Does anyone here NOT know where their grandparents are from?

[Bonobo]

Do any of you get "confused" about it? I certainly don't.

I know when my ancestors came to America and which ones did.

I suspect this is true for most Americans with immigrants in their background.

So how the HELL did Hillary Clinton think that "all of her grandparents" came here from other countries when actually only one did?

Was she confused or was she lying? It's one or the other. The next question must be either:

-Why was she confused, or

-Why was she lying

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/apr/16/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-flubs-familys-immigration-history-/

[Cali_Democrat]

1. That article is from April 16th. nt

[Bonobo]

8. What difference does that make? nt

[Cali_Democrat]

49. It's just odd that you would choose to recycle this news many months later

Are the latest round of polls not looking good for Bernie?

[Bonobo]

51. No, it's just that this type of behavior on her part is continuing.

I wanted to establish that the Abuela thing is part of a LONG-STANDING pattern of deception.

[Cali_Democrat]

53. What exactly is the deception in the abuela-gate nontroversey?

How is Hillary deceiving the public?

[Bonobo]

54. She is NOTHING like the abuela of a typical Latino voter, and

all of Twitter told her so in no uncertain terms.

The deception was in trying to portray herself as something she is NOT.

She is an overprivileged and extremely wealthy White woman, not like the abuela she was trying to claim she is.

[Cali_Democrat]

55. Isn't abuela the Spanish word for grandmother?

Last I checked, Hillary is a grandmother.

Where exactly is the deception?

[artislife]

60. You are not this dense. This I know from reading your posts. nt

[artislife]

59. Why do some post about Bernie's kid out of wedlock? nt

[BeanMusical]

14. This is not LBN.

[TwilightGardener]

2. Not plausible to think that she doesn't know her own family history.

Politicians are generally keen to highlight whatever family lore makes them look good to voters. Look at the other candidates--they not only have the stories down of ancestor immigrant hardship or dad being a mailman, etc., they've been running on those stories for multiple elections. Both of my grandmothers were born in the US to immigrant parents, both of my grandfathers came through Ellis Island.

[nc4bo]

35. She knows her genealogy very well, It's been done.

and can be viewed by online in a multitude of places.

She lied. Her weathervanin' should become an Olympic sport. Instant gold medal!

[MADem]

3. When I say "grandparents" I also mean "great grandparents."

I don't just mean the ones who preceded my parents.

Sure you're not nitpicking?

[CBGLuthier]

4. When I say grandparents I mean grandparents when I say great grandparents I mean great grandparents

When I say my ancestors it includes everyone. I have never before heard of any one referring to their "greats" as just grandparents.

[JonLeibowitz]

58. Welcome to DU. People here make all kinds of interesting mental contortions for their candidate. n/t

[draa]

6. When I talk about my ancestors, even 200yo ones, I usually say grandparents.

It's all in the context of the story.

I didn't watch the vid so....(and don't plan to).

[Bonobo]

7. That's REALLY interesting. I have never heard of such a thing.

I'm not calling you a liar by the way. I just find it really interesting since "grandparents" has such a definite and clear meaning.

[MADem]

9. I was raised in an extended family that included

a "great grandmother," but I never thought of her as "great." She was just a grandmother (she was a great one, in the other sense of the word, mind you, but I never found the distinguishing of ancestors important). I grew up with cousins who were called Uncle or Aunt owing to their age, too.

On one side of my family, only one grandparent was alive. On the other side, I had more than I knew what to do with. And when grandparents have siblings, it can get very mixed up indeed. Instead of Grand Aunt, or Great Grand Uncle, it is easier to just call them grandparents.

[Amimnoch]

29. From the central Louisiana area (Acadiana Area), It's also very common, but confusing:

Up until 1991, I had 2 grandmothers, and 2 of my Great Grandmothers alive.

Each one had a different title when being addressed directly. My mothers mom was "Granny", my dads mom is just "Gram", My Fathers fathers mom was Meh-mere (Cajun for Grandmother, I'm not even sure what great grandmother in Cajun is), My Fathers mothers mom was known as just "Mom" by everyone (sisters, children, nieces etc..).

In a passing reference, or referencing them as a group, they were all just "Grandmother's".

When specifically trying to establish a lineage though, that would be the time we'd distinguish between Grandmother, and Great Grandmother.

[DFW]

36. Different in different ethnic groups, maybe?

I had one great-grandparent alive until my girls were 13 and 11. Although they understood the concept of a great-grandparent, they always referred to him as "Opa Milton," or "grandfather Milton," because "Ur-Opa" is so cumbersome in German. No one ever says it.

[hlthe2b]

25. Yes.. I would have meant my ancesters, too- Honestly what can ANYONE say that can't be nitpicked...

especially by those who are intent on seeing the worst?

[FreakinDJ]

5. Their not from Wall Street

So I'm sure she could care less about them

[Amimnoch]

30. They're.

[Skidmore]

50. That is just petty.

Nitpicking petty.

[Prism]

10. It's part of her pretending

She can pretend to be Southern, given that ridiculous accent.

She can pretend to be black, given that ridiculous accent.

But she can't pretend to be an immigrant or Latina. So we get this abuela bullshit. It's part of her co-opting identities she herself does not possess.

. . .

I cannot believe people are voting for her. I really cannot. When someone literally, to your face, goes, "What do you want me to be?! I'll be it! Just please make me President!" which part of, "Uhm, hey, let's not vote for the sociopath, eh? Probably not an amazing idea," isn't kicking in here?

I'm a firm believer in herd stupidity, and god if the entire Clinton candidacy isn't proof. People will literally vote for anything at all. And if we didn't have Hillary has our personal prime example, we'd need only look at Trump.

At this point, does anyone earnestly believe the majority of Americans aren't just tuned the fuck out, and are only bouncing along to their media queues?

[Bonobo]

11. I think the Clinton supporters here would have HAPPILY thrown in for Joe Lieberman

If he had merely been deemed to be the "frontrunner".

It makes me sick, sad, nauseated and depressed.

But it is the sad reality.

I judge such people harshly to be honest.

[MADem]

12. Not a single person I know who backs Clinton backed Holy Joe over Ned Lamont.

I think you are very mistaken in your opinion.

[Bonobo]

15. I'm talking about for General Election.

Fess up.

[MADem]

26. What does "fess up" even mean? "Fess up" to WHAT, precisely?

Not sure what you're suggesting, here but it reeks of incivility. If you're accusing me of approving of that asshole, that's a nasty and untrue thing to do.

Further, I don't know any DUers who are still here from his independent/spoiler senate run and contribute positively to this board who would take that attitude about him--he made a point of being a GOP-schmoozing jerk.

Most people regard him as a Republican in everything but name at this stage of the game, though he has retired from public life and doesn't wield any clout. His legacy as a Democrat was besmirched by his final years in the Senate.

[BeanMusical]

19. "It makes me sick, sad, nauseated and depressed."

Yeah, me too. In that order.

[Divernan]

20. Brilliant post! Makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

Especially, " which part of, "Uhm, hey, let's not vote for the sociopath, eh? Probably not an amazing idea," isn't kicking in here?

Anyhoo, thank you and Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays!

[Juicy_Bellows]

47. I agree with you. Your last paragraph especially. Nt.

[TwilightGardener]

57. Your post sums up my feelings as well.

[jfern]

13. Jury results

Automated Message
AUTOMATED MESSAGE: Results of your Jury Service
Mail Message
On Thu Dec 24, 2015, 04:50 AM an alert was sent on the following post:

Does anyone here NOT know where their grandparents are from?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251943700

REASON FOR ALERT

This post is disruptive, hurtful, rude, insensitive, over-the-top, or otherwise inappropriate.

ALERTER'S COMMENTS

This is not a pressing issue and certainly not one to accuse the current front runner of the Democratic Party of being a "liar" over. Over the top and completely unnecessary

You served on a randomly-selected Jury of DU members which reviewed this post. The review was completed at Thu Dec 24, 2015, 05:03 AM, and the Jury voted 1-6 to LEAVE IT.

Juror #1 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: No explanation given
Juror #2 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: No explanation given
Juror #3 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: The OP has to do with the persona that the candidate (Hillary Clinton) projects. That may not be the most important issue but it IS an important issue. And I see absolutely nothing wrong with suggesting that a politician--any politician, Democratic or otherwise--is lying, or covering up, or putting a false face on. This is absolutely not abusive or disruptive. It is one of our rights, and one of our duties, as citizens, to question politicians, even in impolite or rude terms.
Juror #4 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: This Alert Stalking is getting crazy. There's so many of these I automatically vote to Leave It since the Administration won't do anything about these people.
Juror #5 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: No explanation given
Juror #6 voted to HIDE IT
Explanation: These threads are ruining our once great board but not no one seems to care (SIGH). The hate is so thick it is like a fog that never lifts.
Juror #7 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: This hypersensitivity has to stop. It's NOT OK with me for politicians to lie, exaggerate, stretch the truth or obfuscate. This is legitimate querying of the truth.

Thank you very much for participating in our Jury system, and we hope you will be able to participate again in the future.

[Bonobo]

16. Alert stalking is ugly. nt

[BeanMusical]

18. Very.

[BeanMusical]

17. Interesting alert and result.

You know, I noticed that the vast majority of pro-Bernie OPs are alerted on. This is borderline pathological.

[Proserpina]

21. (The word you are looking for is...conspiracy!)

Mum's the word! (and the pun was an intentional afterthought).

[BeanMusical]

23. The word I was looking for and found is: pathological.

[Proserpina]

24. Yes, they are

[sibelian]

43. I don't think there's anything borderline *about* it.

Damn straight it's pathological.

[CoffeeCat]

28. Are people penalized for incessantly alerting on people?

I mean, if you wanted to get rid of someone (or a group of people who had certain views), you could constantly alert on them. You could make it into a part-time hobby.

Is there some limit to how much someone can do this?

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

38. Far as I know

you have to lose your alert 7-0 to get blocked from doing another alert for 24 hrs. But I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that the most alert happy folks have multiple socks to alert with so they can even get around that minor 'punishment'.

[artislife]

62. I honestly think they have opened a Sock Shop.

I find many have changed their "voices" and there seem to be the same "voices" on the board.

[Zorra]

63. Alert socks would be a useful tool for what are, generally,

any inherently subjective, dishonest individuals/groups of posters.

FDR traditional Dems at DU don't use alert socks, won't alert for malevolent purposes, and are collectively far more objective in their evaluations of posts in the capacity of juror than the more conservative groups of posters.

Posters from generally subjective, inherently dishonest group(s) can, and do, frequently, use the jury system as a weapon, because they are permitted to alert at will, and they will almost universally automatically vote to hide even the most innocuous alerted on post that is made by a traditional Democrat.

It's somewhat like the integrity gap between traditional FDR Dems and Republicans. The farther to the right of the political spectrum that a juror is, the more likely that juror is to use the jury system as a weapon.

The 7 - 0 rule is relatively ineffective in protecting traditional Dems here because of this integrity gap. There's almost always one subjective member on a jury from an inherently dishonest group. Therefore, there's no 7 - 0 result, and subsequently, the alert stalkers are allowed to continue to alert stalk traditional FDR Dems with impunity.

An added bonus for the dishonest group is that each time they hide a traditional Democrat's post, they significantly lower the traditional Dems odds of being selected for a jury. Each hide a poster gets lessens their chances of being selected for the jury, effectively stacking future juries on the side of the dishonest group.

The system works!


***An effective, and simple, solution to this problem would be to allow each individual member 4, or maybe 6, alerts per year. Having been a member of DU for almost 13 years, I believe that this should be acceptable to any reasonable DU member who would never consider using the DU jury system as a weapon for punishing and/or silencing, without reasonable cause, those who disagree with her/him.

Just FYI, a prolific poster's alert sockpuppet was exposed for trying to circumvent the alert system a few years ago. The sockpuppet was tombstoned, but the poster was not tombstoned, or suspended. No telling how many socks are out there.

[font color="grey" size="2" face="face"]Awaiting validation[/font]

[sibelian]

42. It never works.

But they still do it.

Why do they keep doing it if it never works?

[SwampG8r]

46. Its a reflection of their candidate

[indivisibleman]

22. I am a genealogist and...

it is quite common for people to generalize. I rely a lot on oral histories and over the years have found that when people use the terms grandmother or grandfather it often means their parent's grandmother or grandfather. It is also a common generalization to just say "grandparents" instead of ancestors. There is nothing unusual here. She was just generalizing.

[EdwardBernays]

31. Lots of people

Know very little about their own family.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

39. An awful lot of us just take what parents or other relatives tell us as gospel until we find out it

isn't. Sorta like one of the ancestry.com tv ads where the guy talks about how he was raised German, did all sorts of cultural things, then found out he was actually mostly Irish or Scottish.

I know when I was growing up, I thought we were basically German with a small bit of Native American, then, when I actually wandered around ancestry.com for a bit and into trees other relatives had built, found out there was less German, more a number of other Western European countries, and never did actually find any of the supposed NA, although there were a few very poorly documented females a few generations back who could have been anything under the sun.

[EdwardBernays]

40. I'm adopted and so was my dad

So I know zero about my ancestry.

[HereSince1628]

41. I know when and -almost- where a grandfather came from but

after trying to figure out exactly where I've concluded that a great-grandfather, seemingly with intent, tried to cover those tracks.

The end result is a confusing stub in the stammtafel. That grandfather was, with some certainty born in 1863 and baptized just before Christmas at ~3 weeks of age in Holland. He may have been born in southeastern provincial Brandenburg aka Lower Lusatia, in Baden or in HOlland. His father was, according to various records, listed as being from Baden, or provincial Brandenburg.

Family history and reorganization of the German states and their labels makes clearly knowing 'where' difficult.

[Codeine]

52. I discovered a big chunk of my "Scottish" ancestry

which was supposedly a family name something like "McDera" or "McDerris" (neither of which are real names, apparently, but I didn't know that as a kid) is actually Portuguese ancestry with the real last name Madeira. Was someone ashamed of being Portuguese? How far back did the misrepresentation begin? No idea.

Several other things don't line up with family stories as well, like when we got to America (much, much earlier than claimed) or the unmentioned fact that one of my ancestors owned slaves. Here I am in my mid-40s discovering that big chunks of my family history are complete codswallop. And that's just my mom's side -- I don't even know my dad.

[treestar]

32. This one is pathetic

and proof positive that some people are anti-Hillary and not really pro Bernie. If Bernie had not thrown his hat in the ring, they would be behind MOM. I hope you hate Republicans more than you hate Hillary. Or at least as much.

[Scootaloo]

64. "they would be behind MOM"

Yeah, probably, because O'Malley is a better candidate than Hillary is, too.

[nc4bo]

33. Oops, she did it again.

It's really bad when it's little shit like this that she lies about.

[tammywammy]

34. I don't know where my dad's parents are from.

Or their parents, etc. I didn't know where my grandma was from or anything about her childhood until a couple years ago and have no idea where her parents are from.

[sufrommich]

37. I had two living great grandparents,one lived

until I was in my 20s. I called them both grandma. Let me add that this is right up there with freepers attacking Elizabeth Warren for her remarks about her ancestors.

[rurallib]

45. My parents were both orphans and their parents were immigrants

both were orphaned at a very early age, so no I don't

[Codeine]

48. In point of fact I do not.

The stories my family told me do not line up with what I've found via Ancestry.com. It's clear that at some point our family histories became muddled and heavily romanticized. Nationalities were claimed that didn't exist, others never mentioned, and immigration in particular was garbled or outright invented from whole cloth.

I can't be the only person to have gone on Ancestry and had several WTF?! Moments.

[LWolf]

56. All Americans have immigrants in their backgrounds.

I'm assuming you mean recent immigrants. Generally, those with families functional enough to know who their grandparents are probably know whether or not they were immigrants.

I know where some of my grandparents are from.

I know that my paternal grandmother was of British descent...although not at all recent. I know that she claimed my paternal grandfather, who divorced her long before I was born, was as well; she was adamantly refuting the claims of his own sons that he was of mixed Native and European blood. He was gone by then, and I wasn't raised by my father, his son, so I have no idea what he claimed.

I know that my maternal grandmother was of German/English descent, and that the newest arrived in the 1800s.

I don't know anything about my maternal grandfather. He was a name on a birth certificate; a Scottish last name, but nobody outside my grandmother ever met this man, and she never spoke of him. There was some suggestion that the name was fiction.

Many of us without strong family connections may not know about our grandparents. I doubt that HRC falls into that group.

[demwing]

61. My grandparents came from Tennessee and Kentucky

As did their grandparents, a few of which were Native Americans.

Before that we came from various North Eastern states and, embarrassingly, are related to the Bush family.

In the 1700s we have German Irish immigrants on my maternal line, and Brits on my paternal side.

At least that's the generationally shared information. I trust it because it came from those who lived it, and because I verified bits and pieces on Ancestry.com!

[Scootaloo]

65. Vaguely

I don't have any "documented pedigree" and so, according to at least one Clinton supporter on DU, that makes me 'trailer park white trash."

I know I have at least one ancestor who was living in Georgia in 1680. I know I have Irish travelers in there. My grandmother's maiden name - "DeLoach" - implies that I'm descended from a French barber at some point. I've heard talk of "Cherokee princesses" on my father's side, which is Southern for either "I'm full of shit" or "Someone in the family tree isn't porcelain-white" but I've been unable to glean further data, so I'm leaning towards the former.