace back to your paternal great-great-grandparents and now feel a connection to them. My great-great or great grandparents (not sure just how may greats it is, and it just might be both, or another great) emigrated from England to New Zealand, or from Scotland to New Zealand and from Ireland to New Zealand in the 1870's or thereabouts. One of my Dad's cousins did some family history research and I have copies of those books that I'm slowly transcribing into a genealogy programme on my computer. A distant cousin of my mother's has done the same for that distant branch and it does include me. I have two projects I'm working on (off and on, and to be honest more off), other than the transcribing of my family history books. Number 1 is to locate the ancestors that arrived in New Zealand, where they landed and first settled and the ships they came out on (this is connected to my learning more about the indigenous peoples of New Zealand as well, and their formal greetings which includes the above information and way more) and 2 to make an outfit similar to that my great grandmother Hannah is wearing in a photograph in one of the family history books.
My family history is weirdly similar and weirdly different to yours. I had more starting information than you did, but just barely. 3 of my 4 grandparents were Polish and there was incredible emphasis on that we were POLISH! but they only gave my generation information on the two Great Grandfathers that came to America. We were never told what cities they were born in, any of their families beyond their wives names. Only one of my mothers relatives corresponded with anyone from the Old Country and she wouldn't discuss it. So our roots went exactly back to Pawel Zukowski and Michel Alabinski even though everybody used the English versions of the name, including how the intake paperwork changed Alabinski to Albin. It was only very recently that I (also through an Ancestry site) was able to trace back further than those two men or see any other branches. There were pictures of my Great Grandparents that I don't know where they came from. I had seen one or two of them before, and here there were a dozen. There was the lady (my maternal Great-Grandmother) from the wedding portrait in the basement, but with her parents. I had names and places. It was past one in the morning and I was sitting there staring at my laptop and crying. I had always been told I was 4th generation on all sides and the one non-Polish grandparent, who we'd been told was Dutch German, was a big mix of Northern Europe and that branch of the family had been in the U.S. since 1745. I came from active (rather than passive, after the fact) colonizers, and that was a deeply complicated feeling. I had draft records for relatives from the revolutionary and the civil war, literally over the course of a few hours. Also that branch of the family apparently had enough status that the German branch has birth records going back to 1525 in Germany. I still can't find records for anything about the Polish relatives who immigrated here except the cities they were born in, but in one night I went from Paul and Michael, to Pawell, Michel, Jan and and and.... It was hugely transformative. I am also estranged from my living family, and that and the lack of any real information about my heritage had always left me feeling rootless, and in a weird way without an identity. Sorry for the wall of text. I could go on. I am currently working on figuring out what regional dress my family would have worn, as Polish regions have a lot of variation. I want to make a what my ancestors would have worn, but I still have so much research to learn what that might be.
It's so beautiful that you got to research part of your family with your uncle! I wish you great insights into the life your great great grandmother might have lead, I totally understand the urge to find out more about ones family history :) In relation to that, if you want to look further, there are State Archives in Austria and Hungary, where you can search for names online. I don't think there's a lot digitized, but at least it will tell you if there is something there to look at. Sometimes it's announcements of marriage or the birth of children. I still life in the town where one of my great great grandfathers settled after moving his family to Russia for work and then back to Austria when a fabric printing factory opened here and he went to work there. As a teenager I found a family photo album that reaches really really far back and I'm terrified it is lost somehow. My grandfather passed last year, maybe we'll find it now that we have to go through that house (it's still the same one my great great grandfather bought, so we'll probably find a lot of really old things).
This video really struck a chord with me. I'm not Jewish but I am NZ European (Pākehā). I know bits and pieces of my ancestry, but there is a lot that I don't know (due to similar family traumas that you spoke of). I know I have Romani ancestors about 5 or 6 generations back, as well as Scottish, English, French, and Finnish ancestors. I would love to learn more about them, but I've always been afraid to ask any of my living relatives because some of it is a sore subject. This video makes me think I should just do it to see what comes out of it. I also relate to your sentiment of being (perceived as) white on indigenous land. I don't know the story of my non-British ancestors, or why they came to New Zealand and assimilated in Pākehā culture, but the result is that I don't have any connection to their culture or languages. I'm so happy that you have your Jewish heritage as a connection to the past, which is something I would long to have. Thanks, V, you've inspired me to look more into my family history.
I have Hungarian, Czechoslovakian, Polish, and German ancestry. I was lucky that I know a decent amount about my ancestry. I am a third generation American. The problem is it is hard tracking my history past that into Europe. I am especially struggling with Poland because a lot of records were destroyed there over the years and the borders changed.
I haven't looked deeply into what my family might have worn. I have family from Portugal, Germany, Greece, France and the Americas. All of them assimilated either by choice (necessity) or force so I don't have family stories about them pre-white washing. I hope to one day have the funds and energy to study my lineage and learn more about the day to day lives of my ancestors.
I am lucky to have photos from both sides some as far back as my 3rd or 4th great grandpa rents. I have some from the 1890s to 1910s? I'm not that great at precisely dating based on clothes. A census record indicates that my 2nd great grandma and her cousin worked at the millinery together. Very cool.
7:10 Before watching this video I hadn't put together how close you live, but it clicked when you said, "I am recording this from land that would have been in the care of the Ohlone." The American Exceptionalism thought in school and in our society as a whole is really poisonous to healing some of the original sins of our country. Let alone all the sins that have followed those. I really appreciate your educational content and insight on topics like this, as well as many others.
Your hair looks FIRE usualy but in this vid I couldn't stop looking at them. My closest family and I assumed our ancestry to be european living on europe and I didn't really dig, but learning about our ancestors sounds do rewarding, that is if we find aby info.
Thank you for sharing your journey of embracing your Jewish heritage with us all! I feel like you are helping me to learn about my students before I've met them (I live in an area with a large Jewish community and am starting a new job at a local school next year - I will definitely have students who are Jewish). I was lucky enough to have some wedding photos as far back as Great-grandparents that I displayed at my wedding reception and we had even further back on my husband's side due to some impressive family record keeping from his maternal grandmother's family. I have a felt hat that belonged to my Great-grandmother, not an especially old one, but a nice vintage piece all the same.
Wow! What a fascinating story you have in your GGG Karolina! A very deep look into celebrating your ancestors. Thanks for sharing. Gives me ideas for exploring my heritage!
Aaaaah I'm so excited for this new project! To be honest, I'm not sure what my ancestors would've worn, especially the ones from Russia/Hungary. Guess it's time to do some research and find out!
Sounds like an awesome journey your going on. Can’t wait to see where it takes you and the clothes you will sew 😻🖖🏻 I don’t have one solid ethnic line to ancestry, my mom is Dutch (her dad) English Irish and Blackfoot Native American (her mom), my dad was Canadian french and Blackfoot. Later we found out one of My adoptive dad’s relatives married one of my grandfather’s relatives stirring some Swedish blood in the mix. I’m what we used to call a mutt lol
Genealogy is such an interesting thing. As a Québécoise, I am lucky that birth and marriage records have been well kept ever since French immigrants colonized what was at the time the Nouvelle-France. So I can trace back my genealogy up to the French parents of the first French immigrants that first arrived in what is now Québec, back to the 1400-1500's and in a few instances even in the 1300's. I don't know all their named by heart, obviously, but I was able to find all the specific locations in France from which my direct ancestors (and those of my husband) came from. I also have Finish ancestors that immigrated to Canada in the 1800's and one of my uncles has traced back their genealogy too, but Finish genealogy is complicated since I don't speak the language and Finish people did not have family names before the 1800's. My half-Finish grand-mother died this summer at 96, and I've inherited a 1936 letter from the Consulate of Finland, about her own grand-parents.
I only have a couple of stories from my Granny both are from her childhood and I love both of them. I think she was living in London at the time, in or near the east-end. 1) One day she was playing outside and she saw something really strange and raced home to tell her parents. When she described the carriage that she had seen driving up the street with a horse pulling it, her parents were very cross. They accused her of lying and gave her a chance to take it back and apologise but she was addlement that it was the truth - so she was spanked. A few days later her father was out and saw a car! he realised that granny had been telling the truth. You'll be glad to know he felt bad for not believing his daughter and punishing her when she had told the truth all along. 2) My granny went to the local school and her mother used to collect her at the end of the school day. One day she arrived wearing a brand new dress (which great granny was quite proud of apparently). Granny looked at her in horror as she realised that she could see her ankles clearly - and so could everyone else! She was mortified that her mother had somehow become a fallen woman (who else would show off their ankles like that!!!). Granny refused to hold her mothers hand, or walk next to her, instead she trailed along behind her trying to look like she was not connected to her at all because she couldn't bear the shame of having her mother dressing like that. Having seen a few pics of her in 20's dropped waist dresses showing far more than an ankle its safe to assume she recovered from her mothers attempts at being fashionable!!!
It's always heart-warming to see satma jews coming back to Romania every year in Satu Mare, we really want every jewish romanian to feel welcome here. The sad part is even the lands where jews used to live misses them,I certainly do when I look back in history.
I have an aunt on my mother's side and a cousin on my father's side who have led the effort in genealogical research of our respective families. In both stories, the trail goes cold when we get to my great grandparents. I do have one colorized photograph of my mother's father's parents on their wedding day. Everything about that photograph-the date, the names of the standing man and the seated woman, the blue-green of her dress, the subtle brown of his skin, the very fact of their relation to me-I have to take on faith. My mother's parents died while I was in elementary school, my father's before I was born. I know the history of my family from scraps and snippets, the anecdotes of my parents' childhoods, the occasional dispatches from my aunt and my cousin. There is so much that I don't know, will probably never know, and in a way that inability to know makes me feel more connected to the anonymous masses that came before me.
Oof. I've stopped the video part way to say I feel you about the lack of connection to your greater family. I was the kid who always wanted the connection to my heritage that my Ukrainian- and Scottish-Canadian friends had, but what family I have are not storytellers and the ones who might have been died before I was born. There was a rift in the Slovak side of my family for decades and I'm only now learning about them. Some came to Canada to escape extreme poverty, some to escape military punishment. I've only recently found out that slavery still persisted in Romania when my Romani grandfather was born. I'll probably never know the truth of his childhood. I'm also working on a sewing project from family history, but I'm taking all the parts of my heritage, including my Canadian identity, and making one folk costume. A Romanian blouse, a Slovak skirt and apron, a German vest, and an Austrian hat. The embroidery and decoration is where I'll put myself. Congratulations, and good luck on your journey.
I'm a convert, so idk how much my input will help. I've been part of the LGBT community for much longer than I've been Jewish, and even a cursory look at Queer history has given me some lessons that really help tie my Jewishness together: Having a shared history, good and bad, is what keeps us together and gives us strength Found family can be a lifesaver in more ways than one Confidence and pride in your identity and ideals is the only thing that will ensure our lasting existence (along with antifascist action applied as necessary)
I understand what you're saying about your history. We're white and American- what more could we want to know? I've always been drawn to immigrant history, though.
This is so great. :D Btw, what was that bookstore you found those books in? How do you spell the name? Does it have a website? Where is it located? I know you operate in San Francisco, is it in the city? I have in-laws in No-Cal and would love to stop by that shop next time I visit.
Thank you so much for sharing so many personal things with us! I really appreciate this video. Maybe you already know it, but you might like the book "beyond the pale" by Elena Dykewomon. All the relevant characters are ashkenazi jews and immigration and life in NY is a big part of it. Big content warning for very graphic descriptions of a progrom though.
Do you know the joke about the shtetl near the scene of a great battle? The town leaders sent a messenger in horseback to find out about the outcome. When he came back, there was a crowd assembled, wanting the latest news. When they asked him what had happened, he said, "We've been ceded to Poland." And a wag in the crowd called out, "Thank goodness, no more of those horrible Russian winters!"
Ah, the perils of genealogical research. "I just need to check on this one thing...." and suddenly it's ten hours later! On a more serious note, my research into my maternal family - who I have been estranged from for almost 25 years now - has gotten back to a point at which I think they were escaping the Irish Potato Famine. How my staunchly Irish Catholic ancestors from Staten Island ever met up with - much less married - the Germanic ancestors from Lower East Side Manhattan, I have yet to figure out! I really wish I knew the stories of those relationships outside of just the dates. Though the one ancestor I do know both names and stories for - on my father's side - is because I have the dubious distinction of being related to the accusers in Salem. Not exactly ancestors to be proud of, if you know what I mean.
I kinda know one side of my family has lived in the same smal village as my family still lives for hundrets of years. A third of the villagers have the same surename as we and you don´t find it almost anywere then in this tiny village. I know that my family owned one of the oldest houses still standing there today. I don´t know through when they arived there and if its even possible to find out. On the other side of my family i kinda know were in bavaria the came from but they moved much more (what's honestly better for gene diversity).
I'm also estranged and this makes me so happy :) I know my grandfather (born 1939-41... my grandma was born one year and him the other and I Do Not remember) remembers that HIS grandfather came to NY from Scotland, spoke some Scots, and kept wearing his kilt into the 40s- that same grandfather claims some Indigenous ancestry he has absolutely no proof of and that our family has no connection to though, so that has to be taken with a grain of salt. The only other clues I have are that there's Irish on my mom's side and my last name has a German root. I want to know more and for the first time I have some hope of that without relying on a DNA test, which wouldn't give much cultural information anyway, so thank you :)
I am a pagan, nearly lifelong. And I'm one of the type sometimes derided as tree-huggers or 'messy' pagans. That means that I believe that real spirituality is both cultural and spiritual, aka all true paths lead to the top of the mountain. And the cultural part is very important. Identity, particularly of historically marginalized peoples is very important. Without history, we are groping in the dark, sometimes with disastrous results. So, a heartfelt Seasons Greetings!
the irish side of my family did everything old, so i only barely remember my grandmother, who died when i was 2. my dad and aunts and uncles told me plenty about the old country--the last one who'd been on the boat only died recently, a few months shy of his 100th b'day. they came over during prohibition, so grandpa had to leave a bottle of good irish whiskey on the boat. they were white, educated, had money, and spoke the language but still were treated like trash. the italian side did everything young, so i my last great-grandma passed when i was ~14, and grandma passed in my 40s. half that family was dark, and the other half was fair; they were not educated and spoke only italian when they came over. they too were treated like trash. being treated like trash seems to be the common denominator. :( we have a photo of one of the italian sides from the late 1800s--wearing victorian fashion in italy.
I know mostly about my great grandmother because she was here till 5 years ago..I think, she would always shake her fist up in the air to my mom and say “your kid is a fighter” or something like that and she kept doing that even when she couldn’t really talk much. We actually have something she made in the Great Depression, it’s a quilt made out of old pants, they were sheep herders so they went through a lot of pants. She got married at 15, illegally😅 and when she got pregnant the second time she decided that she was going to the nearest hospital because she had had a still birth and complications last time and needed to be safe. And she didn’t care that it used up the fuel rations because she and the baby(my grandfather) were going to both live. Some of my stories of her are very sad and not really something I want to put on the internet. But she and her daughter in law cut off the heads of lots of snakes😂. I’m so glad I know so much about one side of my family..the other side doesn’t really talk about the past that much because it was painful. Anyway I hope someone enjoyed my rabble.
We could be cousins! (In the "medieval population bottleneck resulting in Ashkenazi all being the genetic equivalent of 13th cousins" sense.) But in a more serious vein, my paternal grandmother was a storyteller from a huge extended family on her mother's side, and since I was named after her mother, I heard lots of stories growing up. Great-grandma Pauline came over from what is now Moldova as a teenager along with her father and 12 of her siblings (some older siblings were married and stayed behind, not clear how many or what happened to them) sometime between 1902 and 1910. It's likely that they left as a result of the Kishinev pogroms and/or the 1905 revolution. Their town wasn't directly affected because the Jewish community in Dubasari had a lot of armed and organized socialists who kept the rioters and soldiers away, but it must have felt like a good time to get out of Russia. They settled on the Lower East Side and my great-grandmother worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. She wasn't there the day of the fire because she had Saturdays off as a reward for being a fast worker. She lost a lot of friends that day, and afterward she and her brothers were heavily involved with the labour movement and helped to found a socialist bungalow colony in the Catskills (aka "The Borscht Belt") in the '20s and '30s. My family still has two houses there. There's a ton of stuff around the internet on the wave of immigration that brought our families here, and I'm happy to help you track it down.
My great-grandmother's generation tended to encourage their kids to assimilate as much as they could to avoid antisemitism. When my grandmother started learning English in kindergarten, her parents stopped using it at home so she wouldn't grow up with an accent, and my parents' generation didn't learn Yiddish at all unless they studied it as adults. There was a general reclaiming of heritage in the 1970s or so that kept the language from dying out entirely, but I definitely felt the loss of it as a kid. I have a friend whose parents immigrated from China before he was born who likewise wanted their kid to sound American, but he didn't even learn Cantonese because his mother stopped speaking to him entirely. It still affects him.
it's also interesting looking at how diasporas that ended up in america adapted their cultures to fit in, and avoid things like antisemistism. Like, the american versions of st patricks day, christopher columbus day, and hanukkah, are all huge comercialized things, very divorced from their roots.
I have had to come to terms with the fact that I will probably never know anything about my indigenous Mexican ancestors. I live in Texas, I do not speak very much Spanish and within my mother’s family there was a certain amount of denial that we had indigenous ancestry among the older generations. So while I can trace my colonizing Spanish ancestors back hundreds of years, I know nothing about the ancestors they conquered.
Just a random comment: Since the major influx at the turn of the century, US immigrants have relied heavily on "the three blades" to build a life from scratch: the kitchen knife, hair scissors, and tailor shears. Fashion is 2/3 of the root of US immigrant family history on a large scale.
I have a very big binder of family history work my grandma made me, but unfortunately it's in storage rn 🥲 I'm looking forward to going through it when I can take it out though!
This makes me so happy for you! My family is from King Island/Ugivak and where displaced by laws requiring native children to attend BIA schools and the lack of teachers willing to travel to our island. King Islanders/Ugivangmiut maintain a strong sense of unique, personal identity, even though we were made to perminantly relocate to our summer restocking spot in Nome and our dialect of the inupiaq language being perhaps the most obscure. I managed to track down and order an out of print collection of King Islander stories that my great grandmother, who i knew very little about, contributed to before her death. There was a description of her in the front that called her a "tireless berry picker" and mentioned her helping to reconstruct the Wolf Dance. There's a tv special from the 80s someone uploaded on youtube showing the King Island Wolf Dance and going into how it was reconstructed. My great grandma contributed to that. We didn't have any photos of her, but there's one in the book. She's holding my great uncle Michael who i never got to meet and he was just a year old in the photo. One of the guys in my polycule says he can see a family resemblence. I have an old photo, a picture taken of a xeroxed picture taken back in like the 60s, of my grandmother, who i got my eskimo name from, in a fancy traditional parka. I'd love to make a kuspuk based on it one of these days
@@SnappyDragon it's quite a legacy ^-^ The thing that surprised me most about the story my great-grandmother contributed, though it really shouldn't have, was that in it she recalled her uncle referring to her as "Ullaaq", short for her eskimo name "Ullaaqham Quliapyungnikua". The few times my mom mentioned her, she called her "your great grandma Clara" and legally her name was Clara. It shouldn't surprise me; the stories were originally told and written down in Inupiaq (with English translations provided) and my mom's generation was the first to have English as a first language instead of Inupiaq, but I was never told that my great grandma Clara spent her youth and early adulthood being Ullaaq to her family. It felt like learning for the first time that something precious was stolen from the family, you know? Like it was there, and it just stopped being there one day, but you only remember it not being there
@@seraphinasullivan4849 My mother's family has a related story about speaking Yiddish! My great-grandparents spoke it as their first language, as they were the ones who emigrated, and my grandparents were fluent. But they specifically chose not to teach my mother or her brothers, for the same reason it was tricky to find out where the "old country" was. It was safest to be as "American" as possible. My mother said her parents would speak Yiddish to eachother when they didn't want the kids to understand.
@@SnappyDragonin my family's case my grandma not only chose not to teach my mom or uncles Inupiaq, she also treated "stupid" like a swear word and wouldn't let them say it around her. Hard to say if it was the BIA school in Nome or living in the US as a small brown woman who spoke English as a second language One of these days i wanna publish stories and art under my eskimo name, because it was my grandma's before it was mine and if it's associated with knowledge and creativity maybe the word "stupid" won't hurt her anymore. It should have never been used to hurt her in the first place
This makes me so happy, my grandma passed before she could be persuaded to tell me Anything. They told me I "passed" and didn't need to worry about our ancestry. I'm piecing our history together too, so this was relatable as heck. I am excited for you and the next videos. ^-^
When you travel to New York City, do stop by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. They have a lot of information about NYC Jewish history, including Yiddish and Ladino speaking communities. The last time I visited involved a tour of one apartment recreated to represent one family's home/sweatshop, and how operating this tiny business allowed family and employees to observe the Sabbath. We also saw the recreated apartment of a different Jewish family whose employers had them work Saturdays, and their kids were much more assimilated.
Get the cookbook they have from there too- 97 Orchard : An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement. I found the part about bacon and Jewish immigrants very interesting and the part about the huge Italian loaves of bread.
@@SnappyDragon You might want to check out the Red Star Line museum in Antwerp, Belgium. About six or seven years ago a dear friend of mine found out that her great-grand-parents went through Antwerp to get to New York. It was a great discovery.
Thank you, Viv!!! I'm sitting here crying as I understand your personal history. I lost my grandparents at 8, as well. At 19, I moved far from home. My life with my parents was not good, especially for my mother and her family. By 2005 my father could trace one side of his family back to their coming to America in 1776. My mom's side, my Native side, always ends at the 1880 census. My great-great-grandfather, George, was adopted out of a Boarding School and, legally, became white. Yet, in 1945 my mother was born on the reservation in Oklahoma. Five years later, the Court house burned down to ashes. I want to do DNA testing, but I have reliable results that if one is less than 10% American Native, the American DNA companies will not list Native heritage. I understand and dislike this. Too many people would try to use it for undeserved benefits, but it screws over those of us who want to know about the cultures that got left behind. Best of luck with this auspicious project, and may God grant you nothing but good days.
The role of DNA testing can definitely be fraught! I'm glad the technology exists but of course how it's used is going to be just as full of issues as all the human systems managing it.
@@SnappyDragon my father may not be my biological father. So I don't want my DNA tested. I did get both my parents DNA tested from their hair. They both died in 1990. My mother was 90% Ashkenazi Jewish, and my father was mostly northern Indian, Sindhi, Punjabi and Rajput, with Irish, Gulf Arabic, Ethiopian, Portuguese and Armenian.
I would love to have a resource/statement on the 10%. My great-grandmother was Cherokee; my mother met her and she was noticeably Native. However, my sister and I had our’s done by a company that touted their American Indian database and we came back all European. We are still scratching our heads.
@@nightfall3605 Happened to both my cousin and my son's grandmother. We know the dates that our people left their respective reservations, and the tests came back ALL European and Scandinavian.
@@nightfall3605 Unfortunately DNA analysis of this kind seem to still have a ong way to go. I know there was a video or two on here where identical twins tested themselves and they didn't have the exact, 100% same output in percentages. I know another person (or twins, I can't remember) took tests with more than one company to compare them all as well, and the companies did not return the exact same percentages either. Slight differences here and there. I'm wondering if that's an error. Alternatively, for twins, if you can look alike but still not have all identifiers in common on a genetic level. Like how you can look like your siblings (if you have any) but still not be 100% alike on a genetic level. But unless it's down to 1-2%, that shouldn't just disappear into thin air. Sorry to hear about your trouble with the testings, both you and My Mid-Victorian Crisis.
as a descendent of enslaved people on both sides of my family, i can relate to this video far more than i expected to when i tapped on it. especially w| how much i love + appreciate fashion + style in the framework of culture + history. thank you for this one. for me, it’s up there w| the one about vikings + locks in terms of impact. i appreciate you + your channel! 🖤✊🏾
Odd tip as you embark on your journey to connect-I always knew my grandmother made most of her clothes but I never found any commercial patterns. Years after she died, I asked my aunt who had inherited her house. My aunt told me that my grandmother used to open the newspaper ads and say what do you want and would then pull out her rulers and things and draft the pattern-often on the same newspaper. She then told me she had thrown all those away-they had no use. After my aunt dies, we found folded up inside something of my grandmother's my aunt had saved, a newspaper pattern of a bolero and skirt. My daughter's size. as I started working with it, I found a most of a movie review of "It Happened One Night" anyway, as you embark, maybe draft onto a newspaper or use some other restriction/opportunity your great grandmother would have worked with.
I love that you share your story! As an adoptee with no knowledge of my biological family heritage, I'm envious of people who have knowledge of their ancestry and family stories. I get it ❤️
The sheer pride in your eyes and strength in your words. 🤗 I'm in awe and currently sitting here in tears and goosebumps all over my body. I'm so looking forward to the next chapters of this story and what you will be discovering along the way
A beautiful video. I am a Jew-by-choice. I know so much more about my ancestry than my husband did about his - the Mayflower, 14th century baptismal records, the fading letters in beautiful script, the whole deal on both sides. But everyone had ancestors in the 14th century. Knowing the names and dates, belonging to the family societies, does not make you a better or a more interesting person. How you live, what do you with the knowledge of your heritage, is what honors their efforts and sacrifices.
Thanks for articulating the outsider feelings so well. My grandmothers refused to talk about their lives in Ukraine. I have a few photos of them in the US soon after their arrival.
Yes! I love this video!! I think I might have been one of the people who originally replied to your original question about why I do this, because I’m VERY proud to be from a long line of Jewish garment workers and it’s a huge part of what drew me to historical clothing making. I’m very lucky that since my great grandmother owned her own millinery shop from the 1910s all the way up until the 1960s when she retired, that we have many beautiful photos from the early days of the business she used to advertise her hats of her in her gorgeous lingerie gown (always the same one, obviously her “best”) modeling some very extravagant Titanic era hats. My great grandmother’s millinery supplies that I inherited are some of my most treasured possessions. Her husband was a master tailor, and he died young, while my Nana was pregnant with my Mimi, so literally the only connection I had for years was the fact that I’m a tailor too. We have none of the stories from that side of the family, only that we know they came from the Russian empire, and went to England before coming to America. I was always told Great Grandpa’s family mostly stayed in Russia, as opposed to Nana’s family, my many cousins who all still live in the same vague area of New York State. For ages ran into the same mentality that “it was all lost in the Holocaust.” It was only this past year that I found more. And it was…. Well what I found was wild to say the least. My great grandfather’s family DIDN’T all stay in Russia, a good number of them actually moved to New Zealand, which apparently was an incredibly common. Long story short, this is how I found out, as a mixed Jewish Indigenous person myself, that my distant cousin is probably the most famous mixed Jewish Indigenous person currently living and that I’ve cosplayed as my own cousin, Taika Waititi 💀 But being DISTANTLY related to a famous person aside, I also found out that being a tailor was apparently the family trade even before leaving the “old country,” and that was just such an amazing discovery for me. We often get told as the living descendants of Jewish immigrants to America from the late 19th/early 20th century that our ancestors turned to garment work because unskilled sweatshop jobs were all they could get, not that we have such a long and storied Jewish history of working with textiles and creating clothing for the communities we lived among. So now every time I’m pad stitching, I can literally feel the memory of my ancestors in my needle, and it makes me so proud. Being proud and loud and VISIBLY Jewish is so important to me, and it brings me so much joy. I’m glad you are finding this joy as well. I’m so looking forward to your upcoming creations and trip to New York. I hope your Hanukkah celebrations filled with light, resilience, joy, and laughter, and so, SO much tasty food!
As someone who has a lot of breaks in my family history, researching has been the only way I've been able to fill in some of those breaks. Listening to you talk about being your own history researcher had me nodding A LOT in understanding. I can't wait to see the upcoming videos.
Thank you so much for sharing ❤️ I'm also estranged from my family of origin and it feels like having my roots cut off. And even though I belong to my country's (Sweden) majority population and probably most of my ancestors lived here I struggle with this sense of rootlessness and it hurts so much. Hearing your story inspires me to maybe do something similar (or something different, but at least something) to try and connect to my roots. Again, thank you very much for talking about this ❤️ I rarely hear about others not being in touch with their biological family, and that makes the loneliness even harder... Looking forward to follow your journey, 💕💕 you're awesome 🥰
If you ever want help translating any documents from German/old German into English, I’d be more than happy to help you with that ☺️ Thank you so much for sharing your fascinating journey with us 🥰
I think Saturnalia is a perfectly good holiday, great for hedonists! Not sure if i like what Christians have done with it (usurped?). Love your video - warm, kind and well balanced. Being able to understand history through clothing is a superpower. Thank you / great vid.
I know that my great-great grand father was a tailor, and he was an apprentice under the man who later became his father-in-law. one of my aunts did a bunch of digging and found this out several years back, and she mentioned it because she thought it funny with my interest in sewing. I also know that my great-grand father was a veterinarian, that worked with a lot of butcher houses on how to make sure that the animals that were sent there were healthy and that they died in as humane a way as possible (we have so many stories about how mad he got at people that didn't treat animals with respect).
My great grandfather was also a tailor and my mother was always amazed at me sitting cross legged on the floor while handsewing. She said I was moving like him. He was also a hands on healer and after I took some shiatsu and I worked on her she swore she could feel his hands. I never met him and know very little about him because as usual there was a family split.
I'm so glad you are able to track your history! I'm starting on the same journey. My mom's side is Armenian 🇦🇲 and came over because of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. All I know is that my grandmother's mom and my grandfather's mom were both from Constantinople, and both were widows and remarried to men who already had jobs and houses in America in order to get them out. I'm having trouble doing any tracking as my grandma didn't want to teach us Armenian, and it's not the easiest to learn. My older family appreciates my eagerness to learn though, and I've been collecting the little bits and pieces different people know into a full narrative.
Your voice shows your excitement about recreating Karolina's dress as well as your reasons for loving history. Happy Hanukkah and keep shining the light in our weird universe.
This all resonated on SO many points. My family is problematic and I had to walk away and not interact. I only know snippets and a few stories about anyone on either side. I can't ask for more now because I choose not to re-engage. Family on both sides based in New England, with all (?) great-grandparents off the boat immigrants. Irish and Nova Scotia French on my mother's side, Irish and Swedish on my father's. It's sad and kind of hurts to not know more and be able to celebrate some of it. Social isolation came from being raised Unitarian Universalist Pagan. We had our own family holiday traditions that were not shared by my peers - growing up or even now. I live far away from those people now in the greatly homogeneous Midwest bible belt, where I often feel (and am reacted to) like a foreigner. Yay you for being able to be a relative and/or a researcher to put your family pieces together. Inspired by your work and ooking forward to what you have to share! BTW, I'm a cultural anthropologist, my thesis was a cultural textile exhibition, and I love making garments 🙂
Thank you for sharing this with us. A bit of info about some records of Jewish people being destroyed during WWII: sometimes this was done to keep people safe. My Roman Catholic great-uncle was involved with the destruction of government records that would have identified non-practicing Jews of having Jewish heritage. This was in the occupied southeast Dutch town of Roermond. My mother remembered her uncle and his son hiding in my mother’s family’s house to evade the German soldiers looking for them. I’m fortunate that my mother shared many family stories with me before she passed away.
Oh, for sure! It's another side to why the myth that all records were lost, is a problem.
I am not jewish or part of any minority where I live, but seeing you with your uncle in the living room holding the picture made me sob because I know exactly how it feels to talk with the last person to have all those memories (my dad) and try to match it with my own research with the pictures we have - and the joy when it comes together and we fill the gaps. It's amazing, although a hard work. Thank you for sharing such a personal moment.
NGL this was my journey too. I only had my paternal grandparents names and not my paternal grandmother's first name. Traced that side back to 1495 through a free person. I was SHOOK!
Great video!
Your ancestors might have bought their first “new” clothes used and (anachronistic term) up cycled them.
Tailoring was a tough way to make a sometimes meager living. I think a lot of families tried to get their children upwardly-mobile by deliberately not passing on these jobs and the result was the Origen of “my son, the doctor” and similar tropes.
My great-grandmother was a seamstress, but she didn’t even teach her daughters to sew. I imagine she might have resented the profession. My grandmother was a waitress, though-so not really upwardly mobile!
This was a great video!
Quote possibly, yes! I'm going to have to do a reconstruction from scratch, but it'll be interesting to take a look into the secondhand trade in NYC. Most of the research I've done on historical thrifting used material from the UK.
This was so great!! Yes yes connection to our ancestors! Connections to the works and joys and ordinary details of their lives and the lives of their neighbors and communities. I especially like what you said about finding a way to connect.that is about more than tragedy and trauma and connects to resilience and ordinary joys. .
Your story reminds me of my mom. She fought so hard to discover our heritage, and even got to visit some relatives she discovered in Ireland before she passed. She was fascinated by her Polish heritage, because her own mother had been horribly racist in general, but towards Polish people in particular. We will never know why my family left Poland, but we know they buried their culture because they felt they needed to to survive in America. I feel like diving into Polish folk art helps me connect to my mother even though she's gone now.
This whole video resonates so much with me. I was born in Germany as a child to serbian immigrants and I relate a lot to feeling alienated during the christmas season. And not being able to ask one's own family about their history. I know which regions my family grew up in but I barely speak serbian so I literally can't ask them. There are a few garments from the early 20th century from my family that my mom managed to uncover for me but I honestly wish I could sit down with my great grandma and ask her about living in rural yugoslavia in world war ii. I want to hear how my grandpa grew up and what stories he was told. Maybe some day I'll have the time to travel back to serbia and ask them, but who knows how much will be left once I get the chance
This was awesome! I think there is a fascinating awakening happening among millenial and Gen Z folk where we are trying to reach back beyond the forced or coerced assimilation of the early to mid 20th century to actually find our roots. We live in a world where what makes you distinct-your background, your traditions, your story, is part of what you bring to the table. For many of us, we inherited scraps, if we were lucky. I did not find out about my grandmother's Rusyn heritage until I was 29. When I asked her why she never told me, she replied "You never asked. Plus we are American. I was raised American." She then went on to list a bunch of traditions that she claimed were American but were very much not known outside of her small Rusyn community in Upstate New York. I am so glad that I pressed and asked the right questions because I might never have known. My Italian American paternal grandfather and Appalachian maternal grandparents passed away before I was aware enough to ask their stories. I wish I knew as a teenager what I know now and had asked. I am lucky to have photos and documents to start my research and technology to continue the journey but I know those stories would have been just as illuminating. My particular interest is in language and holidays so I am learning Italian and trying to integrate certain traditions and recipes from my ancestral cultures into my own celebrations. Thank you for bringing this up!
Love your words and so excited about this project! I'm an archaeologist working on a series of projects that use creative making to help people discover themselves in the past, tell stories about that past, and challenge interpretations that have always marginalised and ignored people outside of the very limited, very white, very male story. This resonates so strongly with my research and work so I am really looking forward to how your narrative unfolds!
My father, after retiring from academia, became a professional genealogist so I know a great deal of the names and dates and things of his side of the family, but much less about the small, intimate details of their lives as it's all done through records. My mother's side of the family, on the other hand, is absolutely crackling with stories, but the 'truth' of those is always questionable. Hers also comes heavily laden with a twisted and troubling American Christian heritage rooted in the 2nd Great Awakening. It is hard to want to physically connect with a family past that I understand, but very thoroughly reject.
I know my family history back to my great great grandparents. It's nice to know who these people were, and why and how we ended up in this country. It's nice to practice your traditions and remember your ancestors. I feel really happy for you that you're able to make this connection to your past.
I'm tearing up. This is so bittersweet as you are trying to piece together your history. It's a reclaiming of history from oppressive groups.
Love love love love love this video! Would love to do this kind of research for my own family. I’m still close with my ashkenazi family, but we rarely ever talk about it and don’t know much. No photos (we were too poor when first immigrating) or anything. I know we come from somewhere that was “sometimes Russia sometimes Poland” and that our last name got changed into something Scottish by immigration officers when we arrived in Boston rather than whatever Polish name we used to have. I’d like to work up the nerve to ask to interview my family members that are still alive now, even though they don’t really think it’s worth researching or talking about. I’m excited to see your explorations continue!
I was lucky enough to know three of my great-grandmothers when I was small (one very shortly, but still). And as I now learn about fashion history, I've also been revisiting my memories of them and it dawned on me that "omg, they definitely wore corsets for a substantial part of their lives or at least their youth!" (my grandma confirmed one of them kept wearing them in old age, which explains her ever dignified posture). Just to realize that not only I've actually known authentic corset wearers, but they were my relatives, they bottle fed me, I sat on their laps... wow!
I find it fascinating how far people would go all those years ago. My family has been in the same place for as long as we can trace, literally a 15 mile radius for every one of my direct ancestor's place of birth (they travelled alright, but never really moved). The difference in perspective is stark.
You have shared a heartwarming and inspirational reflection, thank you. Sometimes I wonder what my Irish immigrant ancestors would have worn in 1850s outback Australia, running around with the likes of Ned Kelly, infamous bush ranger!
Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. I'm so excited to see where this project takes you!
I don't know much of my family's history. However, my paternal grandmother was a seamstress in New York's Spanish Harlem, working from home. She would send my father out to fetch materials from the Garment District and elsewhere around the city. Since he was always running errands so my grandmother had more time to sew and make money, my father actually doesn't know much about sewing. He likes to sit by my sewing table and ask questions while I work, sometimes telling me a story or two about what life was like back when the Bronx was in flames and his mother did piecework. That's how sewing brings me closer to my family, past and present.
Wow. what a great intro. Looking forward to your future vlogs. The pandemic (and working at home) gave me more time to work on my family history. Like you, I have very little in terms of family stories. Conflicts in their home countries (Ireland and Poland) meant that 19th and early 20th-century government documents were destroyed. My family settled in Chicago, and reaching out to the local historical/genealogical organizations has been very helpful. I am building my family tree on a US site, but I have a membership in an Irish ancestry group - their professionals know what to use as good substitutes for missing documents. Academic articles describe events my family faced; an article in Demography suggested the motivation for my family to leave Poland. Historical books from Ireland and Western European publishers also filled in details. Finally, having a newspaper subscription has been really useful. Back in their day, major newspapers like the Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune were seriously into local gossip. My family members were working-class people, yet the papers include stories about them. I only wish that more was written about women at that time.
might i ask what that site is? i would like to recommend it to my father
I'm really looking into filling in the historical blanks! It'll be interesting to try to find out if there were larger historical events that affected them, or if it was something more simple like losing their parents. There's someone on my mother's side who either ran away with or traveled to the US with her eventual husband-- we're not sure, they were from the same region but didn't marry until they'd been in the US for 3 years!
Ancestry.com-- no professional relationship with the company, it's just the site I've had the best luck with.
@@captnflint V is correct. Not sure if other companies do this, but Ancestry uses the information from members' trees to offer hints (you can restrict Ancestry from doing this if you wish). It is good to validate the hints, but they have been very useful.
@@nidomhnail2849 i was asking about the specifically irish site you mentioned! we have enough to go off of there with the one irish great grandda i have to get further if we take it to the right people :3 but yeah, i'll look more into ancestry
I love this, V! I am fortunate that I knew my great grandparents (some of them) and grandparents (all of them). A few years before my Poppy died, I recorded an oral history interview about his memories of “the old country”. It’s uploaded here on UA-cam! I love the photos I have, and it is interesting to think about the prospect of recreating some of the clothing. It is harder to get this information for my father’s side of the family since he was the sole immigrant to America - everything else is left behind in Spain!
Thank you so much for making this. One of the things that motivates me to watch your videos is how you share yourself. Your heart is on display. I appreciate that so much. The feeling of otherness during major Holidays. The disconnect from a person's roots. There are so many who have lost that connection to their ancestors. My family is so mixed. My family is also rife with trauma. American History favors colonialism so bad. Sharing honest history with my daughters helps. It has a lot of tragedy and also hope. Working from scraps and being a historian can be rough. There is such a yearning. Thank you for making this. This message is vital. It speaks to me so deeply.
This really touched me. I'm in a similar process with reconnecting to estranged but more recently immigrated history. Different backgrounds and different areas of interest. It can be a difficult and painful process to wade through.
Anyway I found a little snippet about my great grandma that loved to weave and knit everyone slippers. I am an avid knitter and also weave. This without any knowledge of the connection. Though I certainly understood that my family likely did these things in the past.
I have chosen to dig into the region that they are from and see what traditions they might have participated in. Perhaps I should also look at those weaving and knitting traditions. Eventually I want to travel to these places and walk those places though.
My great great grandfather ran a draper's shop during the Gaelic Revival and Irish War of Independence.
He was very involved in teaching the Irish language, though tragically he was the last of my ancestors to use it as a primary language. I like to think his shop would have been popular amongst those who wore the Gaelic Revival style - a really beautiful blend of Art Nouveau and Iron Age! I've dreamed of recreating some of these dresses for a while.
Super excited to follow your journey!
Sending you light this season! My mother has a jacket/ bodice from ~1900-1910 that belonged to my great-great-grandmother; it's a black wool tweed with narrow sleeves and a slight pigeon front, plus black ribbon trim. I have a strong connection to my bio family/ ancestry, and I'm so glad you are able to connect with yours!
I totally get that idea of being disconnected from your ancestors because of modern family issues. I haven't spoke to my ex dad's side of the family since I was 18, so while i know a lot about my english and Irish ancestors, i know next to nothing about my french and german ones
Thank you for sharing! I really appreciate it and I understand.
1:45 As an ADOS and a Louisianan of Creole heritage….it does get pretty dark when I’m faced with the reality of knowing my actual identity and lineage can’t be traced back to what country/area/tribe I came from in Africa. It only goes back to slavery and I know I am more than just that. I know that’s not everyone’s experience but it’s been mine due to my family history.
I’ve been a fan of historical fashion but I’ve watched from a distance. If I’m honest….it’s for that very reason. I have absolutely no way of knowing what my historical or traditional dress would’ve been.
I envy those of you who can trace your histories back to the countries your ancestors migrated from. Doing the work and learning what your culture was before America is amazing! This is not me saying that no one else’s past is riddled with violence and wrongdoings….not at all! I wish more records existed where everyone could figure out where they come from!
Snappy Dragon, I enjoyed your video “Why do we Dress UP” very much. I was brought up Catholic and I celebrate Christmas and I agree with you that Christmas is very much in the public sphere. Each year around this time I have looked more and more for Hanukkah songs and tried to find out more about the holiday. I also liked your video 1000 Years of Hanukkah in Jewish historical costume. I was lucky, an older cousin on my father’s side lived with our grandparents and he gave me a lot of information on our ancestry going back four generations and my mother’s sister provided me with information on her side.
Tom,
I’m a member of the Seventh Day Adventist church. Some of my relatives were early church pioneers, and along about 1860 they became interested in the dress reform movement (not to be confused with the aesthetic dress movement, these clothes were ugly 😂). I don’t have any photographs of my ancestors wearing reform dress but I’d love to make a complete outfit because I’m pretty sure it’s plausible that at least one grandmother might have worn reform dress.
i don't know exactly what they would have worn, but my moms family is from greece, and my grandma told me that when she was a little girl in the village she learned to sew and weave, and she remembers people spinning wool. i want to talk to her about it and see if she has any photos. i asked once and she mentioned embroidery on vests and skirts made from lots of different fabrics sewn together in stripes
I’m very fortunate to be extremely close with my first (and second) generation grandmother and was also with her late husband (again, one American parent one Italian). Her and her sister are in their mid-nineties so they don’t always remember things (and disagree on EVERYTHING) They have a lot of clothes and pictures and letters from Relatives still in Italy. My great-gma also worked during the depression and worked extra jobs, so they could all have nice and fashionable clothes, and go shopping in Youngstown (now small Ohio city that used to be a somewhat big steel town, my great-gpa worked there during wwii) every Saturday. Sewing, needlework, and crochet was a HUGE part of their lives. They worked in a furniture factory sewing and often made their own clothes. I am also fortunate enough to be studying abroad in Italy soon, so I can actually see three towns my maternal side is from. My paternal side… is there. I like one great uncle and aunt but I don’t see them because they are in Chicago and I live in Ohio.
(Sorry for the book)
I loved this video. I'm Ashkenazi on my mother's side. Im lucky enough to know that my great grandparents fled the Russian and Prussia from the pogroms.
I also know that one of my great grandmothers had her name changed to Catherine (she was about 5 so it wasn't her choice) when she arrived at Ellis Island... because her true name, Chava, was too Jewish and her parents didn't want to stick out too much. They were afraid that it would ruin her future.
Thank you so much for this! I’d never ever thought of making clothes that my ancestors would have worn when they came over. But that’s a great idea. I had an ancestor come over straight from whitechapel during the time when Jack the rippers was active. Like, one child born before and one born in America right after.
I have some ancestors that came over earlier. I’m so interested in this, thank you so much for this idea!
This is so interesting! Recently I searched my moms attic where she has some old clothes stored from her youth and from some older relatives. I tried on several things and she told me what she remembered about them, which wasnt much but it was still a strange kinda emotional experience. Especially the garments from her parents and grandma. I never knew them so there was something very real about their clothes, giving a hint of the size and shape of their bodies, and when i tried the clothes, how their bodies were similar and different from mine. I asked mom how tall they were and she said grandpa was exactly the same height as me, and i could wear his waistcoat though it was a little more masculine shaped than me, it was still pretty close to my shape. I never knew much about him but it seems my unusually long body comes from him more than anyone.
What to let you know that I know how you feel on not being able to find your own family history. I’m adopted and have a block in my history. I’m so happy that you are looking into your history.
This is beautiful! Thank you for sharing your thoughts and history with us. Blessings!
I'm honestly into costuming because I also love history. I can't sew like I used to but I understand what you mean when you say we find a connection to our past that way. Crazy thing is, I sorta did mine backwards! As a hippie teenager in the seventies, we all wore leather but I was into making Native American things. And I wanted to get it right too,about the way to make it, the beading, everything! Colonial clothing, how the Natives meshed European fabrics with their own traditional wardrobe, all of it! Then, I found out in my twenties that I had a secret Cherokee background from my mother! It was secret because after The Removal, Native people weren't allowed to live, own land or work in my state! (Georgia) So, I knew my family had to come back in secret, change their name, leave all of their native heritage and religious items behind and then they bought back their land from their white neighbors in Georgia and continued to live on their land! The community was interracial by choice until The Removal. The white folks were of Scottish and Breton (Huguenot) ancestry and appreciated that the Cherokee thought they should have their own churches. Many practiced Cherokee and Methodist (Scots) religion at the same time! Everybody got along! Until...
My ancestors were welcomed back with open arms by the community. They buried any paper that said the family was Native in the town courthouse along with the few others that returned slowly. Nobody spoke about it.
Ever. Until I dug this all up in my forties! The courthouse burned in 1964 so I had no proof and couldn't find my family anywhere (or prove my cousin's stories) until the roles taken by the US Army for Indian tribes in Oklahoma were released in paperback. What a feeling to turn the pages and see your family's names at long last! I hope you get to do that one day too Snappy! It is so cool! Just be aware, most hide their identities for a reason! There are always two sides to every coin!
I would truly enjoy seeing you embrace your family history in remaking clothes they would have worn I'm so happy to watch your channel even when your videos make me tear up its because your a good historian passing on your knowledge we love your content.
This is such a powerful video! I have only a vague idea of my family history as well, and I yearn for some sort of connection to the past especially when it comes to historical fashion. As a half-black American, I can only assume a good bit of my genealogy was lost to the horrors of slavery. I am lucky, however, to have one picture of a great-great-grandmother from that side of the family that may one day lead me to some answers. Thank you so much for sharing your story! It gives me hope that someday I’ll find the connections and stories I seek as well.
That's so wonderful, I wish you all the best luck. On a personal note, I always took it for granted that my family kept a detailed account of our history. I love hearing stories about my ancestors, and although I'm not terribly interested in historical clothing, I love jewelry. I'm half Ashkenazi and half Yemenite, and I've been collecting Yemenite jewelry since I've had an income. I'm lucky that my ethnic background also has one of the most sophisticated jewelry traditions. The Jews dominated the Jewelry market in Yemen, much like they dominated the garment district in NY.
I think that part of the reason I focused on my Yemenite side is because I look much more white than I do middle eastern, unlike my sisters, who don't feel the need to emphasize that side of their heritage as much. It's one of my ways to feel that I belong to my ancestors. That they would have worn something similar, and that we share our appreciation for their beauty.
I'm sure your great great grandma Carolina would be touched and supportive of your search. You carry her with you, physically, in your gens. The way your shoulders will fit in the sleeves might be exactly the way hers had fit in them. It's more than an aesthetic experience, it's a corporeal one. And happy Hanukah!
I'm so pleased for you that you were able to trace back to your paternal great-great-grandparents and now feel a connection to them.
My great-great or great grandparents (not sure just how may greats it is, and it just might be both, or another great) emigrated from England to New Zealand, or from Scotland to New Zealand and from Ireland to New Zealand in the 1870's or thereabouts. One of my Dad's cousins did some family history research and I have copies of those books that I'm slowly transcribing into a genealogy programme on my computer. A distant cousin of my mother's has done the same for that distant branch and it does include me.
I have two projects I'm working on (off and on, and to be honest more off), other than the transcribing of my family history books. Number 1 is to locate the ancestors that arrived in New Zealand, where they landed and first settled and the ships they came out on (this is connected to my learning more about the indigenous peoples of New Zealand as well, and their formal greetings which includes the above information and way more) and 2 to make an outfit similar to that my great grandmother Hannah is wearing in a photograph in one of the family history books.
This reasonates so much for me, thank you for talking about this
Thank you so much, what an interesting reflection!
My family history is weirdly similar and weirdly different to yours. I had more starting information than you did, but just barely. 3 of my 4 grandparents were Polish and there was incredible emphasis on that we were POLISH! but they only gave my generation information on the two Great Grandfathers that came to America. We were never told what cities they were born in, any of their families beyond their wives names. Only one of my mothers relatives corresponded with anyone from the Old Country and she wouldn't discuss it. So our roots went exactly back to Pawel Zukowski and Michel Alabinski even though everybody used the English versions of the name, including how the intake paperwork changed Alabinski to Albin.
It was only very recently that I (also through an Ancestry site) was able to trace back further than those two men or see any other branches. There were pictures of my Great Grandparents that I don't know where they came from. I had seen one or two of them before, and here there were a dozen. There was the lady (my maternal Great-Grandmother) from the wedding portrait in the basement, but with her parents. I had names and places. It was past one in the morning and I was sitting there staring at my laptop and crying. I had always been told I was 4th generation on all sides and the one non-Polish grandparent, who we'd been told was Dutch German, was a big mix of Northern Europe and that branch of the family had been in the U.S. since 1745. I came from active (rather than passive, after the fact) colonizers, and that was a deeply complicated feeling. I had draft records for relatives from the revolutionary and the civil war, literally over the course of a few hours. Also that branch of the family apparently had enough status that the German branch has birth records going back to 1525 in Germany.
I still can't find records for anything about the Polish relatives who immigrated here except the cities they were born in, but in one night I went from Paul and Michael, to Pawell, Michel, Jan and and and.... It was hugely transformative. I am also estranged from my living family, and that and the lack of any real information about my heritage had always left me feeling rootless, and in a weird way without an identity.
Sorry for the wall of text. I could go on. I am currently working on figuring out what regional dress my family would have worn, as Polish regions have a lot of variation. I want to make a what my ancestors would have worn, but I still have so much research to learn what that might be.
It's so beautiful that you got to research part of your family with your uncle! I wish you great insights into the life your great great grandmother might have lead, I totally understand the urge to find out more about ones family history :)
In relation to that, if you want to look further, there are State Archives in Austria and Hungary, where you can search for names online. I don't think there's a lot digitized, but at least it will tell you if there is something there to look at. Sometimes it's announcements of marriage or the birth of children.
I still life in the town where one of my great great grandfathers settled after moving his family to Russia for work and then back to Austria when a fabric printing factory opened here and he went to work there.
As a teenager I found a family photo album that reaches really really far back and I'm terrified it is lost somehow. My grandfather passed last year, maybe we'll find it now that we have to go through that house (it's still the same one my great great grandfather bought, so we'll probably find a lot of really old things).
Such a powerful video! Thank you for sharing!
This video really struck a chord with me. I'm not Jewish but I am NZ European (Pākehā). I know bits and pieces of my ancestry, but there is a lot that I don't know (due to similar family traumas that you spoke of). I know I have Romani ancestors about 5 or 6 generations back, as well as Scottish, English, French, and Finnish ancestors. I would love to learn more about them, but I've always been afraid to ask any of my living relatives because some of it is a sore subject. This video makes me think I should just do it to see what comes out of it.
I also relate to your sentiment of being (perceived as) white on indigenous land. I don't know the story of my non-British ancestors, or why they came to New Zealand and assimilated in Pākehā culture, but the result is that I don't have any connection to their culture or languages. I'm so happy that you have your Jewish heritage as a connection to the past, which is something I would long to have. Thanks, V, you've inspired me to look more into my family history.
I have Hungarian, Czechoslovakian, Polish, and German ancestry. I was lucky that I know a decent amount about my ancestry. I am a third generation American. The problem is it is hard tracking my history past that into Europe. I am especially struggling with Poland because a lot of records were destroyed there over the years and the borders changed.
I haven't looked deeply into what my family might have worn. I have family from Portugal, Germany, Greece, France and the Americas. All of them assimilated either by choice (necessity) or force so I don't have family stories about them pre-white washing. I hope to one day have the funds and energy to study my lineage and learn more about the day to day lives of my ancestors.
I am lucky to have photos from both sides some as far back as my 3rd or 4th great grandpa rents. I have some from the 1890s to 1910s? I'm not that great at precisely dating based on clothes. A census record indicates that my 2nd great grandma and her cousin worked at the millinery together. Very cool.
7:10 Before watching this video I hadn't put together how close you live, but it clicked when you said, "I am recording this from land that would have been in the care of the Ohlone." The American Exceptionalism thought in school and in our society as a whole is really poisonous to healing some of the original sins of our country. Let alone all the sins that have followed those.
I really appreciate your educational content and insight on topics like this, as well as many others.
I love your Jewish costuming videos! If my CFS improves I want to make some of the outfits because I have both Ashkenazi and Sephardic heritage.
Your hair looks FIRE usualy but in this vid I couldn't stop looking at them.
My closest family and I assumed our ancestry to be european living on europe and I didn't really dig, but learning about our ancestors sounds do rewarding, that is if we find aby info.
Thank you for sharing your journey of embracing your Jewish heritage with us all! I feel like you are helping me to learn about my students before I've met them (I live in an area with a large Jewish community and am starting a new job at a local school next year - I will definitely have students who are Jewish).
I was lucky enough to have some wedding photos as far back as Great-grandparents that I displayed at my wedding reception and we had even further back on my husband's side due to some impressive family record keeping from his maternal grandmother's family. I have a felt hat that belonged to my Great-grandmother, not an especially old one, but a nice vintage piece all the same.
Wow! What a fascinating story you have in your GGG Karolina! A very deep look into celebrating your ancestors. Thanks for sharing. Gives me ideas for exploring my heritage!
Aaaaah I'm so excited for this new project! To be honest, I'm not sure what my ancestors would've worn, especially the ones from Russia/Hungary. Guess it's time to do some research and find out!
Sounds like an awesome journey your going on. Can’t wait to see where it takes you and the clothes you will sew 😻🖖🏻
I don’t have one solid ethnic line to ancestry, my mom is Dutch (her dad) English Irish and Blackfoot Native American (her mom), my dad was Canadian french and Blackfoot. Later we found out one of My adoptive dad’s relatives married one of my grandfather’s relatives stirring some Swedish blood in the mix. I’m what we used to call a mutt lol
Genealogy is such an interesting thing. As a Québécoise, I am lucky that birth and marriage records have been well kept ever since French immigrants colonized what was at the time the Nouvelle-France. So I can trace back my genealogy up to the French parents of the first French immigrants that first arrived in what is now Québec, back to the 1400-1500's and in a few instances even in the 1300's. I don't know all their named by heart, obviously, but I was able to find all the specific locations in France from which my direct ancestors (and those of my husband) came from.
I also have Finish ancestors that immigrated to Canada in the 1800's and one of my uncles has traced back their genealogy too, but Finish genealogy is complicated since I don't speak the language and Finish people did not have family names before the 1800's. My half-Finish grand-mother died this summer at 96, and I've inherited a 1936 letter from the Consulate of Finland, about her own grand-parents.
I only have a couple of stories from my Granny both are from her childhood and I love both of them. I think she was living in London at the time, in or near the east-end.
1) One day she was playing outside and she saw something really strange and raced home to tell her parents. When she described the carriage that she had seen driving up the street with a horse pulling it, her parents were very cross. They accused her of lying and gave her a chance to take it back and apologise but she was addlement that it was the truth - so she was spanked.
A few days later her father was out and saw a car! he realised that granny had been telling the truth. You'll be glad to know he felt bad for not believing his daughter and punishing her when she had told the truth all along.
2) My granny went to the local school and her mother used to collect her at the end of the school day. One day she arrived wearing a brand new dress (which great granny was quite proud of apparently). Granny looked at her in horror as she realised that she could see her ankles clearly - and so could everyone else! She was mortified that her mother had somehow become a fallen woman (who else would show off their ankles like that!!!). Granny refused to hold her mothers hand, or walk next to her, instead she trailed along behind her trying to look like she was not connected to her at all because she couldn't bear the shame of having her mother dressing like that.
Having seen a few pics of her in 20's dropped waist dresses showing far more than an ankle its safe to assume she recovered from her mothers attempts at being fashionable!!!
Christmas is so public - YES!
It's always heart-warming to see satma jews coming back to Romania every year in Satu Mare, we really want every jewish romanian to feel welcome here. The sad part is even the lands where jews used to live misses them,I certainly do when I look back in history.
I have an aunt on my mother's side and a cousin on my father's side who have led the effort in genealogical research of our respective families. In both stories, the trail goes cold when we get to my great grandparents. I do have one colorized photograph of my mother's father's parents on their wedding day. Everything about that photograph-the date, the names of the standing man and the seated woman, the blue-green of her dress, the subtle brown of his skin, the very fact of their relation to me-I have to take on faith. My mother's parents died while I was in elementary school, my father's before I was born. I know the history of my family from scraps and snippets, the anecdotes of my parents' childhoods, the occasional dispatches from my aunt and my cousin. There is so much that I don't know, will probably never know, and in a way that inability to know makes me feel more connected to the anonymous masses that came before me.
Oof. I've stopped the video part way to say I feel you about the lack of connection to your greater family. I was the kid who always wanted the connection to my heritage that my Ukrainian- and Scottish-Canadian friends had, but what family I have are not storytellers and the ones who might have been died before I was born.
There was a rift in the Slovak side of my family for decades and I'm only now learning about them. Some came to Canada to escape extreme poverty, some to escape military punishment. I've only recently found out that slavery still persisted in Romania when my Romani grandfather was born. I'll probably never know the truth of his childhood.
I'm also working on a sewing project from family history, but I'm taking all the parts of my heritage, including my Canadian identity, and making one folk costume. A Romanian blouse, a Slovak skirt and apron, a German vest, and an Austrian hat. The embroidery and decoration is where I'll put myself.
Congratulations, and good luck on your journey.
I'm a convert, so idk how much my input will help. I've been part of the LGBT community for much longer than I've been Jewish, and even a cursory look at Queer history has given me some lessons that really help tie my Jewishness together:
Having a shared history, good and bad, is what keeps us together and gives us strength
Found family can be a lifesaver in more ways than one
Confidence and pride in your identity and ideals is the only thing that will ensure our lasting existence (along with antifascist action applied as necessary)
I understand what you're saying about your history. We're white and American- what more could we want to know? I've always been drawn to immigrant history, though.
This is so great. :D Btw, what was that bookstore you found those books in? How do you spell the name? Does it have a website? Where is it located? I know you operate in San Francisco, is it in the city? I have in-laws in No-Cal and would love to stop by that shop next time I visit.
Also happy 8th night. ❤️
Is that a Nessie teaball? I have a Nessie ladle, but didn't realize they made teaballs!!! (totally off-topic, I know)
Thank you so much for sharing so many personal things with us! I really appreciate this video.
Maybe you already know it, but you might like the book "beyond the pale" by Elena Dykewomon. All the relevant characters are ashkenazi jews and immigration and life in NY is a big part of it. Big content warning for very graphic descriptions of a progrom though.
My family were Tainos and it is SO hard to fin anything.
Do you know the joke about the shtetl near the scene of a great battle? The town leaders sent a messenger in horseback to find out about the outcome. When he came back, there was a crowd assembled, wanting the latest news. When they asked him what had happened, he said, "We've been ceded to Poland." And a wag in the crowd called out, "Thank goodness, no more of those horrible Russian winters!"
Ah, the perils of genealogical research. "I just need to check on this one thing...." and suddenly it's ten hours later! On a more serious note, my research into my maternal family - who I have been estranged from for almost 25 years now - has gotten back to a point at which I think they were escaping the Irish Potato Famine. How my staunchly Irish Catholic ancestors from Staten Island ever met up with - much less married - the Germanic ancestors from Lower East Side Manhattan, I have yet to figure out! I really wish I knew the stories of those relationships outside of just the dates. Though the one ancestor I do know both names and stories for - on my father's side - is because I have the dubious distinction of being related to the accusers in Salem. Not exactly ancestors to be proud of, if you know what I mean.
We have the same menorah
I kinda know one side of my family has lived in the same smal village as my family still lives for hundrets of years. A third of the villagers have the same surename as we and you don´t find it almost anywere then in this tiny village. I know that my family owned one of the oldest houses still standing there today. I don´t know through when they arived there and if its even possible to find out. On the other side of my family i kinda know were in bavaria the came from but they moved much more (what's honestly better for gene diversity).
I'm also estranged and this makes me so happy :) I know my grandfather (born 1939-41... my grandma was born one year and him the other and I Do Not remember) remembers that HIS grandfather came to NY from Scotland, spoke some Scots, and kept wearing his kilt into the 40s- that same grandfather claims some Indigenous ancestry he has absolutely no proof of and that our family has no connection to though, so that has to be taken with a grain of salt. The only other clues I have are that there's Irish on my mom's side and my last name has a German root. I want to know more and for the first time I have some hope of that without relying on a DNA test, which wouldn't give much cultural information anyway, so thank you :)
I am a pagan, nearly lifelong. And I'm one of the type sometimes derided as tree-huggers or 'messy' pagans. That means that I believe that real spirituality is both cultural and spiritual, aka all true paths lead to the top of the mountain. And the cultural part is very important. Identity, particularly of historically marginalized peoples is very important. Without history, we are groping in the dark, sometimes with disastrous results. So, a heartfelt Seasons Greetings!
PS Was that a Fiddler on the Roof reference??? 🤣Or am I projecting?
the irish side of my family did everything old, so i only barely remember my grandmother, who died when i was 2. my dad and aunts and uncles told me plenty about the old country--the last one who'd been on the boat only died recently, a few months shy of his 100th b'day. they came over during prohibition, so grandpa had to leave a bottle of good irish whiskey on the boat. they were white, educated, had money, and spoke the language but still were treated like trash. the italian side did everything young, so i my last great-grandma passed when i was ~14, and grandma passed in my 40s. half that family was dark, and the other half was fair; they were not educated and spoke only italian when they came over. they too were treated like trash. being treated like trash seems to be the common denominator. :( we have a photo of one of the italian sides from the late 1800s--wearing victorian fashion in italy.
I know mostly about my great grandmother because she was here till 5 years ago..I think, she would always shake her fist up in the air to my mom and say “your kid is a fighter” or something like that and she kept doing that even when she couldn’t really talk much. We actually have something she made in the Great Depression, it’s a quilt made out of old pants, they were sheep herders so they went through a lot of pants. She got married at 15, illegally😅 and when she got pregnant the second time she decided that she was going to the nearest hospital because she had had a still birth and complications last time and needed to be safe. And she didn’t care that it used up the fuel rations because she and the baby(my grandfather) were going to both live. Some of my stories of her are very sad and not really something I want to put on the internet. But she and her daughter in law cut off the heads of lots of snakes😂. I’m so glad I know so much about one side of my family..the other side doesn’t really talk about the past that much because it was painful. Anyway I hope someone enjoyed my rabble.
We could be cousins! (In the "medieval population bottleneck resulting in Ashkenazi all being the genetic equivalent of 13th cousins" sense.) But in a more serious vein, my paternal grandmother was a storyteller from a huge extended family on her mother's side, and since I was named after her mother, I heard lots of stories growing up. Great-grandma Pauline came over from what is now Moldova as a teenager along with her father and 12 of her siblings (some older siblings were married and stayed behind, not clear how many or what happened to them) sometime between 1902 and 1910. It's likely that they left as a result of the Kishinev pogroms and/or the 1905 revolution. Their town wasn't directly affected because the Jewish community in Dubasari had a lot of armed and organized socialists who kept the rioters and soldiers away, but it must have felt like a good time to get out of Russia. They settled on the Lower East Side and my great-grandmother worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. She wasn't there the day of the fire because she had Saturdays off as a reward for being a fast worker. She lost a lot of friends that day, and afterward she and her brothers were heavily involved with the labour movement and helped to found a socialist bungalow colony in the Catskills (aka "The Borscht Belt") in the '20s and '30s. My family still has two houses there. There's a ton of stuff around the internet on the wave of immigration that brought our families here, and I'm happy to help you track it down.
My great-grandmother's generation tended to encourage their kids to assimilate as much as they could to avoid antisemitism. When my grandmother started learning English in kindergarten, her parents stopped using it at home so she wouldn't grow up with an accent, and my parents' generation didn't learn Yiddish at all unless they studied it as adults. There was a general reclaiming of heritage in the 1970s or so that kept the language from dying out entirely, but I definitely felt the loss of it as a kid. I have a friend whose parents immigrated from China before he was born who likewise wanted their kid to sound American, but he didn't even learn Cantonese because his mother stopped speaking to him entirely. It still affects him.
it's also interesting looking at how diasporas that ended up in america adapted their cultures to fit in, and avoid things like antisemistism. Like, the american versions of st patricks day, christopher columbus day, and hanukkah, are all huge comercialized things, very divorced from their roots.
I have had to come to terms with the fact that I will probably never know anything about my indigenous Mexican ancestors. I live in Texas, I do not speak very much Spanish and within my mother’s family there was a certain amount of denial that we had indigenous ancestry among the older generations.
So while I can trace my colonizing Spanish ancestors back hundreds of years, I know nothing about the ancestors they conquered.
Just a random comment: Since the major influx at the turn of the century, US immigrants have relied heavily on "the three blades" to build a life from scratch: the kitchen knife, hair scissors, and tailor shears. Fashion is 2/3 of the root of US immigrant family history on a large scale.
Ooh, so that makes me 2 for 3 out of the blades!
I have a very big binder of family history work my grandma made me, but unfortunately it's in storage rn 🥲 I'm looking forward to going through it when I can take it out though!
This makes me so happy for you!
My family is from King Island/Ugivak and where displaced by laws requiring native children to attend BIA schools and the lack of teachers willing to travel to our island. King Islanders/Ugivangmiut maintain a strong sense of unique, personal identity, even though we were made to perminantly relocate to our summer restocking spot in Nome and our dialect of the inupiaq language being perhaps the most obscure.
I managed to track down and order an out of print collection of King Islander stories that my great grandmother, who i knew very little about, contributed to before her death. There was a description of her in the front that called her a "tireless berry picker" and mentioned her helping to reconstruct the Wolf Dance. There's a tv special from the 80s someone uploaded on youtube showing the King Island Wolf Dance and going into how it was reconstructed. My great grandma contributed to that.
We didn't have any photos of her, but there's one in the book. She's holding my great uncle Michael who i never got to meet and he was just a year old in the photo. One of the guys in my polycule says he can see a family resemblence.
I have an old photo, a picture taken of a xeroxed picture taken back in like the 60s, of my grandmother, who i got my eskimo name from, in a fancy traditional parka. I'd love to make a kuspuk based on it one of these days
That's so wonderful that your great-grandmother was part of that work!
@@SnappyDragon it's quite a legacy ^-^
The thing that surprised me most about the story my great-grandmother contributed, though it really shouldn't have, was that in it she recalled her uncle referring to her as "Ullaaq", short for her eskimo name "Ullaaqham Quliapyungnikua". The few times my mom mentioned her, she called her "your great grandma Clara" and legally her name was Clara. It shouldn't surprise me; the stories were originally told and written down in Inupiaq (with English translations provided) and my mom's generation was the first to have English as a first language instead of Inupiaq, but I was never told that my great grandma Clara spent her youth and early adulthood being Ullaaq to her family.
It felt like learning for the first time that something precious was stolen from the family, you know? Like it was there, and it just stopped being there one day, but you only remember it not being there
@@seraphinasullivan4849 My mother's family has a related story about speaking Yiddish! My great-grandparents spoke it as their first language, as they were the ones who emigrated, and my grandparents were fluent. But they specifically chose not to teach my mother or her brothers, for the same reason it was tricky to find out where the "old country" was. It was safest to be as "American" as possible. My mother said her parents would speak Yiddish to eachother when they didn't want the kids to understand.
@@SnappyDragonin my family's case my grandma not only chose not to teach my mom or uncles Inupiaq, she also treated "stupid" like a swear word and wouldn't let them say it around her. Hard to say if it was the BIA school in Nome or living in the US as a small brown woman who spoke English as a second language
One of these days i wanna publish stories and art under my eskimo name, because it was my grandma's before it was mine and if it's associated with knowledge and creativity maybe the word "stupid" won't hurt her anymore. It should have never been used to hurt her in the first place
@@SnappyDragon My paternal grandparents did the same to my father and uncles; except they were in the USSR. But same deal - safer not to know yiddish.
This makes me so happy, my grandma passed before she could be persuaded to tell me Anything. They told me I "passed" and didn't need to worry about our ancestry. I'm piecing our history together too, so this was relatable as heck. I am excited for you and the next videos. ^-^
When you travel to New York City, do stop by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. They have a lot of information about NYC Jewish history, including Yiddish and Ladino speaking communities. The last time I visited involved a tour of one apartment recreated to represent one family's home/sweatshop, and how operating this tiny business allowed family and employees to observe the Sabbath. We also saw the recreated apartment of a different Jewish family whose employers had them work Saturdays, and their kids were much more assimilated.
Get the cookbook they have from there too- 97 Orchard : An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement. I found the part about bacon and Jewish immigrants very interesting and the part about the huge Italian loaves of bread.
I'm already in touch with some people at the Tenement Museum-- no spoilers!
@@SnappyDragon You might want to check out the Red Star Line museum in Antwerp, Belgium. About six or seven years ago a dear friend of mine found out that her great-grand-parents went through Antwerp to get to New York. It was a great discovery.
Thank you, Viv!!! I'm sitting here crying as I understand your personal history. I lost my grandparents at 8, as well. At 19, I moved far from home. My life with my parents was not good, especially for my mother and her family. By 2005 my father could trace one side of his family back to their coming to America in 1776. My mom's side, my Native side, always ends at the 1880 census. My great-great-grandfather, George, was adopted out of a Boarding School and, legally, became white. Yet, in 1945 my mother was born on the reservation in Oklahoma. Five years later, the Court house burned down to ashes. I want to do DNA testing, but I have reliable results that if one is less than 10% American Native, the American DNA companies will not list Native heritage. I understand and dislike this. Too many people would try to use it for undeserved benefits, but it screws over those of us who want to know about the cultures that got left behind. Best of luck with this auspicious project, and may God grant you nothing but good days.
The role of DNA testing can definitely be fraught! I'm glad the technology exists but of course how it's used is going to be just as full of issues as all the human systems managing it.
@@SnappyDragon my father may not be my biological father. So I don't want my DNA tested. I did get both my parents DNA tested from their hair. They both died in 1990.
My mother was 90% Ashkenazi Jewish, and my father was mostly northern Indian, Sindhi, Punjabi and Rajput, with Irish, Gulf Arabic, Ethiopian, Portuguese and Armenian.
I would love to have a resource/statement on the 10%. My great-grandmother was Cherokee; my mother met her and she was noticeably Native. However, my sister and I had our’s done by a company that touted their American Indian database and we came back all European. We are still scratching our heads.
@@nightfall3605 Happened to both my cousin and my son's grandmother. We know the dates that our people left their respective reservations, and the tests came back ALL European and Scandinavian.
@@nightfall3605 Unfortunately DNA analysis of this kind seem to still have a ong way to go. I know there was a video or two on here where identical twins tested themselves and they didn't have the exact, 100% same output in percentages. I know another person (or twins, I can't remember) took tests with more than one company to compare them all as well, and the companies did not return the exact same percentages either. Slight differences here and there. I'm wondering if that's an error. Alternatively, for twins, if you can look alike but still not have all identifiers in common on a genetic level. Like how you can look like your siblings (if you have any) but still not be 100% alike on a genetic level.
But unless it's down to 1-2%, that shouldn't just disappear into thin air. Sorry to hear about your trouble with the testings, both you and My Mid-Victorian Crisis.
as a descendent of enslaved people on both sides of my family, i can relate to this video far more than i expected to when i tapped on it. especially w| how much i love + appreciate fashion + style in the framework of culture + history. thank you for this one. for me, it’s up there w| the one about vikings + locks in terms of impact.
i appreciate you + your channel! 🖤✊🏾
Thank you so much 💚
Odd tip as you embark on your journey to connect-I always knew my grandmother made most of her clothes but I never found any commercial patterns. Years after she died, I asked my aunt who had inherited her house. My aunt told me that my grandmother used to open the newspaper ads and say what do you want and would then pull out her rulers and things and draft the pattern-often on the same newspaper. She then told me she had thrown all those away-they had no use. After my aunt dies, we found folded up inside something of my grandmother's my aunt had saved, a newspaper pattern of a bolero and skirt. My daughter's size. as I started working with it, I found a most of a movie review of "It Happened One Night" anyway, as you embark, maybe draft onto a newspaper or use some other restriction/opportunity your great grandmother would have worked with.
I love this! It literally places a garment in its historical context! Wonderful!
I love that you share your story!
As an adoptee with no knowledge of my biological family heritage, I'm envious of people who have knowledge of their ancestry and family stories. I get it ❤️
The sheer pride in your eyes and strength in your words. 🤗 I'm in awe and currently sitting here in tears and goosebumps all over my body. I'm so looking forward to the next chapters of this story and what you will be discovering along the way
It's so amazing that these pieces landed you a job!
A beautiful video. I am a Jew-by-choice. I know so much more about my ancestry than my husband did about his - the Mayflower, 14th century baptismal records, the fading letters in beautiful script, the whole deal on both sides. But everyone had ancestors in the 14th century. Knowing the names and dates, belonging to the family societies, does not make you a better or a more interesting person. How you live, what do you with the knowledge of your heritage, is what honors their efforts and sacrifices.
Thanks for articulating the outsider feelings so well. My grandmothers refused to talk about their lives in Ukraine. I have a few photos of them in the US soon after their arrival.
Yes! I love this video!! I think I might have been one of the people who originally replied to your original question about why I do this, because I’m VERY proud to be from a long line of Jewish garment workers and it’s a huge part of what drew me to historical clothing making.
I’m very lucky that since my great grandmother owned her own millinery shop from the 1910s all the way up until the 1960s when she retired, that we have many beautiful photos from the early days of the business she used to advertise her hats of her in her gorgeous lingerie gown (always the same one, obviously her “best”) modeling some very extravagant Titanic era hats. My great grandmother’s millinery supplies that I inherited are some of my most treasured possessions. Her husband was a master tailor, and he died young, while my Nana was pregnant with my Mimi, so literally the only connection I had for years was the fact that I’m a tailor too. We have none of the stories from that side of the family, only that we know they came from the Russian empire, and went to England before coming to America. I was always told Great Grandpa’s family mostly stayed in Russia, as opposed to Nana’s family, my many cousins who all still live in the same vague area of New York State. For ages ran into the same mentality that “it was all lost in the Holocaust.”
It was only this past year that I found more.
And it was…. Well what I found was wild to say the least. My great grandfather’s family DIDN’T all stay in Russia, a good number of them actually moved to New Zealand, which apparently was an incredibly common. Long story short, this is how I found out, as a mixed Jewish Indigenous person myself, that my distant cousin is probably the most famous mixed Jewish Indigenous person currently living and that I’ve cosplayed as my own cousin, Taika Waititi 💀
But being DISTANTLY related to a famous person aside, I also found out that being a tailor was apparently the family trade even before leaving the “old country,” and that was just such an amazing discovery for me. We often get told as the living descendants of Jewish immigrants to America from the late 19th/early 20th century that our ancestors turned to garment work because unskilled sweatshop jobs were all they could get, not that we have such a long and storied Jewish history of working with textiles and creating clothing for the communities we lived among. So now every time I’m pad stitching, I can literally feel the memory of my ancestors in my needle, and it makes me so proud. Being proud and loud and VISIBLY Jewish is so important to me, and it brings me so much joy. I’m glad you are finding this joy as well.
I’m so looking forward to your upcoming creations and trip to New York. I hope your Hanukkah celebrations filled with light, resilience, joy, and laughter, and so, SO much tasty food!
As someone who has a lot of breaks in my family history, researching has been the only way I've been able to fill in some of those breaks. Listening to you talk about being your own history researcher had me nodding A LOT in understanding. I can't wait to see the upcoming videos.
💚💚💚
Thank you so much for sharing ❤️ I'm also estranged from my family of origin and it feels like having my roots cut off. And even though I belong to my country's (Sweden) majority population and probably most of my ancestors lived here I struggle with this sense of rootlessness and it hurts so much. Hearing your story inspires me to maybe do something similar (or something different, but at least something) to try and connect to my roots. Again, thank you very much for talking about this ❤️ I rarely hear about others not being in touch with their biological family, and that makes the loneliness even harder... Looking forward to follow your journey, 💕💕 you're awesome 🥰
It's more common than folks think! Probably because there's so much pressure not to talk about it. 💚
If you ever want help translating any documents from German/old German into English, I’d be more than happy to help you with that ☺️
Thank you so much for sharing your fascinating journey with us 🥰
I think Saturnalia is a perfectly good holiday, great for hedonists! Not sure if i like what Christians have done with it (usurped?). Love your video - warm, kind and well balanced. Being able to understand history through clothing is a superpower. Thank you / great vid.
While the Christians have changed Yule quite a bit, at least it’s still normal in my country to celebrate Yule and not Christmas.
I know that my great-great grand father was a tailor, and he was an apprentice under the man who later became his father-in-law. one of my aunts did a bunch of digging and found this out several years back, and she mentioned it because she thought it funny with my interest in sewing.
I also know that my great-grand father was a veterinarian, that worked with a lot of butcher houses on how to make sure that the animals that were sent there were healthy and that they died in as humane a way as possible (we have so many stories about how mad he got at people that didn't treat animals with respect).
My great grandfather was also a tailor and my mother was always amazed at me sitting cross legged on the floor while handsewing. She said I was moving like him. He was also a hands on healer and after I took some shiatsu and I worked on her she swore she could feel his hands. I never met him and know very little about him because as usual there was a family split.
It's wonderful how things like that can show up again after a few generations!
I'm so glad you are able to track your history! I'm starting on the same journey. My mom's side is Armenian 🇦🇲 and came over because of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. All I know is that my grandmother's mom and my grandfather's mom were both from Constantinople, and both were widows and remarried to men who already had jobs and houses in America in order to get them out. I'm having trouble doing any tracking as my grandma didn't want to teach us Armenian, and it's not the easiest to learn. My older family appreciates my eagerness to learn though, and I've been collecting the little bits and pieces different people know into a full narrative.
Your voice shows your excitement about recreating Karolina's dress as well as your reasons for loving history. Happy Hanukkah and keep shining the light in our weird universe.
This all resonated on SO many points. My family is problematic and I had to walk away and not interact. I only know snippets and a few stories about anyone on either side. I can't ask for more now because I choose not to re-engage. Family on both sides based in New England, with all (?) great-grandparents off the boat immigrants. Irish and Nova Scotia French on my mother's side, Irish and Swedish on my father's. It's sad and kind of hurts to not know more and be able to celebrate some of it. Social isolation came from being raised Unitarian Universalist Pagan. We had our own family holiday traditions that were not shared by my peers - growing up or even now. I live far away from those people now in the greatly homogeneous Midwest bible belt, where I often feel (and am reacted to) like a foreigner. Yay you for being able to be a relative and/or a researcher to put your family pieces together. Inspired by your work and ooking forward to what you have to share! BTW, I'm a cultural anthropologist, my thesis was a cultural textile exhibition, and I love making garments 🙂