My adoptive father’s father is from Tennessee. I consider Tennessee to be where they are from, despite the fact my father grew up in Illinois.

My mother’s parents grew up in Illinois, but they’re about two generations out from the deep south–Southern influences in speech, diet, and other little cultural markers are very strong in my family, although its been diluted by Midwestern culture.

My mother’s family descends from the indentured servant Irish, almost-slaves that were eventually freed after a certain amount of years.

My father’s family are Scotsmen, who came for gold and exploitation.

I consider my home to be central Illinois, no particular town, but I lived in Arizona for six years as a kid and can’t wait to move back there.

(Also, I think it’s a little hilarious how obvious it is that I’ve been told the story by my Canadian relatives– according to my American schools, it was the War of Independence, and my ancestors were Tories (said with scorn), or at best, Royalists.)

The whole story, as I attached it to my little “eloriane” marker:

Even my dad doesn’t know much about his side of the family, so this is all about my mum.

On my mum’s maternal side, her family came from Scotland to Canada in the 1880s. “I don’t know why, better opportunities, I guess,” was all she could say. I suspect it was probably mostly consensual. They ended up in an extremely Scots-dominated area where the men were priests for several generations.

On her paternal side, her family is English all the way back. They came to America a loooong time ago, before it was America, probably mostly consensually again, and mixed a bit with some “Pennsylvania Dutch” (that is, Germans, “Deutsch”) about whom I can’t even speculate, but then in the American War of Revolution, they fled to Canada out of political necessity, since they were still loyal to the Crown.

My mum met my dad at university in Canada, where they got married. They came to America in the 1980s to get PhDs in computer science. I don’t think they would have immigrated if they had been able to study in Canada instead, but since they could simply have chosen to study something else in Canada (or not study at all), the move was really a consensual one.

They moved within the states several times as well– from North Carolina, where they studied, to Massachusetts, where I was born, to Kansas, where I grew up, to Arkansas, where they live now, but it was always in pursuit of a better job, not out of necessity.

I’m at school in NC now but my “home” is still Kansas, which is why I placed my marker there.

My mum, on the other hand, migrated from Scotland to Australia more or less voluntarily. Her parents sent her over to live with her sister when she was a teenager, and ultimately followed her themselves. She’s never gone back to Scotland, either, but because she loves this country and feels it’s home.

Heck, I don’t even know where my grandparents were from, what to say of any ancestors before them. I only know where my grandparents lived when I was a child (only one set of grandparents were alive) but have no idea where they were born or grew up. In retrospect I think I never cared about family stories like this due to a highly dysfunctional family (“must… distance… myself…”).

Also, to repeat what several others have mentioned, my family moved around a lot when we were kids. Even my mother (now 75) moved around when she was a child even though that was apparently less common than it is now.

I’ve never felt very attached to a place (eg, “home”) until after I was an adult and I chose where I wanted to live. Of course, my choice was constrained by being able to get a job there. I looked for a job and the place to live came out of that search, not the other way around. But I’m very happy with how things turned out.

Anyway, good luck with the map. I hope you find contributors who know more about their family background.

I am about the only person who has left home, having joined the Navy, except my maternal grandfather who was also in the Army, but is back home now.

Oooh, interesting thought. I just realized that, following my father’s paternal line, my sister and I are the first in three generations to be born in the same country where even one parent was born. (Well, I guess that gets a little iffy when you’re trying to define countries around the Austro-Hungarian Empire — does Vienna count as a different country than a town that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when the people in question were born there, but was part of Poland when their child was born in Vienna?)

I’m not sure how to put myself on the map, because there are so many places and journeys, and I could go back hundreds of years. But I’ll try.

sure, the pogroms were a factor in emigration, in the years immediately following 1881 and 1903 in particular. and certainly WWI was an even bigger one. but the main force behind the massive migration to the cities (especially those with a reputation for freedom of thought and culture, like varshe/warsaw, tshernovits/czernowitz/chernivtsi and odes/odessa) and later our of eastern europe entirely, was escape from the rule of the laytn and rabbis. this is what’s behind the large number of yiddish songs praising romania (“rumenye, rumenye” being only the most famous) – austro-hungarian romania (and romanian-speaking czarist bessarabia, now moldova) had less powerful rabbinates, and were seen as a center of freedom in eastern european jewish culture.

less noted in song, though, is the coercion involved in migration off the shtetl: often, folks who dissented were driven out, or given no alternative but to leave. in my family, for instance, the only way to get out of an arranged marriage that went wrong was to leave the country. which is how my great-grandmother wound up in new york.