I've never known much about my family's background, except that they are Eastern European. While recently chatting with my grandmother, she told me that her mother immigrated to the United States from Czechoslovakia. When I pressed her a bit further, she shared that her mother was a "cigar girl" on a steamboat and used an Atlantic Crossing job to make the move to the United States. What a brave thing to do as a single woman at that time! I believe it was in the 1930s.