52 Ancestors 2026: Tradition – Or Maybe Not

 

Growing up in Buffalo, I was surrounded by traditions, many of them rooted in the city’s immigrant neighborhoods. There were Italian festivals and foods celebrated each year, diners run by Greek immigrants, and the major Christmas Eve and Easter traditions centered around shopping at the Broadway Market. I learned to greet the various grandmothers—Babushka or Yia-Yia—who served as the respected matriarchs of multigenerational households. Since I got married, my own family now has absorbed and adapted many Polish customs, and we still enjoy celebrating those links to the Poland of around 1900.

At the same time, my family gradually let go of many of the Old World customs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and became an amalgamation of cultures—fully American. Although some ancestors originally lived in émigré communities in the colonies, it did not take long for cultures to blend. A few family lines especially stand out, both before and after the American Revolution.

My paternal line began as various groups of Huguenots from France and Belgium who migrated to New Amsterdam, where they became part of a blended French-Dutch community. The Scots-Irish McWilliams family settled in a heavily German area of Pennsylvania, and over time the Highlanders blended with the Rhinelanders. Other German families, such as the Fasts, were more recent immigrants and probably retained more of their German heritage for a generation or two, something that even proved useful during the Revolution. The New England Puritan families were perhaps the group that remained the most English, at least while they stayed in New England.

After the American Revolution and the opening of lands west of the Appalachians, everything began to change. Being “American” increasingly meant becoming something distinct from European identities. The Huguenot-Dutch branch migrated together into Kentucky, but eventually settled in Ohio, where they intermarried with English families. The Scots-Irish-German lines married into families with Quaker roots, descendants who had left the Society of Friends. Even the New Englanders broadened their horizons as they moved westward and married into German families. Farming and rural life became the defining tradition for many generations afterward. Even the one nineteenth-century Irish immigrant branch assimilated within a generation.

The move to Buffalo, however, transformed a rural family into an urban one. Open fields were replaced by parks and parkways, and one-room schoolhouses gave way to large brick schools with wood shops, auditoriums, and swimming pools. Yet perhaps some vestiges of those older traditions remain. Although gardening and mechanical work are far less necessary for me than they were for my prairie-dwelling ancestors, I still find myself carrying on some of those habits today.