I first became involved with the authors and this project over ten years ago when it began as a series of interviews in preparation for a research project and then a museum exhibit entitled Movers and Seekers: Michigan Immigrants and Migrants. The authors chose to interview me and include my family’s stories, photos and artifacts in the Movers and Seekers exhibit. The exhibit was one of the most popular shows at the Michigan Historical Museum in Lansing, Michigan, and I was proud that my family’s history was included.

The authors interviewed more than eighteen different persons of various ethnic backgrounds,...

Each of us travels through life—literally and figuratively—and has a memory of the journey tucked deep within us, and a story to tell. Sometimes we emigrate from our homeland to get a better education or a more satisfying job, or to be closer to (or further from) family, or for better health. Some of us—refugees—flee our countries of origin to escape war, poverty, hunger, or ethnic or religious prejudice, discrimination and persecution, or political repression. Some of us migrate within our own countries to seek greater economic or educational opportunities or to escape racial prejudice. Our...

Almost one and half million people came from Germany to the United States in the 1880s, the peak decade of German immigration. Most settled in the Midwest. They sought economic opportunity as well as religious and political freedom. As a united Germany built up its army, large numbers of young men emigrated to avoid military service.

Mathias J. Alten was one of those immigrants. He was born in Gusenburg, Germany, in 1871. At the age of fourteen, he began working as an apprentice to an artist, painting decorations on ceilings and walls in churches and theaters.

When he was seventeen...

In the late nineteenth century, Jews in Central and Eastern Europe suffered economic pressures and anti-Semitism. The hostility and discrimination they faced as Jews forced many of them to emigrate.

In the Russian Empire, which included Lithuania, Ukraine, and part of Poland, Jews could not live outside limited territories. Access to higher education and the professions was severely limited. Pogroms—organized attacks on Jewish communities encouraged by the government—killed thousands. Jewish emigration from Russia increased rapidly in the 1890s.

Louis Padnos was born in 1886 or 1887 in Byelorussia. When Louis turned thirteen, he decided to move to the...

Between 1894 and 1922, both the Ottoman Empire and its successor governments in Turkey attempted to eliminate the Armenian minority living in what is now central and western Turkey. Systematic campaigns of extermination, as well as mob violence, starvation, and disease resulted in the deaths of some 1.5 million Armenians. Survivors who were unable to escape the region by emigrating to the United States or Europe fled east into Russian Armenia, which is today an independent republic.

Haratoune Asadore Adrounie was born in 1882 in the mountain village of Zetoune, in the Ottoman Empire, which eventually became part of Turkey....

A wave of emigrants left Finland between 1870 and 1920, pushed by economic changes that left many rural people without land or jobs. Russia, which had ruled the country since 1809, provided another push as it tightened its control over government and language, and drafted Finns into the Russian army.

Nearly all the Finnish emigrants settled in the United States, where they clustered in the mining and farming regions of Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and New York.

Olga Koskela came to the United States from Perho, Finland, with her parents, Pietari and Anna Liisa Koskela, and her two brothers and three...

From 1795 until 1918, Poland was divided among Germany, Russia, and Austria. The Russian and German governments, in particular, restricted the Polish language and the Catholic Church. However, economic circumstances in the Russian and Austrian regions provided the biggest push to Polish emigrants between 1900 and 1915.

Many Poles who came to Michigan for jobs in the auto industry had already worked for a few years in such industrial cities as Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Chicago.

The Skrzypek family struggled to escape poverty by leaving Poland for America, and later moving from the Buffalo area to Detroit. Life was better, but...

Between 1900 and 1914, hundreds of thousands of Italians, mostly from southern provinces, came to the United States seeking jobs. Already accustomed to seasonal migrations to find work in Italy, southern Italians were among the immigrants most likely to return home. Italian immigration to Michigan before 1900 focused on the mining regions of the Upper Peninsula. The pattern shifted in the early twentieth century, and by 1930 about 73 percent of the state’s Italian-born residents lived in Wayne County.

Francis “Bus” Spaniola comes from a long line of Italian storekeepers. His maternal grandfather, Andrew Spadafore, was an immigrant who owned...

In the second decade of the twentieth century, rural southern blacks began moving to northern industrial cities in an unprecedented “Great Migration.” Pushed by poverty, indebtedness, racism, and crop failures, they were also lured by the prospect of better-paying factory jobs and greater freedom in the North.

Michigan’s burgeoning auto industry made the state a destination for migrants. When World War I cut off the supply of new immigrant workers from Europe, auto companies sent recruiters south. African American newspapers and word of mouth from earlier migrants also helped to bring people north.

Detroit was the primary destination in Michigan...

Between 1900 and 1930, population growth, industrialization, and revolution dislocated millions of Mexicans. Many of them—about 1.5 million—migrated north to the United States.

During World War I, Michigan sugar companies began recruiting Mexican Americans from Texas as farmworkers. Families of migrants—parents, grandparents, and young children—spent long hours working in sugar beet fields.

In the 1920s Mexican Americans began harvesting other Michigan crops, including pickle cucumbers, berries, and other fruit. When they could find more stable, better-paying jobs in sugar plants or auto factories, farmworkers often became permanent Michigan residents.

Marylou Hernandez was born in San Antonio,...

In the late nineteenth century, Jews in Central and Eastern Europe suffered economic pressures and anti-Semitism. The hostility and discrimination they faced as Jews forced many of them to emigrate.

In the Russian Empire, which included Lithuania, Ukraine and part of Poland, Jews could not live outside limited territories. Access to higher education and professions was severely limited. Pogroms—organized attacks on Jewish communities encouraged by the government—killed thousands. Jewish emigration from Russia increased rapidly in the 1890s.

European Jews faced a new threat when Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power in 1933. The Nazi Party...

During World War II, a quarter of a million people—half of them Jewish—were killed in the Netherlands. Many more died of starvation during the four-year-long German occupation. The war left Holland’s countryside flooded with salt water from broken dikes; buildings and factories were stripped or destroyed; and there was little wood left with which to rebuild.

To help the country get back on its feet, church officials and the Netherlands government set up emigration offices in poor areas. Their goal was to decrease unemployment and reduce overpopulation. Travel expenses were subsidized and people were assisted in making arrangements...

In the late nineteenth century, changes in Japan’s economy and tax structure led to increased emigration, beginning about 1885. Many of the first to leave went to Hawaii, where large plantations needed workers to grow sugar cane. Especially after 1900, Japanese laborers sought better working conditions on the Pacific Coast of the United States.

Japanese immigrants, although few in number, faced obstacles that Europeans did not. Like most other Asians, they were not allowed to become citizens. They were the acknowledged targets of anti-alien land laws in western states that excluded noncitizens from owning land. Japanese immigration was severely curtailed...

Mary Kobayashi’s grandfather grew peaches and oranges on the Japanese island of Shikoku in the late 1880s. He owned a towboat and barges for hauling coal and fruit to other parts of Japan. When a typhoon hit the island and destroyed boats, the business was ruined.

Japanese tradition dictates that if a family loses its money, the oldest son of the family must pay back any debts incurred. In 1912, when Mary’s father, Sahichiro Kobayashi, was sixteen years old, he immigrated to Arizona to seek his fortune. He went to high school there.

After several years he returned to Japan...

Prior to World War II, only about 2,000 Koreans had immigrated to the United States. After the war, some Koreans began arriving here, some as spouses of military servicemen. The liberalization of American immigration laws in 1965 coincided with rapid industrialization and urbanization in South Korea, spurring a new wave of more than half a million immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s.

One aspect of this immigration was the effort to place Korean children in American families. The Korean War had left many children orphaned. Unmarried mothers faced the stigma of single motherhood and knew their Amerasian children would be...

When Sharkey Haddad turned seven years old in 1968, the Baath Party, took control of the Iraqi government for the second time since his birth. Party leaders knew that many Iraqis objected to Baath rule. Between 1968 and 1973, Baath dictator Saddam Hussein ruthlessly eliminated any group or person suspected of challenging Baath rule through a series of sham trials, executions, and assassinations.

While Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party ruled Iraq, Sharkey’s father was arrested. Saddam Hussein supported Islam. For people such as Sharkey’s family, who are not Muslim, Iraq was a dangerous place to be. Sharkey Haddad left...

Beginning in 1932, political power in Lebanon was precariously balanced between Christian and Muslim factions. In 1975 sporadic violence between the factions escalated into civil war. Conflicts among Lebanon’s neighbors—Israelis, Syrians, and the Palestinians—spilled over the border. The fighting lasted until 1989.

During the fifteen years of war, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese sought homes in safer countries, including the United States. Earlier, most Lebanese emigrants were Christian, but members of all religious groups left during the civil war.

Lara Hamza was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1974. When Lara was very little, her father, Wafic Hamza, worked...

The first wave of Chinese immigration to the United States began in the early nineteenth century, when large numbers of Chinese came to work as laborers, particularly on railroads and in mining.

While employers enjoyed the benefits of cheap labor, discrimination was rampant. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 based on public outcry. Other laws followed that denied citizenship and property ownership and prevented Asians from marrying Caucasians. The Chinese were effectively barred from immigration for over sixty years, until 1943.

After World War II, prejudice against Asians relaxed somewhat. In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration Act, which...

In 1975, after thirty years of nearly continuous warfare and two decades as a divided nation, the Communist government of North Vietnam conquered the South, reuniting the country. As South Vietnam fell, some 130,000 government and military officials fled, most taking refuge in the United States, the South’s long-standing ally.

More than 1.5 million refugees left Vietnam between 1978 and 1981. The government, focused on integrating the south ideologically into its Communist structure, had ordered many urban dwellers into rural work camps. The real work of rebuilding after the devastation of war was neglected. People became so desperate that they...

In 1964, the newly independent African countries of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to become Tanzania. Only in the last decade has the country begun developing a multi-party democracy and a market economy. Tanzanians seeking economic and academic opportunities beyond those at home have settled, sometimes permanently, in other countries.

Deo Ngonyani came to study for his Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1990. In 1999, he came to Michigan to teach at Michigan State University where he is currently an associate professor of linguistics and African languages.

After a long and hard struggle with illness,...

Thank you for traveling with us on our journeys with our immigrant friends and for joining us in discovering their stories. Perhaps their courage and tenacity and profound sense of adventure will inspire you to explore your own family history. Perhaps you will find some ‘old things or stuff’—such as travel documents, journals, letters, diaries, drawings, photographs, films, or videos. Perhaps you will be motivated to record your family stories and preserve them for your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, so that they may value and cherish their family history and memories.

Discovering and understanding our own families histories...