My American History: Celebrating America's 250th Birthday

Here's my dad's family on an all-American road trip to Tahquamenon Falls around 1970. Dad's on the right, my aunts are in the matching outfits on the left, and Grandpa is holding my uncle. Grandma must be the one taking the picture.

I am an American. I’ll never be anything else. I have no other culture, no other heritage. My ancestors originally came from Europe, but they were completely and totally assimilated in the American melting pot. They left no family heirlooms, no traditional recipes, no stories of the “old country.” All I have is American history—which, I’ve discovered, is my family history. In honor of the 250th anniversary of the United States, I’ve decided to look back and see where my family was in America over the years. I don’t have many stories, just birth and death dates, but here’s what I know.

My paternal grandfather’s ancestors immigrated from England and Wales to Massachusetts in the 1630s, nearly 400 years ago. They were probably Puritans; some of them had names like Prudence and Experience. On that side, I’m a twelfth-generation American. My ancestors had already been in New England for four generations by the time of the Revolution. They moved to rural New York and then came to Michigan in the 1840s as part of the wave of settlers that sailed across Lake Erie. They’ve been in Michigan almost as long as it’s been a state.

My paternal grandmother’s family were French, and they were in Michigan even earlier than the 1830s. Maybe they were voyageurs and fur traders. There’s a family legend that one of them married an Indigenous woman. I don’t know if that’s true or not, so I’m not going to claim to have an Indigenous ancestor. But such intermarriage was fairly common among the French, who were less racist than the English, so it’s possible.

My mother’s side of the family is mostly of German ancestry. Her father’s family lived in Pennsylvania in the nineteenth century and maybe even earlier (I don’t have good records from that side of the family). My maternal grandmother’s family were the most recent immigrants; they came from Germany sometime in the late nineteenth century. They lived in Elyria, Ohio and worked in the steel mills. One of my grandmother’s uncles had the job of laying flat on his back all day, inspecting red-hot pieces of steel traveling over his head on a conveyor.

If the Abbott side of the family ever had any wealth or land, it was long gone by the twentieth century. Grandpa Abbott started his career as a janitor and eventually worked his way up to vice president of a small company. He built a small suburban home in the 1960s and raised his four kids with the love of his life, whom he married when she was only seventeen. Then he died of colon cancer at age fifty-three. He lived the American Dream—and it killed him. Grandma Abbott was heartbroken and died of liver failure (caused by taking too much Tylenol for her frequent headaches) nine years later, at age sixty-one.

My mom’s father was a tech guy. Grandpa Winters had his own printing press, ham radio equipment, and even a personal computer in the 1970s! (It filled an entire room of their house). He had a four-seater airplane, and when the family traveled, they flew instead of driving. But alas, he had two weaknesses—greed and lust. He moved the family from Florida to Michigan in the early 1970s to work at a VFW home in Eaton Rapids, where Grandpa had an affair with one of his secretaries. The other secretary found wire taps on the phone lines (installed by paranoid techie Grandpa) and discovered that he’d been stealing money from the VFW.

By that point, Grandpa had divorced Grandma and married another woman (not the one he had the affair with). They decided to go back to the land and build a homestead in Arkansas. The only problem was that they bought the building materials with the stolen money—so he ended up in federal prison instead. After he got out, he became a Presbyterian pastor, worked various odd jobs, and just died two years ago at age ninety-two. Many of the 1970s-era Rodale Press titles in my organic farming book collection came from his failed homesteading venture.

My mom’s mother is a feminist and my only living grandparent (she’s little, feisty, still living independently, and will be ninety-three this summer). Grandma Winters studied accounting in the 1950s, when it was considered a man’s field, and she worked as an accountant as a single mom to raise her two kids after the divorce (there was no child support in those days). They never had much money, but my mom was such a good student that she was able to get a full-ride need-based scholarship to go to college and study music therapy. That’s where she met Dad. They got married in 1986.

Dad followed in his father’s footsteps. He was a first-generation college student and worked his way through college frying doughnuts in the cafeteria. (You could do that in the 1980s. You can’t now.) He studied engineering but was especially fascinated with computers. He got in on the ground floor of IT at the factory where he worked and eventually earned enough money to buy our twenty-acre farm. Then he died of leukemia at age fifty-nine. He lived the American Dream, just like his dad—and it killed him, too.

That’s my story. My ancestors were not noteworthy people. They didn’t make it into the history books as individuals. As far as I know, they were neither very bad nor very good. As my grandma likes to put it, “We don’t have any skeletons in the closet—we parade them down the street.” That’s how I feel about America. It’s not the greatest nation ever in the history of the world. But it’s definitely not the worst, either. I think it’s a pretty great place to live, which is good because it’s the only home and heritage I have.

As we look back at American history, let’s celebrate the good, learn from the bad, and work to make the next fifty years the best we can. Happy 250th birthday, America!