My Irish, Scots, and European Catholic, a few Jewish, and other religious dissidents, they ran away to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to escape persecution or military service.
Same as my wife's ancestors. Her Catholic and Native American ancestors ended up in Mexico and Canada, quite a few of them forced out of the U.S.A. with extreme prejudice. Wrong side of the Battle of the Alamo, etc., all that. Bad Indians, Catholic French and Irish.
My wife's parents were both born in the U.S.A. but her grandparents were treated as "immigrants" simply because her ancestors had had the very good sense to flee the U.S.A. when things got too hot here. Nevertheless one of my wife's uncles is buried at Arlington, killed by the Nazis in the very last days of the war, and one of her grandfathers fought Nazis in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
One of my grandfathers was a pacifist in World War II, pacifism his own family religion. He was given a choice: prison or building Liberty and Victory ships. He built ships. He also got beat up bad by cops for protesting the internment of his Japanese neighbors, with my mom as a child witnessing.
One of my mom's Japanese friends escaped internment. A good Mormon family "bought" their California property and hired the entire family on to work their ranch in Utah. After the war they "sold" this family's California property back to them. But no money actually changed hands. Sadly most West Coast Japanese who ended up in the internment camps had their properties and businesses simply stolen by nasty politically well connected white opportunistic U.S. Americans.
My other grandfather was an autistic spectrum fellow, hopelessly obsessive about airplanes and rockets, and later UFO's. He wanted to fly, bad. The Army Air Force had other use for him. He was honorably discharged after the war a decorated Army Air Force Major. My grandfather never ever ever talked about his World War II experience but you could ask him anything about work he did landing men on the moon for the Apollo project and he wouldn't stop talking. Bits of metal he made are on the moon and in the Smithsonian. Any stories of World War II bits of metal he touched, those stories died with him.
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