These are my great grandparents, Joseph and Rose Janitz, parents of my father's mother Anna. According to the 1940 census they were born in Hungary around 1882, and somewhere I have an ornate marriage certificate that I'll add to the labyrinth someday. 

When I was growing up, people in my family like to say that they hailed from "Austria-Hungary," as that strip of earth was known during age when Joseph and Rose resettled––no doubt in an effort to erase the fact that they with hunkies, bohunks, what have you. 

Being a non-hunky was certainly important to some of the bigots in my family, but as for me... I'm an Ellis Island mutt on both sides of my family (my mother's parents being Polish), so I say hooray for Ellis Island. Hooray for all those who left Europe to become part of the endless wave of cheap, immigrant labor that fueled America's rise to global imperialism.